On October 29, 2026, The Lancet published its first-ever series on men's health. It has three papers, written by researchers from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), the universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and Pennsylvania, Monash University Malaysia, the think tank Global 50/50, and the James P Grant School of Public Health in Bangladesh. The series argues that men's poor health and early deaths are "not driven by biology alone, but by the environments they live and work in." It says men's health has been neglected for so long that it is "vulnerable to companies and influencers in the manosphere to exploit."

Why It Matters

"Performance-oriented masculinities" sold "through products" describes, among other things, the testosterone, peptide and supplement funnels that men's-health influencers send traffic to. Afterglow has tracked that market's growth from [record testosterone prescribing with thin lab workups](/stories/testosterone-prescribing-resurgence-2026) to the [FDA's peptide loosening](/stories/fda-peptide-panel-maha-conflicts) (that framing is ours, not the Lancet's). A top medical journal now treats that ecosystem as a commercial determinant of health, the same category that justified restrictions on tobacco and junk-food marketing. For men's telehealth brands, the risk is regulatory: advertising rules, influencer-disclosure enforcement and claims scrutiny tend to follow once public health applies the "commercial harms" label. The opportunity is that the series asks for credible, evidence-based alternatives aimed at men, which legitimate sexual-health and ED platforms can claim to offer.

The headline recommendation, reported by The Guardian, is that governments should treat the manosphere and online misogyny as a public-health issue, as they treat tobacco and ultra-processed food. The authors define the manosphere as "a diffuse commercial ecosystem and loose collection of online communities united by shared beliefs about masculinity, misogyny and male victimisation." They argue that in it "masculine identity is commodified through products and paid content that normalise and reinforce health-harming and performance-oriented masculinities." Co-author Prof. Kent Buse of Global 50/50 put it this way: "This is a business model, not a fringe… Public health has a tested toolkit for commercial harms and we should use it." Co-author Prof. Sarah Hawkes added: "We need to offer boys something better, not just tell them what to avoid." UK minister for men and boys Jake Richards welcomed the report.

LSTM's Prof. Sally Theobald framed the series as "not a zero sum game" with women's health. Lancet senior editor Dr. Jonathan Pimm used examples including "the middle-aged man reluctant to have his prostate checked and the adolescent boy feeling anxious, depressed and neglected." The authors want men's health built into universal health coverage and wider health policy, and better data collection so that marginalized men are counted.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-31

Initial entry — story first created.