Research institute · Pew Research Center
Half of US under-50s now get health advice from influencers
Pew Research Center's first dedicated study of US health-and-wellness influencers finds that half of adults under 50 get health information from influencers or podcasts, and 41% of those influencers list a healthcare profession in their bio.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 50% of US adults under 50 say they get health and wellness information from social-media influencers or podcasts.
- 40% of all US adults do, meaning the under-50 lean is sharp.
- 41% of US health-and-wellness influencers list a healthcare profession in their bio (doctor, nurse, dietitian, therapist).
- 64% Women's share of US health-and-wellness influencers, they dominate the pool, the inverse of news-influencer pools.
- 34% Men's share of US health-and-wellness influencers, by contrast, news-influencer pools are 63% male.
- 62% of these influencers post on TikTok, the most-used platform; Instagram 50%, YouTube 45%, Facebook 19%, X 10%.
- 28% describe themselves as entrepreneurs or business owners, coaches and entrepreneurs are nearly as common as healthcare professionals.
What the report covers
Pew identified a sample of US health-and-wellness influencers active on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and analysed both their profiles (occupational claims, audience size, platform mix) and their published content. Alongside the influencer-side analysis, two waves of the American Trends Panel (ATP), Pew's nationally representative panel of randomly selected US adults, captured the audience-side picture: who consumes this content, why, and how much they trust it.
The under-50 figure (50%) sits 10 percentage points above the all-adult average, signalling a generational rather than universal shift. The healthcare-professional claim rate (41%) is the trust signal underneath the consumption number, audiences aren't just following entertainers, a meaningful share are following people presenting credentials. The platform mix is TikTok-led but more evenly distributed than the news-influencer pool, with Instagram still close behind.
The full report is split into five sub-pieces, influencer profiles, audience reasons for consuming, trust, topics covered, and methodology, each of which contains its own quantitative breakdowns.
What this means for UK marketers
Translate the US data into UK terms and three things stand out for UK marketers in B2C health, wellness, fitness, supplements, food-and-drink, and adjacent verticals.
The under-50 audience now uses influencers as a primary information source, not just entertainment. If your category sits anywhere near health or wellness and your audience is under 50, an influencer-led content arm has crossed from "nice to have" into table-stakes. The 50% figure is a US benchmark but UK behaviour tracks closely on every comparable consumer-tech metric Ofcom and the IAB UK have published in the last 18 months, assume parity until you have data to disprove it.
Credentials are doing more work than disclosure alone. The 41% healthcare-professional claim rate is what gives the channel its trust premium. UK brands picking creator partners should treat real, defensible qualifications as a meaningful differentiator, not just because the ASA and MHRA pay attention, but because the audience is now selecting on this signal too. A "registered nutritionist" or "GMC-listed GP" credential in a creator bio meaningfully changes the conversion economics of a partnership.
Platform mix is broader than the standard playbook assumes. The TikTok-Instagram-YouTube split (62/50/45) means a single-platform creator strategy will under-serve the audience. UK B2C brands running creator activations should plan for at least two platforms per relationship by default, TikTok for reach, Instagram for considered content, YouTube for long-form trust building. Facebook (19%) and X (10%) are not where this audience is.
One last thing the report flags: 28% of these influencers run their own business. That's the creator economy doing its thing, and for UK brands, it means a non-trivial share of the people you'd partner with are running parallel commerce. Plan partnership terms accordingly (exclusivity windows, conflict clauses, IP ownership of the content), they're going to negotiate harder than a pure influencer-for-hire would.
How they got the data
The influencer side combined a qualitative-quantitative profile analysis on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube against a defined set of health-and-wellness search terms and follower thresholds.
The audience side used two waves of Pew's American Trends Panel (ATP), a nationally representative panel of randomly selected US adults recruited via address-based sampling. ATP Wave 173 (9-15 June 2025, n=5,023, response rate 88%, ±1.6pp margin of error) and ATP Wave 182 (20-26 October 2025) provide the survey data, oversampling non-Hispanic Asian adults for sub-group precision and weighting back to population proportions.
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From Pew Research Center · published 07/05/2026