Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee? How about going “within” at the Drybar of acupuncture? What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness—all it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel? In the $4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care—even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all?Rina Raphael was getting burnt out as a millennial digital news producer at NBC News. And so she did what anyone would do: she moved to Los Angeles in search of that self-care. Yet she could never shake her journalistic chops, and so she ended up writing about the wellness industry for the NY Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, and other publications. Her skeptical eye and earnest curiosity lead her to write her brand new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And she’s here this week to talk to us this week about her adventures in modern spirituality—its teachings as well as its traps. Show NotesThe Gospel of WellnessWell To Do — Rina Raphael
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We look forward to getting into your Gospel today.
As for us, you can stay up to date with Conspiratuality on all of our social media handles, independently on Twitter, collectively on Instagram.
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And of course, we are at Patreon.
at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help support us and keep us editorially independent, as well as get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Speaking of which, Matthew, what's going on over there on Mondays?
Well, Julian and I are cooking up three final early access episodes on the perennial catastrophe of the satanic panic, including a movie night on the asylum drama Girl Interrupted, which happened to be Teal Swan's favorite film as a teenager.
We're also going to look at a book called Courage to Heal and how it laundered the satanic panic through the language of trusting the body, which is how it actually infiltrated yoga teacher training reading lists.
But we've also started this other series called Listener Stories because a lot of you out there have a lot of stories and our first guest It's a great story.
She's a super lucid storyteller, and since we released that one, we've lined up actually three more stories to come.
of a sexually abusive world-denying cult into the world of strip clubs and then finding her calling as a yoga teacher only to have her mentor get red-pilled into QAnon.
So it's a great story.
She's a super lucid storyteller.
And since we released that one, we've lined up actually three more stories to come.
What are you working on in the bonus department, Derek?
For this Monday, I'm looking at the field of behavioral economics, working in finance full-time.
I feel like some of the best research on understanding human behavior comes from behavioral economics.
Specifically, I recently came across a couple of studies.
One is about the language that you use when speaking to people who are in poverty.
Research article makes the case that if you're using this very flighty, bootstrapping idealism around it, the idea that your mind can just create your economic conditions, it actually really harms people who live in poverty.
So, a little A Course in Miracles is going to come into that one, and I have some others that I'll be looking at, but that's the main one that I'll have for this Monday.
Cool.
The last housekeeping note is that our most old-timey listeners will remember that we used to do this little segment every show called The Ticker.
We paused that for two reasons.
First of all, we got neck-deep into writing our book, which we just filed the revisions of this week, so hooray!
And I, in particular, felt that my mental health was Hanking, trying to keep up with the news cycle.
But as of next week, we are bringing this segment back under the title of This Week in Conspirituality because conspirituality is only accelerating.
Plus, I have strengthened my immune system with Tawina massage and jade eggs that I hold in my armpits as I meditate.
I am resilient and strong.
My intentions are clear.
I can watch endless streams of cursed content and not lose my oneness of self.
All right, so episode 121, The Gospel of Wellness with Rina Raphael.
Are you ready to biohack your brain with buttered coffee?
How about going within at the dry bar of acupuncture?
What if we told you that cannabis will catapult your chakras into higher consciousness?
All it costs is a $5,000 retreat entry fee, not including airfare and hotel?
In the 4.4 trillion wellness industry, is any cost really too expensive to achieve true self-care, even if it never really seems like you arrive anywhere at all?
Rina Raphael is our guest today, and she was getting burnt out as a millennial digital news producer at NBC News, and so she did what anyone would do.
She moved to Los Angeles to search for that self-care.
Yet she couldn't shake the journalism chops, and so she ended up writing about the wellness industry for the New York Times, the LA Times, Fast Company, and other publications.
And her skeptical eye and earnest curiosity led her to write this brand new book called The Gospel of Wellness, Jim's Guru's Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care.
And she's with us this week to talk to us about her adventures in modern wellness and spirituality.
Yeah.
Welcome, Rina.
Thank you for having me.
And I just want to say off the top that Julian is out with laryngitis, so I'm going to be working from his notes today.
He actually had more time with your book than I did because I was buried under ours.
He loved it.
He quoted it at length, and I can see why.
He starts with this sort of key quote from your introduction.
You write, We have become a self-care nation, though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of well-being.
Being healthy once meant going to the doctor regularly.
Now it means you should rarely need to see a doctor.
Wellness, in its current form, is almost an aspirational obsession for some and close to religious dogma for others.
