Plenty of the posts are benign fluff, such as an instructional post about how to cut a mango. hosts many blog posts, some of which accumulate hundreds of thousands or even millions of views - enough to register as viral content. (While “alternative health” is a vague category, in Mercola’s case, it means he gloms onto nonsense about the dangers of modern medicine - not that he is a champion of experimental but evidence-based procedures.) His website bills itself as the “#1 Natural Health Website.” It is the top “Alternative Health” website, according to Alexa, more popular than Tony Robbins’s self-help page. Business research firm Hoover’s estimates that LLC brings in around $9.8 million annually, with additional income from Health Resources LLC ($5.2 million) and Mercola Consulting Services LLC (around $320,000). Mercola offers himself up as the only honest man in medicine, ready and willing to refute the arrogant lies of other doctors. Our growing disassociation with truth stands to only benefit him more. I’ve known about Mercola for years, but I found myself paying more attention to him in 2016, not because he was up to new tricks but because the shtick he’s used for 19 years is continuing to mislead people - and pay dividends. Teens in Macedonia made bank spreading fake news on Facebook Snopes became a bookmark to check daily. The truth was both harder to discern and less integral to success than it had seemed. It has hosted hoaxes, conspiracy theorists, liars, and frauds since its inception, but in 2016 the scams were rewarded with credulity, attention, and virality to a dizzying extent. The internet is a breeding ground for bad information. Using a mobile phone regularly while pregnant will doom children to behavioral problems down the line letting young people drink fluoridated water will make them stupid, and your local doc is in the pocket of Big Pharma. Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo is, in fact, bad for babies. Steeped in toxicity, we are poisoned by the society we’ve built. It spins a compelling tale: The world is treacherous, and danger lurks in protein powders, laptops, toothpaste, and hot tubs.
The telegenic 62-year-old’s long-running e-commerce and health-blogging business is carefully positioned to attract and comfort people who feel cast off, lied to, and vulnerable.
He launched in 1997, staking out an early corner in the growing “alternative health” industry and building an audience with a wholesome yet conspiratorial “what the doctors don’t want us to know” tone. Mercola is the coauthor of various New York Times best-selling books, including The Great Bird Flu Hoax and The No-Grain Diet. Perhaps you’ve seen him, paternally bald and trim and unflappable, making sanguine appearances on The Dr. This infomercial about Mercola’s life and taste in trees exists because he oversees an alternative-health empire organized around his namesake website, the video is part of a strategy to sell the osteopath as your favorite straight-shooting natural-living guru. Joseph Mercola is not retired, and his sojourn among the fruits is a pit stop in a nearly 25-minute YouTube video titled “A Day in the Life of Dr. He looks like a kindly retiree turned gardener as he crouches to cradle a low-hanging mango. The camera follows a fit, barefoot older man in a Kelly green athletic tank top as he points to a tree in his yard.