biology and chemistry at the University of Illinois, graduating in 1976. In 1982, he graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine (now Midwestern University). According to Mercola's website, he is a former Chairman of Family Medicine at St. Alexius Medical Center. He stopped treating patients in 2009 to work full-time on his health products and vitamin supplements business. In a 2017 affidavit, Mercola stated that his net worth was "in excess of $100 million." Mercola lives in Cape Coral, Florida. He is married to Erin Elizabeth, a blogger listed by The New York Times as one of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation. He has written two books which have been listed on the New York Times bestseller list: The No-Grain Diet (May 2003) and The Great Bird Flu Hoax (October 2006). In the bird flu book, Mercola dismisses medical concerns over an avian influenza pandemic, asserting that the government, big business, and the mainstream media have conspired to promote the threat of avian flu to accrue money and power. Mercola has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors. His business is very successful. In 2019, The Washington Post wrote he had "amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines....His net worth, derived largely from his network of private companies, has grown to 'in excess of $100 million,' he said in a 2017 affidavit." Views and controversy Website and publications Mercola operates Mercola.com, which he has described as the most popular alternative-health website on the internet. Aside from the main site, it also hosts blog subsites, like Healthy Pets and Peak Fitness. Traffic counting from Quantcast shows the site receives about 1.9 million novel visitors per month, each returning almost ten times each month; the number of views is roughly equal to the number received by the National Institutes of Health. Using aggressive direct-marketing tactics, the site and his company, Mercola LLC, brought in roughly $7 million in 2010 through the sale of alternative medicine treatments and dietary supplements. The site promotes disproven health ideas, including the notions that homeopathy can treat autism and that vaccinations have hidden detriments to human health. Phyllis Entis, a microbiologist and food safety expert, highlighted Mercola.com as an example of websites "likely to mislead consumers by offering one-sided, incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading information." Researchers say that Mercola