When influencers tell you what NOT to do

Shivani Verma,11 Aug 2023

Youtube, Instagram, and other social-media platforms are breeding “de-influencers” who tell viewers what not to do in food and health

Their presence and number of followers have only increased post-pandemic, when misinformation around health was at an all-time high

But with the pool of information filling up from anywhere and everywhere, tackling misinformation has become harder

Spurred by public interest, de-influencers have diverse opinions about monetising their content

“Bread. Bread is a big scam. White bread, brown bread, multigrain bread, whole-wheat bread—what’s the difference and which one is the best?” These are the opening lines of a reel posted on Instagram by Revant Himatsingka, also known as “foodpharmer” on the photo-and-short-video app.

The 90-second video, with 8.8 million views, has all the markings of typical influencer content—products, lighting, captions, and the works. But that’s where the similarities end.

Himatsingka started putting out content as recently as April, and his bio reads: “nutrition comedy”. He also calls himself a health coach and mentions what he feels “every Indian should know” about bread.

“White bread is filled with maida [refined flour]… brown breads in India are also not healthy… are brown because of a caramel colour 150A…,” he warns. He goes on to share similar views on whole-wheat and multigrain varieties—all the while showing the labels behind the packets.

Himatsingka is part of a growing crop of de-influencers, a term for influencers who persuade consumers to rethink their choices. With a sizeable online presence, he boasts 551,000 followers on Instagram, 41,000 on microblogging site X (formerly Twitter), and 24,000 on professional-networking platform Linkedin.

Unlike influencers who promote products, most de-influencers don’t monetise their content. Among these social-media personalities, food and health appear to be the most popular topics.

Besides Himatsingka, some known names in the de-influencers list include nutrition specialist Umesh Wadhavani, nutritionist Amita Gadre, science communicators Krish Ashok and Pranav Radhakrishnan, liver-disease specialist Cyriac Abby Philips, health educator and medical doctor Tanaya Narendra, and fitness coach Chirag Barjatya.

Quite a few of these de-influencers are subject experts whose content is based on their primary line of work. Others like Radhakrishnan (of ScienceIsDope) and Himatsingka switched careers to follow their interest or spread awareness.

They consider challenges such as legal notices and threats as all in a day’s work. One of the most storied examples is Himatsingka’s reel on the malt-based drink Bournvita, in which The Wharton School graduate spoke about the sugar-dense ingredients in the product. He then claimed that the food-processing giant, Mondelez India, was mislabelling it as a “health drink”.

The video had garnered over 12 million views and became his first piece of viral content. However, he had to pull it down after the company sent a legal notice claiming defamation and trademark infringement. Mondelez India didn’t respond to questions sent by The Ken until the time of publishing.

Philips, popularly known as the liver doc, has received several legal notices, including one from pharmaceutical major ​​Himalaya Wellness over its formulation Liv.52. Not to mention the numerous threats and retaliation from various quarters. Narendra, who is a doctor at Prayagraj’s Abhilasha Hospital & Fertility Center, has also encountered similar difficulties.

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Most of the de-influencers The Ken spoke with say it’s worth the trouble. While they may come from varied backgrounds, they want to “spread awareness” and “debunk misinformation”. But is this all that’s driving their content as de-influencers?

Philips never thought he would witness so many herb-induced liver injuries. He said many of his patients—who were on alternative medicines such as Ayurvedic and Homeopathy—had to undergo liver transplants. Some even succumbed to their illnesses.

“Most of these patients weren’t well informed. They would take medicines for diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., but eventually stop and move to herbal formulations thinking they were safer, more effective and cheaper alternatives to modern medicine,” said Philips, who works at Rajagiri Hospital in Kochi, a city in southwest India’s coastal state of Kerala.

Encounters with such cases regularly pushed Philips to join Twitter in 2019 to educate people about the misinformation around AYUSH and “pseudo-scientific” practices.

“Initially, even I thought these were just herbal and natural supplements. What could they do? But my understanding has changed towards this after the findings in patients.”

CYRIAC ABBY PHILIPS, HEPATOLOGIST AT RAJAGIRI HOSPITAL IN KOCHI

Ever since, Philips has been tweeting about food, nutrition, alternative medicine, and supplements.