The average American believes adherence to popularized methods can overcome sickness, unhappiness, and even death.
A strict overhaul of diet, movement, and thoughts is hailed as the new messiah.
In wellness, it seems, So, we're going to reference your personal journey, but for now, can you just give us the thumbnail on how large and how extensive this gospel actually is?
How large is this market?
I mean, this market is massive.
And one of the reasons why is because there's no real borders of what this industry is.
I mean, when you talk about wellness, you're talking about over a dozen subsectors.
You're talking about fitness, nutrition, meditation, travel, beauty.
It goes on and on and on.
And what you're seeing is that more and more stuff is getting shoved under this umbrella of self-care and wellness.
It's ever-expanding.
You know, one of the number one questions I get asked is, what is wellness?
Like, it can mean meditation, but it could also mean CBD butt bomb.
Nobody knows anymore because it's become an ambiguous marketing term that can mean anything and it's used to sell you anything now.
Now, I wanted to follow up by saying, you know, you have this really evocative phrase at the end, which has this American rhyme to it, in wellness it seems we trust.
Now, if that's really going to be stamped on all of our bitcoins going forward, what have we lost trust in?
Our institutions, you know, I spoke to so many women over the years who just no longer had any trust in the media, in the medical establishment, nutritionist, I mean, you name it.
And so they put their faith in alternative healers or influencers.
And you know, there's not one reason why this happens, it's multifactorial.
But for some reason, we've convinced a certain group of women that they can buy their way to health.
Or that they can overcome the chaos in their life, whatever is bothering them.
Everything from being burdened by the news, not being happy that there aren't enough health treatments, even just tech dependence.
They've been told that they can buy their way out of this, or that they have to work so hard to achieve a certain state of well.
Even though, how do you define well?
It's so subjective.
Well, you just brought up wellness as ambiguity.
What are some of the more egregious definitions that you came across while you were writing the book?
Right.
Well, first I'd like to say that it's not like all of the wellness industry is bunk and that a lot of the trends that we see have their roots in the 60s.
You know, no one is going to argue that fitness and nutrition and relaxation techniques are helpful, but this market has kind of become overridden With all of sort of the predatory purchases and the goops of the world.
So I've seen everything, again, from CBD-infused toilet paper.
You know, I've gotten pitches talking about how Botox is self-care.
I mean, there's all these things that are being told that will help you mentally, physically, even spiritually.
And no one bats an eyelash anymore.
And in the book, I go into how this happened.
Why women are drawn to it, but also the entire ecosystem that kind of feeds off of this and supports it.
I mean, it's everything from social media influencers to even legacy media.
You know, one thing that we often get is we're criticized because part of what we do as podcasters is criticize the practices, but we all come from the wellness industry and we've recorded full episodes about what we actually take from it.
So in the course of this book, What did you take that was personally valuable to you from your research and from the industry overall?
Well, one thing that I'd like to stress that was really made apparent to me is that you have a lot of people who mock the wellness industry, who mock people who use crystals or some CBD cream, or are really into activated charcoal.
But I think you have to have a lot of empathy with a lot of these women who are searching for solutions and are then hawked a bunch of stuff that doesn't work or has little, if any, scientific evidence.
There are women out there who are suffering.
There are a lot of Americans who don't have a safety net.
They don't feel supported.
They don't have child care policies.
They don't have adequate health insurance.
And here comes this industry saying, we have the solution.
I think people have to understand the mentality that gets people there because there are real reasons why women are looking towards wellness, and they're not to be discounted.
The issue that I have, though, is a lot of this is just masking the symptoms.
We're not getting at the real reasons of why people are unwell and how to make them better.
I have a chapter that's called, Why is the Advice Always Yoga?
You know, women are stressed out because of work, because they don't have help with their children, because they suffer the second shift.
And instead of saying, okay, we need to band together and demand systemic solutions, we tell them to take a bubble bath.
You know, a lot of times I hear a lot of women say, oh, you know, the medical industry doesn't look at the root causes, you know, and then they kind of do the same thing with wellness.
It's becoming just as prescriptive as the pharmaceutical industry, but they don't realize it because of the way it's marketed to them.
Just as prescriptive and just as fundamentalist in some ways, at least with some of the influencers that we track.
Did you find that as well?
Yeah, I mean, gurus don't gather the masses with probability.
They gather them with certainty.
