How reliable is the nutrition advice your favorite fitness influencer shares on YouTube?
According to our new study, not very. Our research team lead by Anna Kiss PhD, a researcher at both Pro-Sharp Research and ELTE University, analyzed thousands of scientific publications alongside 114 of the most popular sports nutrition videos on YouTube, with over 43 million combined views. The findings were clear: the vast majority of information shared is oversimplified, misleading, or scientifically unfounded.
Terms like "fat-burning foods," "detox," and "metabolic reset" dominate online fitness content, yet they either don't exist in scientific literature or mean something entirely different. Personal experience is routinely presented as scientific evidence, and commercial motivations often hide behind charismatic delivery and polished production.
The goal is to build an AI-powered tool that can automatically assess the reliability of any sports nutrition video, similar to how Nutriscore rates food products. Imagine pasting a video link into an app and instantly seeing a quality score based on how well its claims align with peer-reviewed science.
We're not against influencers. We're for fact-based communication.
The gap between scientific knowledge and what millions of people consume daily on social media is growing. Experts need to show up where the audience already is, and technology can help bridge that divide.
This is exactly the kind of challenge Pro-Sharp was built to solve: turning complex problems into smart, scalable software solutions.