IN SHORT: Short videos circulating on Facebook with “health secrets” for slowing down ageing contain nothing but unreliable home “remedies”. What’s more, these videos are unusual in that they are not only inaccurate, but also impersonate another untrustworthy source.
A video, which has been viewed at least 1.2 million times on Facebook, claims to offer “3 holistic health secrets that will make you look younger at 93 than you did in your 30s”. It’s just one of dozens of videos on Facebook and TikTok with similar or identical audio promoting the same “health secrets”.
The videos prominently feature Barbara O’Neill, an Australian naturopath who is responsible for promoting many false health claims. She has been banned for life from providing any health services by an Australian regulatory body. The videos typically include clips from O’Neill’s lectures and a voice that sounds like hers delivering the “health secrets”.
The “secrets” include drinking a mixture of ginger and lemon juice, applying rosemary oil to the hair, and taking “a moringa supplement”. Their specific uses and effects are not described in detail, but the voiceover informs viewers: “These are the three holistic health secrets that have made me look younger at 93 than I did at 50.” (The claimed ages vary from video to video.)
So can these “health secrets” make you look younger? We checked.
No evidence for viral claims
The voice-overs used in the videos are fake (more on this below) and their health advice is unsupported or incorrect. Let’s look at the three remedies first.
Very little information is given about how these “health secrets” are supposed to work, or how to use them. However, in explaining the benefits of taking a moringa supplement, the videos claim that “moringa’s antioxidants detoxify our bodies” and counteract the ageing process. This is false.
This claim is based on a pervasive health myth that substances called antioxidants can slow or prevent ageing. As Africa Check wrote in this factsheet on antioxidants, there is little evidence that antioxidants have any effect on this process, and even if they do help, they’re not magic. To find out more about what antioxidants can and can’t do, read our factsheet here.
Most of the videos give no explanation for how the other two health claims might work, but Africa Check has seen similar claims many times in the past. For example, the videos recommend “ginger in lemon juice in a cup of hot water every morning on an empty stomach” as another way to slow ageing. This is similar to previous home remedies that recommend using ginger, lemon juice or both to prevent any number of ailments. These claims are false. Ginger and lemon juice can be part of a healthy diet, but they have no known ability to prevent ageing.
The final claim is that rosemary oil “is the fastest way to go from dead grey hair to long black and smooth hair”. Rosemary oil has been shown to increase hair growth in rats and small human studies.
Although these studies only indicate that rosemary oil can promote hair growth, they don’t prove that it can change the colour or consistency of hair. And, as one doctor told the medical organisation Cleveland Clinic: “The extent of the improvement is variable. There are no guarantees.”
When evaluating health claims online, it is always important to thoroughly check the evidence behind the claims before trusting a health product or home remedy. Another helpful step in evaluating such claims is to check whether the source is trustworthy. In this case, it is not.
Video is impersonating a disgraced ‘naturopath’
The video shows the Australian naturopath O’Neill in front of a white board. Naturopathy or naturopathic medicine is an alternative medicine which is not based on, and in many cases contradicts, medicine based on scientific evidence.
Naturopathy can involve many different approaches or types of treatment and is not consistently regulated around the world. While some naturopaths actively reject medical and scientific evidence, this is not always the case.
O’Neill has been banned for life from practising medicine in New South Wales, Australia. The state’s Health Care Complaints Commission ruled that she had provided misleading and dangerous health information to “vulnerable people, including mothers and cancer sufferers”. The commission also found that O’Neill had no relevant medical qualifications, had repeatedly made untrue and misleading claims, and had even refused to read guidelines produced by medical experts.
But despite the ban, O’Neill has remained popular. She continues to offer expensive treatments, lectures and workshops around the world. And videos of her lectures have become popular online.
Vox reported in February 2024 that audio recordings of her lectures were being widely shared on TokTok to promote dubious health products. In the examples examined here, videos of O’Neill are being shared with fake audio not actually spoken by her.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) models to imitate a human voice is often referred to as “voice cloning”. In recent years, this technology has advanced to the point where very convincing clones can be produced with surprisingly little audio of a person speaking.
This has been used for obvious jokes, to replicate an actor’s voice on film and for more nefarious reasons. Voice cloning technology has made it possible for scammers to imitate the voice of a victim’s friend or family member with only a short audio recording and trick a victim into handing over money.
O’Neill’s voice would be easy to clone, as there are many recorded hours of her talks and lectures available online. A detection tool built by AI audio company Resemble AI estimated that a clip from one of the videos was fake. A tool from ElevenLabs, another AI audio company, found that it was “very likely that this audio was generated with ElevenLabs”.
There are several clues that the audio is unreliable. O’Neill’s speech patterns and mannerisms often sound stilted or awkward. This may be most obvious to those already familiar with O’Neill.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
Similarly, O’Neill’s usual health advice is not the same as that given in the videos. For example, while O’Neill has promoted untrustworthy home remedies involving ginger, she has advised using the plant to treat inflammation, not to prevent ageing. Africa Check could find no evidence that O’Neill made the specific claims in these videos. The original content of O’Neill’s talk should not be considered trustworthy medical advice just because it has been overdubbed with other false claims.
The voiceovers also claim that O’Neill is 93 years old. But according to the records of the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission she was born on 28 July 1954, making her just barely 70 at the time of publication.
Finally, where these videos have used clips of O’Neill, none of them match the AI-generated audio. O’Neill’s mouth movements don’t match the words she’s supposedly saying, and the original clips aren’t related to any “health secrets”. For example, this video uses clips of O’Neill taken from a talk titled Mental Health & Rewiring the Brain, which does not mention any of the supposed secrets in the video shared on Facebook.
This is not the first time that impersonators have used O’Neill’s voice online. Similar techniques have been used online in the past and have been debunked by various fact-checking organisations.