138 Million Views, 19 Health Claims, and Which Ones Held Up

How much of the health advice that reaches you is actually true?

Nobody knows, and the reason is dull: answering it takes two jobs that almost nobody does together. Somebody has to measure what people actually watch. Somebody else has to sit down and read the studies behind it. Those are different skills, different budgets, and different weeks.

So we did both. We checked 20 health claims the slow way — reading the trials, rating how well each one held up — and in August 2026 we counted how much attention each had drawn on YouTube. For one of them, psyllium husk, the search we saved turned out to be about other things, so that row has a rating and no view count. Put the two columns beside each other and you get something we have not seen anywhere else: 138,982,268 views, sorted by whether the claim underneath survived being read.

Here is the whole thing. Nothing is for sale on this page.

73% of the attention sat on claims that did not hold up

Of the 138,982,268 views we measured, 101,110,487 — 72.8% — sat on claims we rated Preliminary or Unsupported. That is: claims where the research is not yet good enough to tell you anything, or where we went looking and it simply was not there. Psyllium husk, which we rated Established, is the row with no view count, so it is not in that sum.

The single biggest topic in the set is high cortisol symptoms, at 19,864,237 views. It is rated Unsupported.

Before you take that number anywhere: we picked these topics

This is the part most pages would put at the bottom in grey text, so we are putting it here instead.

This is not a random sample of health content. We chose these 20 topics, and we choose things that look shaky — that is the job. A claim-checking desk that picked topics at random would spend most of its week confirming that vegetables are good for you.

So 72.8% does not mean 73% of health advice is wrong. It means that among the claims we thought were worth checking, that is where the attention landed. Anyone who quotes this page as the first thing has misread it, and we would rather say so now than be cited badly later.

The views need a warning of their own. Each count comes from one YouTube search per claim, the videos YouTube ranked as most relevant to it rather than the most watched, saved on a single day between 6 and 22 August 2026, and the searches did not all return the same number of results: between 10 and 25. A result is counted only if its title, description or tags name the subject, which left out 24 of the 383 we saved. That test is generous: a video that names the subject once, in its description or its tags, counts as much as a video about it, and ten of the videos counted, with 3,925,825 views between them, never name it in their titles. It cannot see which claim a video makes about the thing it names.

And it cannot tell a warning from a pitch: a video telling people a claim is false counts the same as one selling it. For methylene blue, seven of the 25 videos we counted, with 2,926,258 of its 5,873,036 views, have titles that warn or ask about its risks or its hype. Even those titles cannot settle which side a video is on: under one of them the description asks whether it is as dangerous as other influencers are warning, and another is about how to make sure it is high quality and potent. So read the views as attention on a subject, not as a count of people who were told it works.

What it is good for is the next question.

So is there a shortcut? Something you can check in ten seconds?

That is the question worth asking, because almost nobody is going to read forty papers before deciding whether to buy a jar of something. If reading the research is the only defence, then the research may as well not exist.

We had a hunch, so we tested it against our own table before writing it down here.

Where that line falls is our judgement, and on several rows it could fall either way, because each can be done with what you already have and each has something sold for it. We put oil pulling and ice baths with the claims you can act on without buying anything, going by what you do. We put electrolyte drinks, lymphatic drainage massage and seed oils with the claims you act on by buying something, going by what is mostly sold: a drink, a session, a fat to replace the one you avoid. That is arguable, and lymphatic drainage massage most of all, since many of the videos we counted show you how to do it by hand. Put those three on the other side and the count reads 2 of 12 against 4 of 8, with four of the eight in the second group failing. Move ice baths across as well, judged by the tubs sold for it, and it reads 3 of 13 against 3 of 7: four of the seven fail, which is close to the result we say below would prove the hunch wrong. No way of filing those five rows does worse, and in all 32 of them the claims you act on by buying something still fail more often. Every row’s call is listed here, with its reason, so you can move any of them yourself.

