When Fear and Ridicule Becomes the Sales Funnel

HormoneSynergy® Longevity Medicine
Evidence-Based Preventive Longevity Medicine
Published September 28, 2026

What began as frustration over gender stereotypes attached to carnivore and vegan diets led me into a much more troubling corner of online wellness culture, where ridicule, speculation, fear, faith, and commercial interests can become difficult to separate.

Editorial image of a man reflecting on online wellness claims, fear-based health marketing, compassion, and medical misinformation.

Daniel | HormoneSynergy®

This began with something I probably should have been able to dismiss and move on from: the increasingly common suggestion online that what a person eats says something fundamental about masculinity or femininity. We had recently written about the gender stereotypes that have attached themselves to carnivore and vegan diets, particularly the portrayal of meat as masculine, physical strength as evidence of dietary superiority, and plant-based eating as weak, feminine, or somehow contrary to human nature.

There are legitimate arguments to have about nutrition, including protein intake, metabolic health, food quality, animal foods, plant foods, and the advantages and limitations of different dietary patterns. I have no problem with those discussions. What I have difficulty taking seriously is the idea that a man proves something about himself by eating steak, or that courage, character, masculinity, femininity, intelligence, or worth can be inferred from what someone puts on a dinner plate.

I might have left it there if I had not kept reading. What I encountered was not simply a strong opinion about diet, but a broader collection of posts that included ridicule directed at people with obesity, speculation about the health and private life of a woman the writer did not know, expansive claims about environmental exposures, explanations for illness that went well beyond what could reasonably be established, and repeated invitations to purchase or engage with an app, device, supplement, discount, or other commercial offering. The more I read, the less interested I became in the carnivore argument itself and the more interested I became in the way health information was being used.

AI Overview: Legitimate questions about nutrition, obesity, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, environmental exposures, and other health concerns deserve serious discussion. Problems arise when evidence gives way to speculation, vulnerable people become material for ridicule or amateur diagnosis, and fear repeatedly leads toward a product, app, device, supplement, or other commercial solution.

One-Minute Read

I started out looking at the strange gender language surrounding carnivore and vegan diets, but the longer I looked, the less interested I became in the diet argument itself. What bothered me was the combination of nutritional certainty, ridicule of people with obesity, speculation about another person's health and history, fear surrounding environmental exposures, and repeated commercial offers.

The science matters, but so does the way people are treated. We can discuss obesity, nutrition, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, electromagnetic fields, and environmental health without pretending to know another person's medical history from a photograph or social-media post. We can question institutions without turning uncertainty into fear, and we can sell legitimate products without first convincing people that ordinary life is filled with dangers from which they need protection.

For me, what began as another argument about nutrition eventually became a more basic question about what we owe one another when we speak publicly about health.

When Diet Becomes Identity

I do not object to someone choosing a carnivore diet, nor do I object to veganism, vegetarianism, Mediterranean eating, lower-carbohydrate diets, or an omnivorous diet. People make dietary choices for medical, ethical, cultural, environmental, practical, and personal reasons, and those choices can be discussed on their merits. Nutrition is complicated enough without turning it into a referendum on someone's identity.

The gender language surrounding some of these diets is what originally caught my attention. Meat is sometimes presented as evidence of toughness and masculinity, while plant-based eating is characterized as weak or feminine. Concern for animals can be dismissed as softness, while eating large amounts of meat becomes a statement about strength, independence, or what humans were supposedly designed to do. None of those assumptions tells us much about whether a particular diet is nutritionally adequate, metabolically appropriate, or likely to improve someone's long-term health.

Human beings have eaten a wide range of foods across geography, culture, and history. The relative value of animal and plant foods should be discussed in terms of physiology, nutritional adequacy, health outcomes, individual circumstances, and, when relevant, personal values. A person's diet may tell us something about what that person prefers to eat, but it tells us remarkably little about courage, masculinity, femininity, intelligence, morality, or human worth.

