The companies promoted 30 products, only eight of which were licensed as health functional foods, the ministry said at a briefing on Thursday. The remaining 22 were ordinary foods.
Penalties may include business suspensions or corrective orders under the country's food labelling and advertising law.
The products rode a wave of online weight-loss fads, among them the so-called "Olé-shot," a mixture of olive oil and lemon juice, and a so-called "natural Wegovy" combining olive oil with boiled eggs.
Some were pitched as an "edible Wegovy" or invoked GLP-1, the class of blockbuster obesity drugs.
Kim Ji-yeon, a professor of food science and biotechnology at Seoul National University of Science & Technology, dismissed the claims at the briefing.
"There are no research findings that olive oil has anti-ageing effects," she said, adding that olive oil benefits the body only when it displaces saturated fat within a normal diet, not when taken as a supplement. She said there was no evidence lemon juice aids the liver in detoxification.
Several firms produced short-form videos in which celebrities and pharmacists appeared to endorse the products, using AI-generated imagery and depictions of body tissue to suggest drug-grade effects such as appetite suppression and blocked fat absorption.
The videos circulated repeatedly on Facebook and YouTube and funneled viewers to the sellers' own online storefronts.
Phrases such as "rapid short-term weight loss" and "fat expulsion" appeared in the clips but were scrubbed from the linked sales pages, a tactic the ministry said exploited the difficulty of tracing advertisers behind clips that vanish after posting.
Markups ran from 1.8 to 27.5 times the purchase price. In one case, a product bought for 2,000 won was sold for 60,000 won, generating 2.09 billion won in revenue.
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