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A woman claims she was rushed to hospital with esophageal burns after following a health influencer’s digestive health recipes.
In a viral TikTok video, a woman has warned about the dangers of following health and wellness advice from social media influencers. TikTok user @lutinii took to the platform in April to share the disastrous results she experienced after trying the influencer’s “holistic” recipes to help her digestion.
“You guys better be careful what you listen to health and wellness influencers or you might end up in the hospital like me,” she began in the video, which has been viewed more than 2 million times.
The woman explained that she began following a “famous” health and wellness creator on social media about six years ago. The unnamed influencer was said to have shared content about “healing the body from chronic illness,” something the TikTok user could relate to.
“One day I stumbled across her video, which was about how eating oranges with cinnamon and cayenne pepper and the skin on helps with digestion,” she says. “It just didn’t feel right, and I thought it was for my health. I thought I was doing the right thing for my body and it would thank me later. I was wrong.”
She revealed that she had to go to hospital after becoming “super ill” after consuming an influencer’s digestive health recipe – she told her doctor she’d eaten an orange sprinkled with cinnamon and cayenne pepper, to which he replied: “Why would you do that?”
“Do you know what my answer was?” the woman asked the camera. “‘I saw someone doing it online.’ And as soon as that came out of my mouth, I thought: ‘I deserve this. I deserve this.'”
Doctors suggested that her esophagus may have been burned by eating an orange laced with cinnamon and cayenne pepper, and over the next few months she saw a variety of specialists to treat her esophagus.
“I had an endoscopy and it turned out I had actually burned my esophagus,” she said.
While the incident happened several years ago, the TikTok user said she was inspired to post about her experience at the hospital after noticing a wellness influencer had recently reposted the same digestive health recipe on her own social media page.
“It just makes me angry because now hundreds of thousands of people are asking her for information,” the woman said. “It’s dangerous to recommend something to someone, saying, ‘This is the cure for your digestive problems,’ but it’s even more dangerous to believe everything you see.”
“I think influencers and content creators have a responsibility to be careful, but I also think we all have a responsibility to be discerning and not take everything we see with a grain of salt,” she added. “This is the last time we’re going to listen to health and wellness influencers.”
In the caption, the TikTok user shared that she was reminded of an important thing: “Not everyone’s body is the same and there is no one size that fits all.”
Though the woman didn’t name the health and wellness influencer in the video, it didn’t take long for the internet to speculate that the creator of the content was Lil Shipper, a popular influencer with over 1 million followers on Instagram. Lil Shipper, also known as Bethany, has garnered a large online following for her recipes and tips focused on improving digestive health.
In May 2022, she shared a video with a recipe very similar to the one that allegedly burned a TikTok user’s esophagus. The recipe, which featured navel oranges dusted with cayenne pepper and cinnamon, claimed to relieve constipation “in about five minutes.” She shared a similar video with the same recipe again in December 2023.
The comments section was flooded with thousands of messages from users referencing @lutinii’s video of their own experiences at the hospital. “I got the idea from watching videos of people who were hospitalized,” one user wrote, while another added, “Anyone else who ended up here after watching a girl who tried it and got sent to the emergency room?”
Despite the negative experiences of TikTok users, cayenne pepper is known to provide some relief from digestive issues by “increasing gastric juices and stomach enzyme production to help break down food” and “promoting a healthy microbiome,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Navel oranges contain around 3 grams of dietary fiber, which aids digestion, helping your digestive system process food and maintain regular bowel movements, while cinnamon has long been used as a way to support digestive health.
Independent We’ve reached out to Lilsipper and @lutinii for comment.
