Wellness Bloggers – Are they Quacks?

Wellness bloggers are really a different breed, aren’t they?! A quick Google search and over one million and fifty thousand pages come up, most with oodles of posts written by wellness bloggers on the subject of “The best wellness bloggers to follow” – those with a cult following perhaps? So I decided to click on a list promoted by the Nourishing Hub, a site which claims to be “dedicated to women’s health first”.  So since I had some time to kill, I decided to click on the above link. The result was alarming.

This is an opinion piece of the said blog, which promotes other blogs that will ultimately try and subconsciously convince you to either buy their products and programs, or charge you a monthly subscription just to engage you into believing that every health problem you have, or have had, can ultimately be fixed by either self-love, quitting your job, buying a said product, or eliminating a certain food or food group. In other words, it’s all just fruitless material, just to get you to buy, buy, buy… CHA-CHING!

Anyway, let’s take a quick look at some of the bloggers they promote: First on the list promoted by The Nourishing Hub is “The Nourishing Hub!” (told you it’s alarming)

The Nourishing Hub If you haven’t noticed, the majority of the blog posts written by nourishinghhub.com.au contain a product at the end of the post, which you can buy. CHA-CHING! Let’s take this post as an example.

“MCT Oil – Similar to Coconut Oil but Turbocharged” written by Simone Denny.  Great headline if you are a coconut oil fan. If you are, you will be adding MCT oil to everything every day, including your coffee (yes they even promote/recommend that as well). However this article fails to tell you about the side effects of MCT and its interactions with certain medication. It also says nothing about the serious consequences it can have for people with chronic health conditions.

So what is MCT oil? MCT oil is Medium Chain Triglycerides – a man-made oil that has been developed in a laboratory – yes a laboratory, everything that wellness bloggers refute!! This is done by processing coconut and palm oil together. While Medium Chain Triglycerides or MCT is generally safe to consume, it can cause diarrhea, vomiting and essential fatty acid deficiency. It can also cause serious health consequences for people with liver disease and diabetes. To top it off, MCT oil is also not recommended for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.   Personally, I find this quite alarming, as this was not mentioned at all in the post, which is listed on a site that claims to be “dedicated to women’s health first”. It definitely raises alarm bells.

So, if you are trying to conceive, it’s probably best to avoid MCT oil completely. You may have already consumed MCT oil for the past few weeks on a daily basis without realizing you may be pregnant. If that’s the case, that could be absolutely disastrous!