If you go to a doctor and they say, okay, we're going to try these treatments and like there's a 30% chance maybe we can help you with, you know, some chronic condition that's very tricky versus some influencer who says, here, buy this bottle of turmeric juice and you'll be cured.
I mean, what's more alluring?
You describe the empathy that's required in this research and in considering the field in general, and of course you've got personal investment in this because you're writing about moving from New York to LA in 2015, writing about fashion and food for a fast company.
And that ends up being a personal gateway into a series of practices that were new to you and that made promises.
So you write, Wellness promised me food that could deliver more energy and keep me thin.
Supplements dangled better sleep when I lay awake, wondering whether I'd die alone.
Ouch.
A fitness class hinted that I didn't need to make plans to see friends.
They'd just be there.
Ouch.
Meditation advertised a silencing of all the dying journalism industry woes clogging my brain.
Wellness said it could fix me like a toy that was not so much broken as in need of new batteries.
And I wanted to believe it.
So when did the penny drop?
Like, what was the first sort of chink in that set of beliefs for you?
Right.
It happened on two fronts.
So yes, I was personally interested in wellness and I started doing all the stuff like clean eating and trying out these very aggressive fitness regimens, buying a Fitbit, buying kombucha.
And over time, because I was so personally interested in it, my pitches to my editor started to reflect my metamorphosis.
So after a while, I started covering this industry full time.
Two things happened.
One, On a personal level, I started noticing that these trends weren't making me better.
They were making me obsessive.
I became consumed with my Fitbit to the point where, you know, if I didn't work out enough, then I would tell myself, okay, well then, you know, I had to skip a meal.
I worried if I had processed food.
You know, I started at one point, I documented the book, Eating Baby Food, because it was just much easier than doing my own clean meals.
It wasn't making me better as it had promised.
And not to mention, I was spending a fortune.
It was dictating my whole life, where I traveled, where I went out to eat, what I did with my friends on a weekend.
There was that level of it.
Then on a professional standpoint, because I was covering this industry full-time, I had access to all the founders and entrepreneurs and publicists.
And the more I interviewed them, And the more I got to see their marketing materials, I had to admit that there wasn't a lot of scientific evidence there.
And then what started happening is that I would write some sort of story, and I would get called out on social media by people like Timothy Caulfield, who would say, that is completely bunk.
And I had to say, oh my gosh, like what am I doing?
And the reason why I was writing articles that weren't based in science is because I just took certain values and facts at face value.
I just assumed clean beauty was true because it was in every woman's magazine.
It was in Top legacy media.
I never thought to question it, so I never went and spoke to the experts in those fields.
I didn't speak to toxicologists.
It all came kind of crashing down at a certain point, and that's when I sort of, I would say, almost switched sides and became a real skeptic.
You know, you also, I think it gets even more personal when you write about getting married in 2016 and going through dieting and cleansing practices that you saw that were part of the culture of
Women before wedding day festivities and that led to an even deeper reflection on the hollowness of self-help and then also you wind up grieving your father and not finding solace in this wellness landscape.
Yeah, in regards to my father, I talk about when he passed away, I realized how absurd it was that I was just relying on wellness and health to feel better.
And I give the example of gyms that kind of advertise themselves as your tribe, your community, your people.
And this idea that you go through something as dramatic and as personal as a family death, That I was going to rely on my gym was just kind of absurd.
Number one, I'm not working on my body.
But secondly, my instructor wasn't going to come over with a casserole.
There were no rites of passage for something like this.
You know, this was coupled with speaking to people who did rely on their gyms as their community and their tribe and were really left disappointed.
At one point in my career, I remember I profiled a gym that was just for pregnant women in New York City.
And when I spoke to the women who were clients there, they had told me that they had all been kicked out of their own gyms and how painful that was for them.
They spent years going to a certain gym, and then in the third trimester, an instructor would come over and say, you know, we're really worried about teaching you, so you got to leave.
Wow.
And they said, well, that was my community, you know?
There's not a lot of time for women to spend with their friends if they're working, if they have children.
And so a lot of times they kind of look for socialization in their gym.
But also I spoke to other people who said, I lost my job and I couldn't afford the gym fee.
And now I miss all my friends.
Like the idea of going to your soul cycle and saying, hey, I've fallen on hard times.
Can I still come to class?
It's just outrageous.
So this is where I talk about how, we're being advertised certain things that are sort of under delivering in certain ways.
And by the way, I'm not saying that everyone relies on their gym for emotional issues or when there's a family death, but it's an example of what are we putting our faith in here?