How we sorted each of the 20 rows

• High cortisol symptoms: you act on it by buying something (cortisol supplements and detox protocols)
• Daily steps (about 7,000): you can act on it without buying anything (walking; wearables and phone apps are sold but not required)
• Sea moss: you act on it by buying something (sea moss gel and capsules)
• Electrolyte drinks: you act on it by buying something (electrolyte powders, though salt in water is the home version)
• Oil pulling: you can act on it without buying anything (oil already in your kitchen, though ready-made rinses are sold for it)
• Lymphatic drainage massage: you act on it by buying something (a paid session or a tool, though many of the videos show you how to do it by hand)
• Ice baths: you can act on it without buying anything (cold water; tubs are sold but not required)
• Walking after meals: you can act on it without buying anything (walking; nothing is required, though glucose monitors are sold around it)
• Methylene blue: you act on it by buying something (methylene blue drops)
• NAD+ and NMN: you act on it by buying something (NAD precursor capsules)
• Creatine gummies: you act on it by buying something (the gummies)
• Ikigai: you can act on it without buying anything (books exist, but the claim is behavioural)
• Mouth taping: you act on it by buying something (mouth tape)
• Beetroot juice: you act on it by buying something (juice and nitrate shots)
• Seed oils: you act on it by buying something (the fats sold as the replacement, though acting on the claim can mean not buying one)
• Red light therapy: you act on it by buying something (panels and masks)
• Tart cherry juice: you act on it by buying something (cherry concentrate)
• Beef tallow on skin: you act on it by buying something (tallow balm)
• Colostrum: you act on it by buying something (colostrum powder)
• Psyllium husk: you act on it by buying something (psyllium powder)

Three rows argue with us, and they are the interesting ones

A pattern you only notice when it agrees with you is not a pattern. So here are the rows that break it.

• Beetroot juice — sells something (juice and nitrate shots), and rated Supported anyway.
• Psyllium husk — sells something (psyllium powder), and rated Established anyway.
• Oil pulling — you can do it without buying anything (oil already in your kitchen, though ready-made rinses are sold for it), and it still only reached Preliminary.

Look at the two that sell something and survived anyway. When this page first went up, we said what they had in common was that nobody owns them: psyllium husk sold in a plain tub, beetroot juice a vegetable. Our own verdicts say otherwise. A company that sells a psyllium laxative powder funded two three-day trials of psyllium and appetite, with a US government grant also listed, and employed two of their four authors. Its employees wrote the pooled analysis behind the weight-loss claim, and were three of the five authors of the one on blood sugar. In 2012 it asked the FDA to let labels say psyllium cuts the risk of type 2 diabetes; in 2014 the FDA allowed that only with the words that there is very little scientific evidence for it. And the beetroot trial that carries a third of our blood-pressure result used one juice company’s juice, and its placebo too, though a charity paid for that trial; the same verdict reports a powder trial paid for by the powder’s maker. Somebody has a stake in you believing in each of them, and spends money on it. What earned the ratings is another matter. Psyllium’s cholesterol analysis came out of a university research group, and company money does not explain its answer. Neither of the two reviews beetroot’s rating rests on names a company funder: one was paid for by a university grant, and the other reports no funding at all.

To be explicit, because this is the kind of thing that gets flattened in the retelling: it is a hint about where to aim your scepticism, not a verdict about any product. It cannot tell you what is true. Only reading the studies does that, which is why the rest of this site exists.

What we are watching next — and how you will know if we were wrong

This page is not finished. It is a running tally. 20 of the 138 verdicts on this site are in it so far: the ones with a saved YouTube search of their own. So here is what we are watching, stated in advance so it counts.

The thing that would prove us wrong: the column of claims you can act on without buying anything filling up with failures. It has 5 entries today and one of them — oil pulling — already came back Preliminary. If that column keeps growing and keeps failing, then what we found is not a pattern about commerce at all. It is a pattern about which claims are easy to test, and we will say so on this page rather than quietly dropping the section.

What to watch for in the wild, meanwhile. Three shapes show up again and again in the rows that failed, and once you have seen them you cannot unsee them:

• A mechanism doing the work of a result. The claim explains how something would work, in convincing detail, and never gets around to whether it did. Detail about mechanism is not evidence of effect.
• A real study about the wrong people. The evidence behind what is sold comes mostly from somebody else: for lymphatic drainage, women treated for breast cancer; for the longer life sold with NAD+, rodents, and even they are split. The studies in people like you are smaller or shorter, or measured something else, and the claim quietly transferred to you anyway.
• A product that was never the thing in the study. The research is on the ingredient, at a dose or in a form the jar does not match, and the two get talked about as if they were the same object.

Every one of those has a verdict on this site showing it in action, linked in the table above. We will keep adding rows, and when the numbers move we will update this page rather than writing a new one, so the tally stays honest.

If you want to see what earns each of the four ratings, we wrote that down separately: how we read a study. And nobody pays us to reach a conclusion — there is nothing to buy on this page, and there never will be on a page that carries a verdict.