When Health Commentary Becomes Speculation

The issue became more uncomfortable for me when I came across a post using a well-known woman's difficult life as the basis for a health theory. Her childhood, family relationships, appearance, nutritional history, hormones, possible environmental exposures, and public struggles were assembled into a proposed explanation of what may have happened to her. The writer acknowledged that the theory was speculative, which is better than presenting speculation as fact, but the acknowledgment did not resolve the problem for me.

We cannot determine another person's endocrine status from photographs or interviews. We do not know her laboratory findings, genetics, nutritional status, treatment history, medical records, environmental exposures, or the private circumstances surrounding events in her life. Research into endocrine-disrupting chemicals is important, but that research does not give any of us the ability to look at a stranger from a distance and reconstruct a medical explanation for her suffering.

The commercial context also became relevant because the discussion eventually directed readers toward an app. There is nothing inherently wrong with recommending or selling a useful product. HormoneSynergy® is a business, and we sell products and services. Many responsible physicians, researchers, educators, and companies do the same. The question is not whether money changes hands; it is whether the evidence leads naturally toward a product or whether a frightening interpretation of the problem helps create the perceived need for what is being sold.

Fear Has Always Been Good for Marketing

I began noticing a similar structure elsewhere. A legitimate health concern would be introduced, the discussion would expand into something more threatening or more certain than the available evidence justified, and eventually an app, wearable device, supplement, biohack, discount code, or other solution would appear. Environmental health lends itself especially well to this kind of communication because the science can be complicated, many exposures are invisible, and most people understandably do not have the time or background to distinguish a meaningful exposure from a hypothetical one or a plausible biological mechanism from evidence that an exposure is actually causing disease under ordinary conditions.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are a legitimate area of research. Phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS, pesticides, air pollution, and other exposures deserve serious scientific attention. Electromagnetic fields are also a legitimate subject of research, although many claims made about routine everyday exposure go considerably beyond what current evidence can establish. These subjects are important enough to discuss accurately and do not need to be made more frightening in order to justify serious study.

What concerns me is the ease with which scientific uncertainty can become commercially useful. Someone who is tired, gaining weight, anxious about hormones, dealing with chronic symptoms, or simply trying to protect a family can understandably become receptive to the suggestion that an overlooked exposure explains what is happening. If enough ordinary parts of life are described as dangerous, a product offered as protection can begin to feel necessary before anyone has established either the magnitude of the risk or whether the proposed solution meaningfully changes it.

Obesity, Responsibility, and Contempt

The ridicule directed at people with obesity bothered me just as much. Obesity is a serious health issue and should be discussed candidly. Diet, physical activity, sleep, insulin resistance, genetics, medications, appetite regulation, muscle mass, environment, psychology, socioeconomic circumstances, and individual behavior may all contribute. Recognizing that complexity does not require pretending that personal choices are irrelevant, but neither does acknowledging personal responsibility justify contempt.

Anyone who has spent meaningful time around patients knows that body weight is rarely explained adequately by one behavior or one moral characteristic. People can respond very differently to similar diets, medications, sleep disruption, stress, hormonal changes, and environmental circumstances. Weight stigma adds another burden to people who may already be struggling with their health and can influence whether they seek care, how they are treated when they do seek care, and how they come to view themselves.

I have always had difficulty understanding what is accomplished by humiliating another person because of his or her body. Using someone else's vulnerability as evidence of one's own superiority may attract attention online, but it does not tell us much about the person's health. In many cases, it tells us considerably more about the person doing the humiliating.

Faith Entered the Question for Me as Well

I am cautious about commenting on another person's faith because I have spent much of my own life thinking about faith, doubt, meaning, spirituality, morality, and the difficulty of living consistently with what we say we believe. I do not believe wearing a cross makes someone perfect, nor do I believe Christianity gives any of us authority to determine whether another person's faith is genuine.