I would agree with that in terms of having a gym as a social community.
That was my life because I freelance media for so long.
I I taught at Equinox for 17 years and a lot of people did rely on that.
But that's crazy about the pregnancy.
I remember having a woman who was nine months and two days pregnant in my class once and being like, I'm hoping this class will help get it out of me.
Let's actually discuss another ageism, because you brought up age a moment ago.
In the media industry, it's very personal to me.
I have a similar trajectory from you.
I grew up in Jersey, but I lived in New York City working in media, and then I moved to LA for similar reasons as you.
I didn't want to be in that city anymore.
And now I'm in Portland, escape LA, so I guess that's kind of how it goes.
But in my opinion, you grow wiser and better as a writer and journalist as you age, but that's often not how the media industry treats its professionals.
Interestingly, you write that that's what brought you to wellness, being burnt out, and we can find plenty of examples how ageism or the quest for youthful appearance is a manifest in the wellness industry.
So I'm wondering, going from media to wellness, did you find examples of ageism persisting across that journey?
I definitely saw instances of ageism and I was worried about it.
I think that was one of the reasons I fell for things like clean eating.
And honestly, a lot of the women who I know who are interested in things like detoxes or cleanses, it's no longer in fashion to say you're dieting.
So they'll talk about how they need to detox their body and whatnot.
I know so few women who are actually concerned about their liver.
It's just a way to say that you're dieting, but without using that word because you're not allowed to use it anymore.
It wasn't just the ageism.
It's how this industry changed.
We had to do more and more with less resources.
A bunch of reporters were let go.
Suddenly you had to be a newsletter aficionado, you know, be a social media savant, be a trend spotter, be a writer, editor.
There was just more and more pressures of what you had to do within the newsroom because the industry You go into all of these wellness practices and so much, in my opinion, is geared toward appearance like in media.
This morning I read an article on GQ about how men are getting their femurs lengthened three inches to be taller and it takes a year to recover and they're paying over $100,000 to get the surgery done and in the last two years that industry is blowing up so men can now be three to six inches taller.
Wait, wait, wait.
Derek, can you just slow down?
What is this like?
Are these implants?
Steel implants into your femur?
Exactly.
I don't know if it's steel, but there's something in the femur.
Do they jack them up bit by bit?
Yes, yes.
From the outside?
From the outside.
It's something like a millimeter a day that's controlled with a row control by the doctor.
They can get you up to three inches taller in your femurs, and if you want to get six inches, they can add it to your tibia.
So again, this appearance thing is endemic in wellness.
I'm writing a book on male body dysmorphia right now, so I think a lot about how men and their perceptions of themselves manifest.
But Reena, you write predominantly about women in this book.
Did you see examples of ageism in the wellness industry when you were going for what you thought was some sort of self-healing ritual, but then you realized it's really just about trying to look or feel younger in some capacity?
Yeah, although I just want to add something about that tidbit you just shared, which is that I was just reading some report, and I forget where, about how when it comes to dating apps such as Tinder, the majority of women screen for men over six feet.
So that means basically only 10% of men on those apps are being sort of serviced.
So you have to jack your femurs.
You just have to.
Yeah.
If you're going to pass Tinder.
I wonder if there's a connection there about also just how dating has changed.
I mean, I don't know who are doing these sort of femur treatments, but I wonder if it is connected to the dating scene and how that has impacted them.
That was brought up in the GQ article and specifically about Tinder and I've read research on that as well as something like, I can't explain the numbers exactly, but there's been this whole thing on Twitter recently about polygamy and how multiple women have to share men because of the height thing on Tinder specifically.
And so men who happen to be taller are benefiting while the rest of the pool has to lie about their height and it is now expected on dating apps that you are going to Push up your height at least two inches so that when people read your height, they subtract two inches because they think that's what it really is.
I'm so happy not to be in that market.
Oh my god.
Yeah, that's a lot.
But getting back to your question, yeah, that's wild.
And I can't wait to read your book.
I want to mention that it's not just women who are subject to ageism or beauty standards anymore.
I mean, obviously men have their own stuff to deal with.
But yes, within the wellness industry, a lot of it is connected to appearance, to thinness, to beauty.
Oftentimes, you'll see supplements that, you know, will talk about health, but wink-wink, it's really about wrinkles.
You see this oftentimes with clean eating or detoxes where they're not allowed to use the word thin.
They only use the word diet.
But if you read between the lines, it's all about getting a certain body size.
