Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed built a lucrative podcasting career by promoting an array of health products on his show, often leaning on his medical credentials to vouch for supplements and devices that experts have questioned. Among the items he helped sell were offerings from Thrive Market, which peddles products like Moon Juice Brain Dust and Royal Jelly Brain Fuel, both of which claim to boost cognitive function despite limited scientific evidence supporting such assertions. The ad reads proved financially rewarding, providing El-Sayed with a six-figure income even as he positioned himself publicly as someone who would never use his platform to hawk questionable health goods.
The contradiction has drawn sharp criticism precisely because El-Sayed himself condemned others for doing exactly what he did. In a now-deleted social media post from March 2022, he wrote that he broadly rejects advertisements for products making health claims. That same year, he attacked Mehmet Oz during Oz’s Pennsylvania Senate run, accusing him of being part of a medical industrial complex that exists to sell people things they don’t need based on no real science. Yet within months of those comments, El-Sayed was recording ads telling listeners that as a doctor and epidemiologist, he trusted Thrive Market for his healthy essentials.
His promotional activities extended beyond supplements. In July 2024, he read an advertisement for Lumen, an Israel-based handheld device claiming to measure metabolism through breath analysis. Health experts had been raising red flags about Lumen’s scientific validity for years before El-Sayed took its advertising money, with one Harbor-UCLA Medical Center researcher describing it as quintessential marketing over science. He also promoted a company selling peptides allegedly improving skin health. Fox News contributor Joe Concha was among those who seized on the revelations, arguing that voters should be wary of a candidate who presents himself as a physician when public records indicate he never held a medical license or completed a residency. El-Sayed does hold a medical degree and a doctorate in public health, but critics say the distinction matters considerably when someone is invoking white-coat authority to sell brain dust and metabolism gadgets. The El-Sayed campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
