Lee Suckling: A major warning about health 'experts' following Belle Gibson lie admission

26-year-old The Whole Pantry author has admitted she fabricated her backstory entirely. Photo / Instagram

Australian "wellness" blogger, Belle Gibson, has admitted she lied.

The 26-year-old self-made social media celebrity gained almost 200,000 Instagram followers based on her admission that she cured herself of terminal brain cancer by eating a veggie-based diet and embracing natural therapies.

Gibson also claimed she had cancers in her liver, spleen, uterus, and blood.

Her "whole foods" business became hugely successful.

Penguin published her recipe book The Whole Pantry and her app was to be offered on the Apple Watch.

This week the young mother-of-one told The Australian Women's Weekly: "No. None of it is true."

"I am still jumping between what I think I know and what is reality. I have lived it and I'm not really there yet," she said.

The Weekly speculates Gibson suffers from a psychological condition called factitious disorder or Munchausen syndrome - where sufferers feign disease or illness to gain attention.

However, it appears she lied to build up a public persona and launch her business, which, we can all assume, will now go up in flames.

"I don't want forgiveness. I just think (it) was the responsible thing to do. Above anything, I would like people to say, 'Okay, she's human'," Gibson told The Weekly.

We can only hope that, for those hopeful cancer suffers who believed in her bogus methods that it's not too late to re-consider other treatment.

This is not the first case of health blogger swindling. Earlier this month, American Vani Hari, who blogs as "The Food Babe", was ridiculed by a scientist in an article titled The Food Babe Blogger Is Full Of Sh*t. The scientist exposed the fraudulent Hari, a bestselling author who had amassed a following of 3 million readers per month, for making false scientific claims about chemical additives in popular foods such as Subway's sandwich bread.

Visit Instagram or the blogosphere and you'll find thousands upon thousands of other examples of health, nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing bloggers that make wild, unsubstantiated claims about how they cured their ailments and diseases, earned their six-pack, and became grounded, meditation gurus in the process.

Over the last 18 months, I've been completing a master's degree specialising in personal-health reporting, and the dangers posed to society when unqualified pseudo-experts give personal health advice to the public. I've discovered journalism has a shady history of picking the most flawed studies - those most likely to be incorrect because of small sample sizes or uber-concentrated extracts of nutrients not found in the real world - and reporting on them because of their sensationalist values.

Health bloggers, however, don't even choose the most dubiously astonishing science to report on. They don't report on any science at all.

Across all media, you'll be exposed on the best diets to lose weight, which superfoods prevent cancer, and exercise programmes that guarantee you'll drop below 10 per cent body fat. In traditional journalism, at the very least reporters are expected to provide reputable scientific citations to back any claims made.

In the world of social media - where, unlike traditional media, there are no codes of conduct, no ethical rules, and no bodies of authority to comply to - "revolutionary" health assertions can be made by using just one innovation of flawed evidence: a sexy, filtered Instagram photo.

Such pictures gain page views, increase followers, and make celebrities out of nobodies. Instagram has become the platform-du-jour for health bloggers to get the public to visit their revenue-generating and advertising-based blogs and websites. But here's the clincher: many such bloggers have more motivation than getting more dollars-per-click.

Those who sell recipes, books, workout videos, or diet plans need to position themselves as experts in order to flog their products.

The general public doesn't want to read the academic studies to prove the Ashy Bines Bikini Body Challenge works (they don't exist); followers can simply look at Ashy's abs on Instagram and buy her $69 diet plan online. If the Gold Coast babe has the washboard stomach, she must be an expert, right?

To add more mud to the murky healthy blogging business, Bines, who calls herself Australia's Leading Body Training Specialist, was recently pinged for plagiarising recipes provided via her $100 Clean Eating Plan.

In a YouTube video, Bines says she tasked an unnamed nutritionist to come up with the recipes for her book.

We all use the internet for inspiration, and for that purpose, health blogs and social media can be ideal. They show us bodies we want as our own, and we work out harder at the gym. They entice us with nutritious recipes, and we make healthier choices at the supermarket. These are good things. Things that genuinely can make us healthier.

But health blogs - especially those operated by those with something to sell - can be dangerous to our health, too. They can advise us to make disastrous changes in our nutrition and exercise, spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, and come out not just without the result we desired, but also in a worse state than we began.

Need some evidence? Just look at "expert" Ashy Bines. Her "clean eating" plan was deemed one of the three worst diets of 2015 by more than 200 qualified, accredited, practising dieticians.

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