That's why I turned to wellness when I wanted to lose weight before my wedding.
You know, I didn't make that connection all on my own.
I looked at the imagery of all of these influencers.
I saw them doing before and after The after spreads were, you know, what they look like before, you know, where they seemed a little bit higher weight and that's when they ate processed food.
But you know, the after photo is them beautiful and smiling and thin and that's, you know, after they, you know, took some dumb cleanse.
So it's prevalent within this industry.
I think, you know, in the last few years, people are definitely noticing it and acknowledging it.
But when I first started, I don't think it was as prevalent.
You write, this is really poetic, stress exists for a reason.
It's a mental state informing us that something is wrong and yet we're constantly told this is something we should bury away.
When women furiously pedal away on a peloton to quote silence their mind unquote You begin to ask, why should we silence our mind?
Maybe my mind has legitimate complaints.
And so I just wanted to come back to some of the things that you brought up earlier about how wellness fails, particularly women at times with, you know, unrealistic promises that collide with a lack of psychological and political depth.
What really stands out there for you?
In this case, it's really about the productivity pressures and the sort of subtle oppression of that you always have to be Zen, you always have to be positive, almost as if we're telling women that they can't be angry and they can't be anxious.
But it almost has the opposite effect, almost as if you, you know, would tell someone who's angry like, hey, smile!
I spoke to so many women who were so upset that they, when they would go to their HR and say, I can't deal with this workload.
And then the response they would get was, have you tried our mindfulness program?
Oh yeah.
You know, it's not just silencing them, it's ignoring what's actually bothering them.
And this is why I have a lot of issues with the discourse around self-care.
It's masking the symptoms.
It's also responsabilizing the worker It's saying, if you're stressed, here's an internal turn that you can take that will actually fix your orientation.
It will actually alter you to the demands of the job, which aren't unreasonable, actually.
That's the message.
Right, and it can lead to self-blame, because if you don't become zen enough, if you aren't relaxed, you say, oh, I didn't spend enough time on my self-care, or I didn't do it right.
And it has nothing to do with that.
You mentioned dieting a little bit ago, and you also devote an entire chapter to food, where you tackle one of the most common enemies of wellness, which is sugar.
As well as you discuss the confusing language that we're left to decipher as consumers, such as the fact that organic farms do use pesticides, and the fact that most conventional foods don't leave enough residue to have negative health impacts, and the trade-offs that we get in terms of crop yield is actually worth it.
In fact, you write, Could make people more fearful of consuming conventional produce and may lead them to consume less produce overall.
And you also interviewed toxicologists who found that the dirty dozen is pretty suspect.
So, this discussion always reminds me that, in general, to have access to organic food in America is its own privilege, and that privilege is often blind.
At the Goop conference you attended, you have a number of great lines in here.
As a writer, I definitely really appreciate it.
What I see a lot of is manipulative terminology.
devotees.
So how do you make sense of the confusing food matrix that you investigated?
What I see a lot of is manipulative terminology.
I mean, think of something even like the dirty dozen.
You're calling fruit and vegetables dirty?
How?
How do you think certain people then view those vegetables?
And, you know, I wrote particularly about what happens to low-income shoppers who can't afford organic, but then they're made terrified of this pesticide residue.
And so what ends up happening?
They end up skipping the produce aisle altogether, even though they're the ones who definitely are in need of more fruits and vegetables.
So it's counterproductive.
And all throughout, it's not just food.
I see that the wellness industry is adopting manipulative techniques from the diet, fashion, and beauty industries.
A lot of the publicists who used to pitch me a decade ago fashion now work within the wellness industry.
And that's what people don't realize.
I mean, even a company like Goop.
Who do you think they hire?
You think they hired people with a health background?
They hired a bunch of people who used to work at Vogue for Condé Nast.
So all these pressures and all of this sort of tricky wording, it's by design and it's by people who really know how to capitalize on women's vulnerabilities and fears.
I want to just back up because I haven't actually heard this before and maybe I'll ask you to repeat something.
So you're saying that the publicity infrastructure that has served fashion has migrated over to wellness.
We're talking about people that we wouldn't see writing press releases that are sort of like behind the curtain and in a black box.
Is that what you're saying?
Definitely.
That's incredible.
Yeah, and it's not just them, right?
Well, first of all, it makes sense, right?
Because wellness is a new hot industry.
If people aren't making as much money in fashion, well, then they're just gonna migrate to the new hot sector that women have migrated over to.
