Research institute · Pew Research Center
38% of US Health Influencer Posts Promote a Product
Pew analysed 535,512 posts from 6,334 US health and wellness influencers and found 38% promote a product, service or subscription, while only 9% cite an outside source when making a health claim.
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Key findings at a glance
- 38% of posts from health and wellness influencers promote a product, service or subscription
- 92% of these influencers included a promotion in at least one post between February and April 2026
- 33% of influencers promote a product or service in a majority of their posts
- 66% of posts about supplements or non-prescription medicines contain a promotion, the highest of any topic
- 52% of posts about nutrition contain a promotion
- 43% of self-described dietitians and nutritionists promote something in a majority of their posts, the most of any background
- 54% of posts mention healthy living, such as fitness, nutrition or everyday habits
- 34% of posts discuss medical topics, which healthcare professionals post about far more often than other influencers
- 30% of posts are not about health or wellness at all
- 25% of influencers make fitness their go-to topic, the most common single focus
- 11% of posts warn of a specific health harm
- 9% of posts cite an outside source, such as research or an expert, when making a health claim
What the report covers
Pew Research Center published What Do Health and Wellness Influencers Post About? on 7 October 2026. It is a content analysis rather than a survey: Pew collected the Instagram, TikTok and YouTube posts published between 1 February and 30 April 2026 by 6,334 health and wellness influencers, 535,512 posts in all, then classified each one by topic, by whether it promoted a product or service, by whether it warned of a health harm and by whether it cited an outside source. The influencers are people rather than brands, with at least 100,000 followers on one of the three platforms, posting mainly in English to a US audience. It follows Pew's May 2026 study of who these influencers are and how US adults engage with them, which we covered in our report on what US influencer audiences say they hear about.
The headline is how commercial this content is. 38% of posts contain a sponsorship or a suggestion to buy a product, service or subscription, and nearly half of the posts that discuss health and wellness directly do so. 92% of influencers promoted something at least once in the three months, and a third did so in a majority of their posts. Promotion is densest around supplements and non-prescription medicines (66% of those posts), men's health and physical appearance (56% each), and nutrition and longevity (52% each). By background, self-described dietitians and nutritionists are the most promotional group: 43% promote something in most of their posts, against 19% of activists.
On content, 54% of posts cover healthy living (fitness 25%, healthy habits 20%, nutrition 19%) and 34% cover medical topics, which influencers who describe themselves as healthcare professionals post about far more often than anyone else. 30% are not about health at all. Around six in ten influencers have a go-to topic, most often fitness. Only 9% of posts cite an outside source when making a health claim and 11% warn of a specific harm, with influencers who describe themselves as researchers the most likely to cite sources (30% of their posts).
What this means for UK marketers
For UK health, fitness, beauty and food brands, the first lesson is saturation. When 92% of these creators sell something and a third do it in most of their posts, your sponsored post lands in a feed where pitches are routine, and trust is already thin: our report on how far US influencer audiences trust health advice found only 10% fully trust the health advice they get. Before you pay, scroll back three months through a creator's feed and count how many posts are promotions, then brief them on their go-to topic rather than asking a fitness creator to sell a supplement.
Second, Pew counted promotions whether or not they were disclosed. UK rules are less forgiving. The influencers' guide to making clear that ads are ads, published by CAP and the CMA, recommends a clear and prominent 'Ad' label upfront and says the brand and the creator are both responsible for disclosure. The claims matter as much as the label. 14% of the posts Pew studied discussed treatments that need a prescription or a medical professional, and rule 12.12 of the CAP Code section on medicines and health products says prescription-only medicines and treatments may not be advertised to the public. For food and supplements, CAP Code section 15 allows only health claims listed as authorised on the applicable register (in Great Britain, the GB register), and rule 15.6.3 rules out health claims that refer to an individual health professional's recommendation. That matters because dietitians and nutritionists are the most promotional group in the data. If a creator calls themselves a dietitian, check the HCPC's list of protected titles and the register before you brief them.
Third, sources are a gap you can fill. Only 9% of posts cite an outside source, so naming the study or the guideline behind a claim sets your content apart, and CAP's rules already require you to hold that evidence. The same discipline applies when you put budget behind creator content through Facebook and Instagram advertising: a boosted creator post is still an ad, so the label and the claims check go with it.
How they got the data
Pew identified the influencers in autumn 2025 through targeted health and wellness keyword searches and site auditing, as set out in the methodology for its first influencer report. For this follow-up it collected posts published between 1 February and 30 April 2026 using the Modash Raw API (Instagram and TikTok) and the YouTube Data API, then removed 494 of the original 6,828 influencers whose accounts were missing, whose posts could not be analysed or who posted nothing about health in the period. The final set is 304,562 Instagram posts, 212,273 TikTok posts and 18,677 YouTube posts. Speech was transcribed with an OpenAI speech recognition model (the first five minutes only for YouTube), and on-screen text was read by optical character recognition on Instagram and TikTok.
Each post was then labelled by OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Mini model against a codebook of 13 topics plus promotions, health warnings and source citations. Two researchers hand-coded 250 posts, reaching at least 88% agreement on every label, and a validation set of 600 posts gave the model an F1 score of 0.6 or above on every label. Two limits matter for marketers. The promotion measure is deliberately broad: it includes free products such as workout guides, and Pew notes it probably misses subtle or undisclosed sponsorships. And the sample addresses a US audience, so treat the figures as a read on the English-language creator market rather than a UK measurement.
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From Pew Research Center · published 07/10/2026