Ted McGrath for BuzzFeed News
On Facebook, Cabbage Juice Is The New Snake Oil
“I'm proud of being a leader of a poop cult,” Jillian Mai Thi Epperly once joked to fans of her signature recipe: a fermented slurry of salted cabbage that produces “waterfalls” of diarrhea. Here's the wild story of how she convinced thousands to believe her dangerous science, and how a grassroots movement shut her down when Facebook wouldn't.
Posted on March 17, 2018, at 6:34 a.m.
Nidhi Subbaraman
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC
When Bruce Wilmot decided to go on “Jilly Juice” last summer, he’d just learned that his pancreatic cancer was back, and it was bad. He’d been through the hell of chemo before, and the last thing he wanted was more treatment.
“My dad was really desperate,” Taylor Wilmot, his daughter, told BuzzFeed News. “He was very sad, and he didn’t want to die.”
Then 55 and living alone in Columbus, Georgia, he stumbled across the Facebook group of Jillian Mai Thi Epperly, a woman from Canton, Ohio, whose tens of thousands of followers swore by her bizarre, dangerous, and entirely made-up science theory: that all diseases — including cancer — are caused by a fungus called candida that lives in the gut.
Jamie Jansen
Jillian Mai Thi Epperly
As Epperly claimed on the group — called Exposing the Lies Candida: Weaponized Fungus Mainstreaming Mutancy — candida attracts parasites, and the only way to health is a severely restricted diet accompanied by large quantities of her signature fermented cabbage juice. Her potion was a purgative, and she said that “healing symptoms” included nausea, headaches, dizziness, and explosive blasts of diarrhea. These “waterfalls” supposedly brought out the parasites, which were visible in the toilet bowl.
For Wilmot, things moved swiftly downhill after his diagnosis. The doctor had given him a few weeks, maybe a few months, according to his rabbi, Brian Hawkins, who told BuzzFeed News he was with Wilmot when he was diagnosed. But within just days, Wilmot found it hard to get around, and a hospice facility sent a bed to his duplex.
“I've been juicing like crazy, Cancer bad juice good,” he wrote in a Facebook post on June 13. “Ime [sic] brewing up some of Jillian Mai Thi's protocol and plan on switching completely over to her diet, ferment etc. as soon as that is ready.” Friends wrote comments of encouragement and said they were praying for him.
Epperly, whom Wilmot had tagged, also replied: “You are amazing If you need a short chat later let me know You will pull through.”
“I might take you up on that,” Wilmot said.
A few days later, friends visited his condo to help make a huge batch of the juice. They followed the recipe described in documents posted on Epperly’s Facebook group: Add a tablespoon of pink Himalayan salt to two cups of water and two cups of cabbage or kale. Puree in a blender, pour into a glass jar, cover, and leave at room temperature to ferment for three days. Drink a few cups nightly — up to a gallon a day.
Wilmot messaged his daughter a photo showing more than a dozen tall jars of the stuff. “Look at my cancer cure,” he wrote to her. “That stuff should work, hope your [sic] doing good today.”
He even bought a second fridge to store it, she said.
In a later video, Wilmot held up a jar of the purple brew, downed some, then addressed Epperly: “Jillian I promised you I’d be drinking a cup, so, first one down.”
Rabbi Hawkins, who had become Wilmot's religious guide and friend in those final months, remembered hearing about the cabbage juice. "If someone had bottled up rat poison and told him, ‘It will heal you,’ he would have drunk it,” Hawkins told BuzzFeed News. “That’s how desperate the man was.”
When Taylor came back to visit her father a few weeks later, she was shocked. “He was totally emaciated,” she said. “He was drinking so much of it, he was basically starving himself. It was all coming out as diarrhea.”
In mid-July, Wilmot's friends found him unconscious on the floor of his apartment, and he was moved to a hospice facility. On July 20, about a month after he was diagnosed and began the juice purge, he died.
Facebook is under scrutiny for its outsized role in spreading political misinformation. But it’s also a platform where pseudoscience, snake oil remedies, and medical falsehoods multiply unchecked. Those have received far less attention, despite carrying the potential for immediate physical harm.
There are countless fake science gurus with large Facebook followings. But Epperly’s is particularly striking, according to Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Alberta, because she’s not a celebrity. “She isn’t associated with some well-packaged brand, so it’s interesting that she’s able to accumulate this much interest.”
She says her cabbage concoction will reverse illness, arrest aging, and even turn gay people straight.
Epperly is also notable for the stark absurdity of her theory. She says her cabbage concoction will reverse all forms of illness, arrest aging, and even turn gay people straight. These claims are “absolutely dangerous nonsense,” David Seres, director of medical nutrition at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, told BuzzFeed News. “I am almost speechless.”
Epperly has no background in medicine or science. She delivers elements of her theory in rambling videos beamed live from her home. They have an unvarnished reality-TV quality to them: Epperly is often in a T-shirt, hair up, walking through the house as she talks. She is also a prolific Facebook commenter, each missive a stream-of-consciousness word salad. And for $70 an hour, she told BuzzFeed News, she will provide personal phone consultations, talking people through her theory and how to make the recipe.
When asked why she presents wild theories with no evidence to back them up, Epperly likened her efforts to a religious conversion. She doesn’t worry, she said, about people who don’t believe.
“We’re using a different context in my world, and the manifestations from the salt and the accessing of the nutrients is gonna give you a different context of what the symptoms are,” Epperly said. “So essentially what it is, is we’re trying to turn an atheist into a Christian.”
More than a dozen people told BuzzFeed News that they complained to Facebook about Epperly and her group, to no avail. The company has fairly lax rules for dealing with pseudoscientific groups. “We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety,” according to its community standards.
For example, in January the platform removed videos promoting the Tide Pod Challenge after people began posting videos eating (or pretending to eat) laundry detergent.
But Epperly’s group did not violate Facebook’s rules, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, and so was not taken down. The company wants to encourage discussion among its users, the spokesperson added, and does not want to censor provocative ideas. Facebook refused to discuss Wilmot’s death with BuzzFeed News on the record.
Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, Facebook’s relaxed policy means that people making wild health claims — like Joseph Mercola, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, or the makers of the “FasciaBlaster” who injured women with a device that promised to zap cellulite — can thrive. But in Epperly’s case, something unusual happened: Some Facebook users decided to take matters into their own hands.
Motivated in part by Wilmot's death, about a dozen private satellite Facebook groups — the biggest has over 10,000 members — have emerged with the explicit purpose of taking her down. This countermovement has organized to contact journalists, law enforcement, and the Ohio Medical Board about Epperly’s dangerous ideas — and prompted a response from the Ohio Attorney General.
But whether their efforts will make any dent in Epperly’s business — or change Facebook’s stance on enabling fake science — is still very much an open question.
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