But it's not just them, it's the media as well.
And I mean, I was guilty of this too.
A lot of times you see reporters write about health topics or they'll recommend a wellness product, And they don't have zero credentials in science or health.
And you don't necessarily need to have that, right?
But then you need to go and check with the experts.
They don't do either of that because wellness is treated like fashion now.
You'll find it in the style section.
You open up women's magazines and they'll have, you know, some sort of listicle about, like, the 12 hottest supplements to buy.
When you think about it logically, that's kind of ludicrous.
We're talking about health here.
But it's treated like fashion.
When you got called out by Dr. Caulfield, you're in that category yourself, so something has to really pivot for you at that point, because you're moving from one discipline to another, and you're living what you're just describing at the moment, aren't you?
Exactly.
Or in the past, I mean, wow.
And that's why the book is filled with a lot of input from experts and scientists and medical researchers.
Again, you don't have to be a scientist to write about a company or a health practice, but you have to do your homework.
You know, I take an issue like clean beauty where oftentimes reporters aren't even aware of who they should speak to.
They'll speak to dermatologists, but a dermatologist isn't versed in toxicology.
You need to speak to a toxicologist.
So there's even minor mistakes like that that have big impacts.
I want to point out something, Matthew, because you brought that up.
As I mentioned earlier, I was at Equinox for 17 years.
I think I crunched the numbers.
I taught something like almost 9,000 classes there.
So I was pretty embedded in the infrastructure in New York and LA and created programs for them.
So one thing that happened in the process is early on when I first started working with them in 2003 or 2004, they were extremely up on exercise science and every new program had a protocol that they were calling in the proper people.
And somewhere along the line, it seemed to change.
And I remember asking some of the upper management about it.
And similar case, the board went from people being in exercise, physiology, and anatomy to the fashion industry.
And at that point, the entire board of Equinox, they started focusing more on the advertising than the actual Yeah, I remember you describing a moment where there was a sort of a mandatory staff meeting or something like that and you were going to redo your poster shots for the studio that you were working at.
Here in Toronto, one thing that happened was that, you know, my yoga training took place in the early 2000s, you know, from, I don't know, like 2001 through 2008 or something like that.
2001 through 2008 or something like that.
And by the time I was in full gig work swing, the way in which you became most visible in the city as a yoga instructor was by becoming a Lululemon ambassador.
And I didn't do that.
I didn't want to do that.
It kind of turned my stomach for reasons I couldn't really articulate at that point.
But now I'm realizing that actually, The discourse of marketability of yoga is switching very quickly, but also very kind of deceptively into the realm of sort of pure advertising and aesthetics because, you know, there was really a kind of tier of teacher that was able to do that, that was able to go from their kind of clunky early 2000s yoga pictures to being on the store wall.
I mean, all of this is subject to fads, right?
I mean, fitness is a lot like other sectors within the wellness industry.
So I was kind of left behind.
But that's an amazing moment where a whole thing pivots because what different people have the money?
Yeah.
I mean, all of this is subject to fads, right?
I mean, fitness is a lot like other sectors within the wellness industry.
I think if people realize that this is a lot more like fashion, they wouldn't be maybe as susceptible to it or they'd maybe pause before buying all in on the next trend.
When I started really getting into wellness, like let's say in 2014, it was all about bone broth.
Then a year later, it was green juice.
Then a year later, it was coconut water.
Then after that, it was functional elixirs.
Then it was CBD seltzers.
Now it's Kamboot.
It goes on and on and on.
The thing is, is that I think people buy these things, realize it doesn't really work, or they're told by a magazine like, oh, no, this is out now.
We're into the next big thing.
And so they just keep migrating and migrating.
It's a lot like fad diets, right?
Like you kind of can't handle a fad diet for too long.
You get exhausted by it.
It's unsustainable.
And then you just move on to the next one.
You know, we just keep putting our faith in the next best thing.
But if we had wellness commentators that made that explicit and turned the new wellness season into the new fashion season with the same kind of commentary, like, what's on this studio's spring line or what is this health company, you know, what's in their couture this year or this fall or something like that, it would be a lot more obvious.
I agree with you that If we could see the mechanics a little bit more clearly, the shine would come off a little bit.
Maybe, yeah.
I wonder about that because, I mean, it is obvious to me.
I mean, people realize that.
I mean, look at women's magazines.
You know, I remember when activative charcoal was the next big thing two years ago.
Now it's all about chlorophyll and CMOS.
