Because so often the online marketing of supplements and various wellness products involves linking to a study that doesn’t back up their claims at all, but nobody ever clicks through so they get away with fraudulent appeal to authority.
Science Friday Sept 9, 2025 – How Shoddy Science Is Driving A Supplement Boom Flora Lichtman: “Is there promise in the supplement world to actually develop new effective treatments?” Pieter Cohen: “Well I think that the problem is unfortunately the situation is designed such that since you can go and start selling products without having done the research it doesn’t encourage innovation.”
Last year I found some people unwittingly hyping a nasal spray for covid by talking about it or liking and reposting stuff about the science study on social media, and some people were surprised and very uncomfortable when I informed them that the preliminary animal study was funded by the company that totally skipped any trials and was already producing and marketing the product online with a sketchy scheme to circumvent FDA regs.
And the nose hype continues… More pandemic profiteering that might violate regulations, and definitely isn’t ready for prime time. Chloe Humbert · Sep 30, 2024 The claim to be “drug free” is because reportedly the study authors deliberately went hunting for some ingredient already deemed safe and regarded by the FDA as an inactive ingredient, by selecting “several mucoadhesive biopolymers from the FDA’s inactive ingredient and GRAS databases” according to Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN also quotes: “Aaron Glatt, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau who reviewed the paper independently” who said “Without any clinical data, it’s extremely difficult to assess how well this spray works,” and “I would be very concerned about anybody using this without any evidence in humans.”
Buyer beware.