I am getting sick and tired of social media ads these days. They are following a recipe designed to make you less knowledgeable, more stressed, and frankly dumber. Here are the two main formulas, or should I say ingredients, in these tasteless ads:

Either:

“Don’t eat these 3 items that are killing you.” Followed by a list that includes seed oils, or certain nuts, or another common item in your kitchen. Before plugging a product, or casually naming a name brand item while suggesting alternatives.

Or:

“Doctors hate me.” Followed by an exercise program or diet that has made the person ultra fit without ‘traditional’ medicines and practices. What,you need is our callisthenics program, Tai Chi, ‘Just 9 minutes a day’, or the Butt Blaster 3000.

It’s ‘Avoid this – it’s killing you!’ And then a product plug. Or it’s ’Transform your body, it’s easier than you think… if you buy into what I’m selling.’

And none of these are 30 seconds long. They are all longer format where they attempt to suck you in, feeling invested in the video for a minute or two before the secret to a better or healthier you is revealed.

But there is no real science behind what is claimed. Or worse yet, there are some factual aspects that are proven but irrelevant. “Did you know that ingredient XYZ in product ABC causes cancer?’ You didn’t, so you watch the video. But what isn’t shared is that the dangerous amount of that item would be 10,000 times the dose you would get from eating product ABC… and it only ever showed a link to cancer when that massive dose was fed to mice for continuous days or weeks.

These ads scare you with ‘facts’ that aren’t actually scary, or make promises that a program or product will change your life with a sample size of one person who is telling you how ‘This worked for me and it will work for you too’.

Fear and false promises are being sold on a grand scale and this formula is just showing up more and more. I guess from the amount of ads like this that I’ve seen, the formula is working.