I Read This Article Like Anyone Would. Then I Asked Five CRUCIAL Questions.

On a Thursday morning, scrolling through my news feed, I came across an article that stopped me cold.... because it was so convincingly good.

Hi! I’m Rachel Pascal. I’ve spent more than a decade writing health communications, so I understand exactly how it gets shaped and packaged before it reaches you. Make Sense Health pulls back the curtain on that process, so you can read health information more clearly and make better decisions with it. Subscribe to get more like this straight to your inbox.

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It was Thursday morning, before the kids woke. I was still in bed. Catching up on the football results after falling asleep halfway through England’s first World Cup match the night before.

At the bottom of that page, in the ‘you might also like’ section that sits beneath most articles on the internet now, was this.

It was an article called “A Cardiologist Said My Belly Wasn’t Caused By Fat — What I Learned Next Changed Everything.”

It purported to be written by a woman called ‘Helen’, a retired teaching assistant from Manchester. She described crying in a Marks & Spencer fitting room. Her daughter — a cardiologist — had driven over with printed notes and explained the real reason middle-aged women can’t shift belly fat.

Cortisol. The liver’s overnight detox cycle. Four specific botanicals. A bedtime cup of tea.

I read the whole thing.

I’ll be honest: the part of my brain that isn’t professionally trained to interrogate health claims found it compelling. The emotional arc was well-constructed. The vocabulary sounded plausible. The solution was simple and affordable.

Helen was telling me it wasn’t my fault.

That response — that involuntary oh, this makes sense — is what I want to talk about. Because this article is a near-perfect case study in how health information can feel trustworthy while offering almost nothing you can truly verify.

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First, What We Know And What We Don’t

At the very top of the page, in tiny grey text, the words: Advertorial.

At the very bottom, after the testimonials and the buy button and the fake scarcity notice (“stock has been limited recently — I’d grab it”), a legal disclaimer explains that the content is promotional, the individuals shown are models, and results may not be typical.

So we know for certain that it’s paid advertising designed to look like editorial content.

Everything else sits in a carefully constructed fog.

• Is Helen real? We don’t know.

• Is Olivia the cardiologist daughter real? We don’t know.

• Are the three commenters — Pauline the retired NHS nurse, Margaret, Barbara whose GP “started recommending it” — real customers or constructed personas? We cannot tell. The disclaimer says images are models, but it doesn’t say the people don’t exist.

Advertorials aren’t inherently dishonest. A well-made one is clearly signposted, makes claims the product can reasonably support, and doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.

But this one does something different — it borrows the full emotional and structural language of personal journalism while offering almost nothing you could independently verify.

The Evidence Problem

Here’s what I can say with confidence: there is no evidence in this article.

Not a single study linked. Not a single clinical reference cited. Not one source named that you could look up independently.

What there is instead is the language of evidence.

• “The most studied plant in clinical hepatic research.”

• “Good clinical data on the stress response.”

• “Drawing serious Western attention.”

These phrases perform the function of evidence — they create a feeling of scientific grounding — without providing any sources.

The MHRA — the UK’s medicines regulator — doesn’t allow food products to make medicinal claims.

So the article never quite says “this tea treats visceral fat.” Instead it has a cardiologist character say it, in a personal conversation, in a story that may or may not be real.

Why A Smart Person Might Still Click

Let’s be careful here, because the easy version of this analysis might be: “people who fall for this aren’t thinking critically.”

That’s not what I’m saying.

The article works because it does something sophisticated: it meets real feelings with real language.

The frustration ‘Helen’ describes — trying everything, being told to try harder, feeling invisible — reflects an experience that is documented and legitimate amongst middle-aged women.

It also uses a structural move I think of as laundered authority.

The claim doesn’t come from the brand, or from a paid spokesperson, or even from Helen. It comes from Olivia, her cardiologist daughter, in a private kitchen conversation. That’s three degrees of removal from anything you could scrutinise.

Even if you wanted to push back, there’s nothing to push back against — it’s a story about what someone’s daughter (who might not even be real) once said.

What using SENSE Looks Like Here

This article is one of the reasons I’m writing a book about how to navigate health information called: How to Make SENSE of Health Information (coming soon!). Join the waitlist here.

SENSE is a framework I’ve developed for when we encounter exactly this kind of article.

Five questions, in order:

• Spot who’s talking — can I trust the source?

• Explore what could happen — what are the real risks and benefits?

• Navigate the evidence — what proof actually backs this up?

• Study the logic — does this actually make sense?

• Ensure it fits — how does this apply to my life and circumstances?

Simple questions. But applied here, they do a lot of work.

Spot who’s talking.

There are three distinct voices anchoring this piece: Helen, the relatable retired teaching assistant; Olivia, her cardiologist daughter; and several commenters at the bottom — including Pauline, a retired NHS nurse, and Barbara, whose unnamed GP was apparently so impressed she began recommending the tea to other patients.

Yet, the small print tells us the individuals shown are models. Whether these people exist (Helen, Olivia, Pauline, Barbara, etc), we cannot verify.

The piece exists to sell Lulutox, but whether that's a direct commission or an affiliate publisher earning per sale, I couldn't establish. What is disclosed — in grey text at the very top and bottom — is that this is a marketing platform.

Navigate the evidence.

There is no evidence that can be followed up. Not a single study linked, not a clinical reference cited, nor one source named that you could look up independently.

What there is instead is the language of evidence, as we’ve seen already. And because the claims are delivered within a personal story rather than as direct product claims, there's nothing specific enough to formally dispute.

The science sounds plausible and that's all it needs to do.

Explore what could happen.

This article has one direction of travel: everything works. The only question is whether stock is still available when you click through.

No risks are discussed anywhere — no mention of interactions, contraindications, or the straightforward possibility that the tea simply doesn't work.

That asymmetry is important. Trustworthy health information acknowledges uncertainty. It tells you what we don't know alongside what we do.

Study the logic.

There is science in this neighbourhood — and it's not new. This 2009 study, for example, found that postmenopausal women show increased activity of an enzyme called 11β-HSD1 in adipose tissue and liver, a mechanism that can amplify cortisol's effects locally, even when blood cortisol looks normal.

But the leap from this to "four botanicals in a bedtime tea fixes it" is enormous, and the article crosses that vast gap in a single sentence, hidden within a kitchen conversation between a mother and daughter (or so we are to believe).

The article does not make anything up wholesale, but takes something true and extends it, in such a way that you might not notice.

Ensure it fits.

The product is positioned as universally beneficial — every woman over 50, same mechanism, same four ingredients, same bedtime cup, same results.

Helen lost 11 centimetres. Barbara lost 7. Pauline's bloating cleared in a week. The specificity of the numbers creates an impression of consistency that real clinical data rarely produces.

Actual health decisions depend on individual circumstances — medications, existing conditions, lifestyle, genetics — yet none of that is acknowledged here. The implicit promise is that your body works exactly like Helen's, yet it almost certainly doesn't.

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I bought nothing. I did spend twenty minutes thinking about cortisol and liver function and whether I should be drinking something warm before bed (even though I’m not even 40 yet).

Thursday morning phone scrolling is where many health decisions begin in this day and age — not in a GP’s office, but in the half-awake, emotionally available space between one headline and the next.

Understanding what’s happening in that moment isn’t a niche skill for medical professionals.

It’s the most important kind of health literacy there is.

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