I mean, people instinctively know this, but there is something to be said about the fact that I don't know that it bothers a lot of women because they see it as entertainment now.
Right?
Right.
It's just another fun thing to do.
It's just like when they got into fashion fads.
We're Americans.
We love buying things.
That's how we express ourselves.
You're never going to get rid of that.
So I don't think it's as simple as just pointing out that this is happening.
You know, there's something, there's another sublimation between these two discourses that I want to point to, and I don't know if I'll be able to articulate this well, but there's something about how you were saying, it really sort of hit me when you said you're not allowed to describe, to use the language of dieting, you have to talk about cleansing this organ or that organ or helping your liver out.
But in the same way, in fashion, you're not really allowed—it's obvious that certain body types will get the most attention and, you know, have the most influence and, you know, sort of direct the pathway of fashion going forward, but the selling point is not That's not what's going to be articulated.
The selling point would be confidence, right?
Or something like that.
And so, there's this way in which both industries are quite deceptive in the sense that what's really on offer, what's sold, is sort of more benign and more aspirational than what is actually making everybody anxious.
Within the wellness industry, they're selling several different themes if you look closely.
And yes, there is the aspirational lifestyle aspect.
There's also the element of control.
You know, people are told if they work out a certain way, eat a certain way, buy all this stuff, they're kind of manage all the chaos that's gotten out of control in their lives.
There's also thinness.
There are several things that really speak to the heart of what a lot of American women want.
And again, it's because of very clever marketing.
You spend a lot of ink discussing Food Babe, who is an extremely contentious food blogger with no scientific credentials.
I'm sure a lot of listeners know her.
She's been around for a while.
After you cover a number of her suspect claims, this paragraph jumped out to me.
Her biggest line is that of supplements meant to round out what is supposedly our crappy diet.
She sells turmeric tablets to support healthy joints and weight loss, plant-based pills to support immune health, and ashwagandha that supports brain health, among other supplements and powders.
Supplements on this beat are one of my personal pet peeves, and I often cover it here on social media and on the podcast.
As you noted, it's a $50 billion a year industry.
It went from 4,000 products in 1994 to 50,000 in 2019.
That was a factoid I enjoyed.
And we sure sound like a sick society if we need that much supplementation, yet in almost all cases, these supplements are marketed to either enhance or optimize us, not to do what a supplement is actually designed to do, which is supplement what you're missing in your diet.
And I was glad you cited Daniel Offrey.
I love her work, so it was nice seeing her pop up.
So what did you find out big picture about supplements and marketing and what they do to people's minds during your research for this book?
I think the average American knows what they should be eating, right?
Like, we know we should try to limit too much processed food, we should try to have a bigger intake of fruits and vegetables, right?
But there's no money to be made in telling that to someone, right?
Like, these influencers have to make money.
So moderation, practical advice, that's not going to support them.
But getting someone hooked on a supplement supply, telling them that what you're eating isn't enough, I mean, that's a sale.
It's so funny because oftentimes these influencers will use words like, you know, we'll sell you liberation and we'll give you freedom, you know, and demonize the FDA, but then they're actually encouraging a dependency on them.
You know, there's one person that I interviewed in the book who made the case that a lot of times people got an idea from taking the antibiotic, that you took this magic pill and everything will be better.
And I think people then apply that to supplements.
Instead of doing the hard work of actually doing behavior change, you can just do a quick fix.
You can just buy this easy pill and poof, you'll be much healthier.
Right?
I think that's really appealing to Americans.
Americans really love a quick fix, and it's part of our mindset.
We're kind of dreamers.
We're highly, highly optimistic.
I mean, we're the country that put the man on the moon.
We built Hollywood.
We ventured out West to secure our golden fortunes, and we kind of apply that same mentality to our health.
The problem is that the dark side of optimism is gullibility.
So we'll buy these quick pills because it's a lot easier than doing what is actually required.
Yeah, I actually have not really considered the transient property of magic between the antibiotic and the vaccine and strangely how that becomes unacceptable in certain wellness circles.
It's almost as if The magic we know is not the magic that we want.
Did you come up against that conundrum of why wellness influencers seem to want to reject the magic that we know?
Do you mean medicine?
Yeah.
Partially because they're not doctors, so they can't make any money off that medicine.
Right.
And because, like I said, I think they tapped into something that is uniquely American.
This idea of wanting to believe in something.
You know, so much of the wellness industry is rooted in belief.
