Deep down, all of us want to live long, healthy lives – even if our day-to-day actions don’t reflect it. Finding the best avenue to optimize your health, fitness, and nutrition is a very personal journey. It’s often fraught with setbacks and missteps as often as victory.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that is full of those willing to take advantage of our earnest desire for good health. It’s not always easy to spot scams and bad advice, particularly because our health can be so personal. After all, if it didn’t work for you, maybe it will work for me!
A word of caution, though – don’t waste your time and money on empty promises. Not only are so many marketed health cures, fat burners, magic diets, and exercise routines ineffective, but they can be downright dangerous.
5 Red Flags that Indicate Health & Wellness Quackery
#1) Asking you to buy into special programs and products.
Scammers want you to rely on their product and their product alone. They will position themselves as the keeper of the secret cure, the only thing you can trust and rely on. They’ll want you to buy special equipment or commit to buying specific foods and meal kits. They’ll pair their products with low caloric intake to give the illusion of “real” results, ultimately making you dependent on the product.
#2) It sounds too good to be true.
We all know that anything worth having is worth working for – health included. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Beware of anyone claiming overnight results, rapid weight loss or muscle gain, and zero-effort improvements. As an example, there are so many diet pills on the market that promise fast weight loss (the fine print will almost always tell you to pair these pills with a balanced diet!). These pills are never FDA approved and are prone to cause health issues through extreme caffeine content that can damage your body.
If anything is telling you that you can revolutionize your health and wellness without making a single real change in your habits or lifestyle, you are being lied to.
#3) Ultra restrictive or dangerously low-calorie diets.
Diet culture is a big problem. We all know that crash diets are dangerous, but there’s more to it than a 5-day cabbage soup cleanse. Beware of programs that are ultra-restricting. That is, they’ll label certain food groups or macros as inherently bad for you or promote a deep caloric deficit.
I’ll tell you what happens when you try these methods: you’ll fail.
They are not healthy and they are not sustainable. Not only is there potential for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but as soon as you are off this restrictive plan, you’ll gain back any weight you’ve lost. Diets like this sabotage the metabolism and are ultimately sources of misery.
#4) Casting doubt on doctors and science.
The best nutritional advice you’ll get is going to come from the experts: real experts who you consult within a professional, one-on-one setting. Anything that asks you not to trust doctors and nutritionists cast doubt on their reliability (ie. Suggesting they’re keeping secrets from you), or steers you towards misleading information is not to be trusted.
Some scams position themselves against the science while others will wield science as a tool to meet their own ends – either by citing unrelated studies or seeking out endorsements from outliers. Even endorsements from doctors aren’t always reliable. You want to look for credible backing from registered dietitians (R.D.s) who truly understand how the body and food relate to one another.
If it conflicts with basic nutritional and fitness principles, I guarantee it isn’t up to snuff.
#5) Ambiguous terminology.
Beware of anything that uses ambiguous, nebulous terminology and buzzwords to sell you on a program or product. Some of these words are:
Toxins
Cleanse
Superfoods
Adrenal fatigue
These terms are not easily defined in that they are not measurable. What toxins? A cleanse from what? How do you measure fatigue? Ambiguous terms make it difficult to prove (or disprove) results, which causes us to attribute success to products and methods that may or may not do anything at all.
If claims are made that cannot be measured or are ambiguous, stay far away. This happens even with the use of numbers and statistics. For example, a claim that something “burns 50% more fat!” is misleading. More fat than what?
At the end of the day, seek out personalized diet and fitness plans from credible professionals. When in doubt, ask. Improving your health, whether in terms of fitness or nutrition, is a journey and a lifelong commitment. There are no shortcuts – just hard work and discipline.
How do you know you’ve stumbled upon a scam? Share your own red flags in the comments.