He questions the scientific benefits of health products and brands. In one of his many threads on Himalaya Wellness products, Philips said that Liv.52 is nothing more than a proprietary multi-herbal supplement; has no conclusive evidence for the prevention of diseases; is not based on Ayurveda; majority of the published researches are funded and designed by the company itself; and the product is not effective for any disease conditions that it claims.

Himalaya Wellness declined to comment on The Ken’s detailed questionnaire.

Philips’ work sometimes also debunks claims made by influencers ( here, here, and here) who, he said, don’t have expertise in their respective field.

But the work for the said audience comes at a cost.

In his six-year career, Philips has received 15 legal notices, including four from the Indian government’s Ayush Ministry and two each from wellness firm Herbalife Nutrition India and Himalaya. Then, there was an FIR from a local private Ayurveda company, Pankajakasthuri Herbals. Except for Himalaya, all legal notices were on research work and their pertinent science communication with the public, Philips said.

So far, Philips has spent Rs 3.5 lakh ($4,230) in legal proceedings. But troubles for him didn’t end there. At his workplace, he received offensive physical letters containing explicit content, and had to endure threatsalong with instances of racist and religious slurs. Even members of the partner lab where he used to conduct research analysis were verbally harassed by Homeopathy supporters.

“Surprisingly, most of these slurs come from my own fraternity—modern medicine doctors,” Philips told The Ken. “If I am talking against Ayurveda or Ayush, people think it’s an attack on their religion or a political party,” he said.

Narendra, who got her master’s degree from the University of Oxford, and started posting content regularly in 2020 to spread awareness about reproductive and sexual health and menstruation, also faced similar issues.

“But I’ve realised that there are better ways of tackling misinformation… In the past four years, I’ve seen how much power one 90-second reel holds. I’ve been able to scale back on the shock value of things and restructure how I see content in its entirety. Hence, I don’t do that [talk about brands specifically] anymore. But if somebody is being very blatant about misinformation, I will definitely call them out,” said Narendra.

However, sometimes it becomes very difficult not to name brands because certain products are sold only by a specific company, such as Himalaya’s Liv.52, said Barjatya, who posted a reel on the product in collaboration with Philips.

Regarding hate, Narendra, who goes by the moniker “Dr Cuterus” on social media, believes that it’s part of being a woman in India. Long emails, curse words, explicit content, and “being against Indian culture” are just some of the things that she has to face regularly. However, a quick fix is not to entertain them. “People would want to associate and learn from a less angry person.”

Interestingly, de-influencers sometimes face backlash from their ilk and the general public, too. Himatsingka’s reel on bread received a lot of flak.

“It’s fine to call out brands and say that it is whole-wheat bread but has only this much percent of whole wheat… but he [Himatsingka] had a negative tone towards maida… and that it is harmful. This creates fear in people because they already have a bad concept regarding it in their minds, which is not right,” said nutrition specialist Wadhavani. “People can have maida; it depends on the intake.”

Himatsingka told The Ken he was mainly against false marketing, and nowhere in his video did he say that one shouldn’t eat bread. “It was made to educate consumers that if you’re eating bread, you should know what you’re eating,” he said. “There are doctors who are supporting me.”

He added that people with a good following will always find a few others who will critique their content to gain followers.

But nutritionists and doctors The Ken spoke with said such content often lacks scientific evidence.

Many of Himatsingka’s other videos have also drawn criticism from fellow de-influencers ( here, here, and here), including nutritionists and doctors.

“Initially, he used to just break down the nutritional labels. Then, he started sitting down with spoons and cubes of sugar. It has a tone associated with it, indicating that sugar is bad for you, creating more confusion and fear,” said Wadhavani. “There are only a few influencers who are talking facts as they are,” he added.

“Unfortunately, social media incentivises scare-mongering content… You won’t get 80 followers if you say that the microwave is perfectly safe to use. But if you say the microwave will give you cancer, you’ll get hundreds and thousands of followers right away…”

KRISH ASHOK, SCIENCE COMMUNICATOR AND AUTHOR OF MASALA LAB

The doctors and nutritionists quoted in the story said that there are many popular content creators, including satvicmovement, getfitwithmiruna, simranbalarjain, beerbiceps and fittuber, who come up with similar content on health, nutrition, and food. A lot of them have over a million followers on Instagram.

