This is on the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohanscher.

Wellness influencers on TikTok and Instagram are big into cooking and dispensing advice for the less colonarily gifted.

Hey, another lazy girl's inner contact. This one you literally, anybody can do it.

While some of it is genuinely useful, when you blend nutritional science and the world of social media,

some essential facts get lost in the mix, like in the wake of this announcement.

The World Health Organization now classifies the low-calorie sweetener as the tame as a possible carcinogen.

It's commonly found in diet sodas, sugar-free gum, and tabletop sweeteners.

Popular wellness influencers, some of them registered dietitians weighed in.

That was a bold move, who none of these studies showed that it was specifically the sweeteners that cause a waking.

But they love a good clickbait.

We go through this every time a new report comes out, and I've gone pretty deep into the science.

It's fine to have a diet soda if you want.

When people switch their sugary beverages to those with artificial sweeteners,

they lost weight and their health markers improved.

Sweeteners are still safe and a great way to reduce their sugar intake.

To Anahad O'Connor, a health columnist at The Washington Post,

the response to the announcement on social media smelled a bit fishy.

And in fact, a report O'Connor released earlier this month with colleagues Caitlin Gilbert and Sasha Chavkin

found that dozens of registered dietitians, some of them with more than two million followers each,

were paid to counter the WHO's announcement.

They were promoting messages that were telling people,

disregard what the World Health Organization has said about artificial sweeteners and diet beverages,

...