Ella Rhian is lying on an idyllic beach with her boyfriend, smiling at the camera. “She doesn’t know it yet, but on this holiday she’s going to eat street food and get food poisoning, which will trigger an autoimmune disease with no cure, which will make her chronically ill for the rest of her life,” reads the text over her video, which racked up nearly 14 million views on TikTok in just five days.
Viewers were alarmed. “New fear unlocked,” wrote one in the comments. Others had questions. Can you really get a lasting illness from food poisoning? “The strangest bit about it actually was I was the healthiest I've ever been,” Rhian tells me over Zoom. The 30-year-old Brit has since been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis — a form of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) for which there is no cure. She recalls thinking her gut health was in great shape: “I was drinking kefir every day.”
