Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic front-runner in Michigan's U.S. Senate primary, spent years reading paid advertisements for questionable health and wellness products on his podcast, even as he publicly attacked Dr. Mehmet Oz for using his medical credentials to "sell people s*** they didn't need."
The contradiction, detailed by the New York Post, sits at the center of El-Sayed's Senate campaign, where the trained epidemiologist has positioned himself as a progressive champion against corporate influence in health care. His financial disclosures tell a different story: over $100,000 in income from the podcast production company he formed in 2024, with the firm valued at up to $250,000, revenue that appears to come largely from sponsorships.
At least 35 sponsors ran across 316 episodes of "America Dissected," the podcast El-Sayed launched in 2019 with Crooked Media before splitting off to run his own operation. Among them: a breathalyzer-style fitness gadget that health researchers have called scientifically dubious, an online grocer that paid $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit over deceptive subscription practices, and a cereal brand that triggered a public callout El-Sayed tried to delete from the internet.
In 2021, El-Sayed appeared on the "Bad Faith" podcast and took aim at Dr. Oz, who was then preparing to run for Senate in Pennsylvania. El-Sayed did not hold back:
"He hasn't been telling it like it is, he's been telling it like some companies pay him to tell it like it is."
He went further, calling Oz part of "the same kind of medical industrial complex that exists to sell you things that you don't need that are not actually based in any level of science." Oz, El-Sayed argued, exploited his medical title to build unearned trust: "Yet he can... say, 'Well, I'm a doctor, so you should trust what I have to say.'"
That framing makes El-Sayed's own ad reads hard to square. He is a doctor. He hosted a health-focused podcast. And he lent his credibility to products that independent experts have challenged on scientific grounds.
In 2024, El-Sayed promoted Lumen, a breathalyzer-style device that claims to tell users whether their bodies are burning fats or carbohydrates during exercise, then offers nutrition guidance based on the readings. In his ad read, El-Sayed endorsed the product in personal terms:
"[T]o maximize what it was I was going to eat, or when I was going to work out, I really wanted to know what it was that my body was using for fuel. And that's why I turned to Lumen."
But by the time El-Sayed read that ad, the device had already drawn skepticism from health researchers. Nicholas Tiller, a researcher at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, told Outside Magazine in May 2022 that the science behind Lumen was unremarkable at best.
"If you're more than three hours without eating, you'll burn more fat. If you've recently consumed some carbohydrates, you'll burn less fat. Do you really need an expensive gadget to measure your carbon-dioxide output and tell you this? I just don't see a practical use for the product in helping people achieve their weight-loss goals."
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who built his brand on following the science, apparently saw it differently. Or at least his sponsors did.
Another sponsor, Thrive Market, sells organic food products and various supplements. El-Sayed did not endorse specific Thrive products on his podcast, but he did read ads for the company. In 2024, Thrive Market settled a civil lawsuit for $1.4 million over allegations that it enrolled customers in automatic subscription renewals and made false claims about subscription terms.
The Michigan Senate race is already producing its share of embarrassing revelations for Democratic candidates. El-Sayed's primary rival, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, has faced tough questions about thousands of deleted tweets and her own credibility gaps.
Meanwhile, Thrive Market also sold brain health supplements, a category that Dr. Pieter Cohen, an internist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance who has researched dietary supplements, warned against this past February. Cohen was blunt: "There's no evidence to suggest there's an ingredient in supplements that can improve brain health. Nothing legally contained in supplements has been proven to improve your thinking or prevent memory loss."
El-Sayed's podcast also ran ads for Magic Spoon Cereal, a brand that advertises heavily on social media and podcasts. In March 2022, someone on social media called him out for the sponsorship. El-Sayed responded on X with a post that has since been deleted:
"I broadly reject any advertisements that are for products making claims about health. Magic spoon [sic] is simply a high-protein, low-carb cereal. They're not claiming to improve your sleep or add years to your life, which is why I read them."
That defense drew a line El-Sayed himself would later cross. The Lumen ad, which came after the Magic Spoon controversy, made explicit health and fitness claims, exactly the kind of pitch El-Sayed said he rejected. He deleted the post rather than live with the contradiction on the record.
McMorrow, for her part, has her own problems with disappearing digital records. She has also been caught up in questions about voting in California years after claiming to have moved permanently to Michigan.
El-Sayed's Senate financial disclosures, filed with the U.S. Senate's electronic filing system, show that he formed his own production company in 2024 after departing Crooked Media. The company generated over $100,000 in income and carried a value of up to $250,000. Most of that revenue appears to come from sponsorships, the very arrangements that let companies pay a doctor to tell listeners "like it is."
That is the same business model El-Sayed attacked Oz for running. The difference is that El-Sayed has not faced the same scrutiny, until now.
The broader Democratic Senate landscape in Michigan reflects a party struggling with its own internal contradictions. Michigan's junior senator, Elissa Slotkin, has called on Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to step aside for new leadership, a sign of how fractured the party's direction has become.
El-Sayed has not limited his corporate-influence attacks to Oz. On the campaign trail, he has accused his top primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, of selling out to "corporations and special interests." Polls show El-Sayed leading the primary field, with McMorrow trailing behind.
His campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
That silence is telling. El-Sayed built a public identity on the idea that doctors who lend their credentials to paid product endorsements are betraying public trust. He said Oz was "part of the medical industrial complex" that sells people things "not actually based in any level of science." He drew the line clearly and loudly, then spent years on the other side of it, reading ads for gadgets that researchers questioned and companies that settled lawsuits for deceptive practices.
The tensions roiling the Democratic Party's internal primary battles have exposed a recurring pattern: candidates who campaign on purity while practicing the same transactional politics they claim to oppose.
El-Sayed's podcast ran 316 episodes over six years. Thirty-five sponsors paid to reach his audience. His production company pulled in six figures. And the man who told the world that Dr. Oz was a corporate shill did not respond when asked to explain how his own arrangement was any different.
There is nothing illegal about reading podcast ads. Plenty of hosts do it. But most podcast hosts do not run for the United States Senate on a platform of attacking corporate influence in medicine. Most podcast hosts did not publicly declare that doctors who endorse paid products are part of a corrupt system. And most podcast hosts did not delete their own social media defenses when the contradiction became too obvious to explain.
El-Sayed set the standard himself. He told voters exactly how to judge a doctor who takes money to promote products. Michigan voters now have every reason to apply that standard to him.
When you build your campaign on calling out the other guy's hustle, you had better not be running one of your own.