Such content becomes counterproductive for doctors and nutritionists who genuinely want to fight misinformation.

“It’s a vicious cycle where people are being under-informed continuously,” said Ashok. “Meta, Twitter [X], or Youtube can’t stop this misinformation.”

However, this isn’t deterring those like Philips and Narendra; in fact, they’re actively engaging in collaboration. The question is, what is driving them?

By creating content to raise awareness, Narendra wants to make sex education a part of the national education curriculum, make the HPV vaccine a part of the national immunisation protocol, and wants to be able to create a space for a college degree in sexual medicine.

Narendra, who has a team of four people, spends three days working at the hospital and three working on her content for social media. She also monetises it, does paid partnerships, works on The Dr. Cuterus Podcast, and creates content as an advisor for government and non-governmental bodies for which she gets paid. Narendra said information regarding her payments for social-media content is confidential due to the contracts.

Radhakrishnan, who worked with the edtech firm Byju’s for six years before he became a full-time content creator, gets revenue from Youtube, sponsorships, and donations from his supporters. He declined to share how much he generates from these. He has 128,000 subscribers on Youtube, 29,000 followers on Instagram, and 17,488 followers on X.

Barjatya and Himatsingka claim that they don’t monetise their content. Barjatya, who has over 47,000 followers on X, does it to “add value” to his audience and PFC Club (online fitness coaching) clients. The funds to run the content and manage the team come from his primary business.

Himatsingka has been using his savings from earlier jobs but eventually wants to monetise his content. He aims to “stop false marketing from FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] companies, promote cleaner businesses, and teach people how to read labels”.

Philips is a lone wolf. He said he wants to educate people, and all his efforts are in the public interest. The analysis work, which he had been funding along with other doctors, came to a halt on 8 August due to a lack of funds.

Interestingly, Nandita Iyer, a doctor who specialises in nutrition, said creating content around these subjects can never purely be a public service. “Even a practising doctor, who regularly puts out content, gets a lot of PR [public relations] mileage. It amounts to a lot of validation.”

Iyer said she has seen a lot of indirect benefits of posting regularly on social media, be it readership for her books, getting quoted in relevant stories by journalists or even in newspapers.

“It’s difficult to say that it’s purely meant to serve as public-service information because it also gets a lot of backlash. Why would anyone tolerate so much backlash if it were all for nothing?” Iyer said.

Karthik Srinivasan, a communications consultant, said monetising openly by associating with brands is only one of the many ways of making money. There could be several others, including platform-based incentives from Youtube and now, X, where owner Elon Musk is paying creators, he added.

For someone like Revant, who offers health advice allegedly without adequate scientific or medical basis (something that Philip recently spoke about), gains are the massive number of views and likes because he seems to be going against the trend of praising brands or pitching them, explained Srinivasan.

But while he does ask people to stay off one kind of bread, he also suggests certain alternatives, he said. “It’s possible that he could/may be incentivised by other lobbies that could gain from the popular backlash against the kinds of food products he ‘de-influences’.”

Nutritionist Amita Gadre said there has been a rise in de-influencing around the food and medical industries because “fear sells”.

“People are becoming aware of what they eat. But paranoia, fear, and confusion around this subject are at an all-time high,” she added.

Consumers indeed rely heavily on social media for information on health and food. There’s no denying it. In Ashok’s words, “We don’t learn enough about food and nutrition in our schools.”

De-influencers are just filling that gap. But oftentimes, those promising to debunk misinformation present a fresh layer of misinformation.

Srinivasan had an interesting take. Creators could be building followers with the “de-influencing” narrative because it stands out against the conventional influencer narrative. “Once they have substantial numbers, they could gradually start working with certain brands by focusing on how they are changing the ingredients towards the better after their exposes.”

As for FMCG companies, Srinivasan assumes that after the Bournvita controversy, they are now actively ignoring such videos. “They think anything they do would only give such perspectives more attention than what they gather on their own.”

But at some point, the companies could start taking note of the negative points mentioned by these de-influencers and update their narratives, he said.

Something that Himatsingka claims they are already doing.

In a way, this completes the influence-de-influence cycle. De-influencers stepped up to counter the influencer status quo, and now it’s the turn of the companies under the spotlight to update their narratives to balance out the de-influencers.

https://the-ken.com/story/whats-in-it-for-influ...