At the same time, when someone deliberately makes a Christian symbol part of a public identity, I find it difficult to completely separate that symbol from the way people are treated in the same public space. Christianity places enormous emphasis on humility, mercy, compassion, care for people who are suffering, and caution about placing oneself above others. I struggle to reconcile those principles with mocking people because of their weight, reducing men and women to stereotypes, constructing public theories about another person's trauma, or making another person's suffering part of a commercial narrative.

I am not asking anyone to be flawless, and I certainly do not meet that standard myself. What I do wonder is what the symbol is meant to represent if it has no bearing on how we speak about people who are vulnerable. For me, faith has less to do with displaying certainty than with trying, imperfectly, to live with greater compassion, humility, and awareness of the humanity of the person standing in front of us.

Why This Stayed With Me

I usually give people considerable latitude online. Social media rewards certainty, exaggeration, conflict, and oversimplification, and anyone who writes publicly is capable of getting something wrong or expressing an idea poorly. I certainly am. I also do not want to become someone who searches the internet for people to condemn simply because I disagree with them.

This stayed with me because it was not one disagreement. It was the accumulation of gender stereotypes, ridicule of people with obesity, sweeping nutritional certainty, speculation about another person's suffering, fear surrounding environmental exposures, conspiracy-oriented explanations, commercial products, discounts, biohacks, and an overtly religious public identity. Taken together, they raised a question for me that had very little to do with whether someone eats meat or plants and much more to do with what we are willing to normalize in the way we speak about other human beings.

I do not object to skepticism toward medicine, government, industry, or scientific institutions when there are reasons for that skepticism. History provides plenty of examples of institutions getting things wrong, and medicine advances partly because accepted ideas continue to be questioned. Nor do I object to unconventional ideas simply because they are unconventional. What bothers me is the erosion of humility that can occur when suspicion hardens into certainty and another person's vulnerability becomes useful material.

Someone who is overweight, ill, addicted, frightened, confused, or struggling deserves the same human dignity as anyone else. We do not gain meaningful insight into another person's life by reducing that person to a nutritional theory, an environmental exposure, a body size, or some explanation constructed from a distance. Science should make us more careful about claims we cannot support, particularly claims about people whose histories we do not know. Spirituality, at least as I understand it, asks something related of us: that we remain aware of the humanity of the person about whom we are speaking.

I believe environmental exposures deserve serious investigation without turning everyday life into a catalogue of hidden dangers. I believe obesity should be treated seriously without treating people who live with it as objects of ridicule. I believe animal foods and plant foods can be discussed intelligently without attaching masculinity, femininity, morality, or personal worth to either one. I believe medicine and scientific institutions should be questioned when evidence warrants it without assuming that disagreement itself proves corruption or conspiracy. Businesses, including ours, can also sell legitimate health products without frightening people into believing that they are unsafe without them.

The person whose body becomes a joke, the woman whose suffering becomes somebody else's theory, the patient frightened about an invisible exposure, and the person desperately looking for an explanation for why he or she does not feel well are not abstractions. They are people with histories, families, fears, and circumstances that cannot be reconstructed from a social-media post.

I eventually reached a wall with this because I became less interested in debating another nutrition claim and more concerned about what seems to be happening to compassion in parts of the wellness world. Health information should help people understand themselves and make better decisions. It should not require humiliation, manufactured fear, or pretending to know things about another person's life that none of us could possibly know.

There is room for disagreement about almost everything I have written here. There is room for different diets, different ideas about medicine, different interpretations of evidence, different spiritual beliefs, and plenty of disagreement with me. I would simply hope that there can still be a basic expectation that the people caught in the middle of those disagreements remain human beings to us.

Years ago I heard a saying that has stayed with me: “Who they are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what they’re saying.” I come back to it often, particularly when public conversations about health become contemptuous. It is sad to me that something as basic as human decency can become lost in discussions that are supposedly about helping people become healthier.