All of these products, all of these characters, they offer a glimmer of hope that if you do something, if you buy something, if you act a certain way, you'll reach the state that's free of sickness, aging, whatever it is.
And people want to believe in it.
I think that's it's like a really important aspect of this that it's it's sort of like the prosperity gospel.
And I wonder if it has a timeline and like a natural decline because as you're speaking I'm remembering how my parents talked about the polio vaccine.
And how they had no idea where it came from.
They had no idea how it was produced.
And suddenly, what is it?
1955?
1954?
Something like that?
It just shows up.
And everybody takes it.
And there's kind of like a culture-wide, almost spiritual experience of freedom being liberated from this horrible disease that had like wrecked havoc through the generations, and everybody had a cousin, everybody had an uncle who had suffered from polio, and that was a magical moment.
And I'm wondering if it just gets forgotten, or normalized, or institutionalized, and then as you said eloquently in the beginning, when our institutions become incredible or untrustworthy, then we look for new sources of magic.
Yeah, definitely.
I do think, as you said, certain miracles, medical miracles, have been normalized and we forget about them.
We have cultural moments of medical miracles, and then they just get forgotten.
They get normalized, they get absorbed into institutions that somehow become untrustworthy, and then the maverick has to show up.
The person who is the outsider, the person who doesn't have to worry about the stats, And, you know, all of the data of public health because they have something as miraculous as that polio vaccine, but it's called something different.
And so, maybe the question is about, like, are the things that we rely on in terms of public health, do they suffer from the lack of the sort of charismatic influence and the bombast that wellness influencers are so good at?
There's definitely an element of taking medical and scientific breakthroughs for granted.
But at the same time, I think you also have to acknowledge that there are imperfect systems.
And there are issues within the medical establishment that also have people reject these things.
They're kind of intertwined.
You know, I spoke to so many women who felt as if they were gaslit or ignored or mistreated by medicine.
And that kind of takes the shine off.
They can no longer see it for what it is.
You know, medicine isn't perfect.
And I also just want to add here, I spoke to a lot of doctors who are equally frustrated with the medical system.
They would love to spend an hour with their patients.
They would love to spend more time on cases.
And the system doesn't afford them that.
I think that both doctors and patients are kind of short-changed right now.
For example, in one chronic pain treatment survey of 2,400 women, 90% of those women said they felt that the healthcare system discriminated against them.
Now, I'm not saying this is all women, but here's what I heard from a lot of women, and it's not all of women.
Right.
But they would tell me how they would go to their doctor in pain and complain and talk about what's hurting them, and they would be called hysterical and not be taken seriously.
Then you have another woman who says, I go to the doctor and I try to be stoic and I try to play by the rules, and then they're being told, you don't look like you're in enough pain.
It's almost like a lose-lose scenario.
So when women are aggravated by these issues, you have to understand that they're not as enchanted by the magic anymore.
I want to recommend two books based off of what I just heard.
First is What Doctors Say, What Patients Hear by Daniel Offrey, who specifically talks about what you were just recommending, Rina, about especially from a female perspective of not being heard by doctors.
That's how I was introduced to her work.
But also Matthew Nemesis by Philip Roth.
So for people to really understand polio on an emotional level, His novel about that era in Newark, New Jersey is just fantastic.
I feel like you can read all these vaccine development historical books and learn about the process and how the fact that the polio vaccine took decades to develop.
You know, we're getting mad at the COVID vaccines when we are new territory in terms of expediency here.
So, those two books are highly recommended.
But, Reena, you devote a chapter to another pet peeve, you hit a number of them for me, manifestation.
And like supplements, it's never about basic needs being met, but acquiring more.
And it's a very capitalist spirituality in that sense.
And you sum up the entire charade very well when you write, Many of the more famous manifestation coaches predominantly preach to a group that has their basic needs met, which inevitably sets the tone for the issues addressed.
Although some have scholarship programs, it's hard to imagine these experts delivering their advice to those living in poverty or war-torn countries.
Another great line here, there are no manifestors without borders.
Followers, mostly women, are drawn to the idea that whatever good energy you put out into the world inevitably comes back to you.
When I ask, however, whether the Jews in the Holocaust lacked the right energy to escape Nazi Germany, some seem legitimately stumped.
Huh.
I didn't think about that," one college-age manifester replied.
Now, to be fair, you cite the fact that thinking positively and chasing something is psychologically beneficial.
I would not argue that.
That is very true.
But I feel like that's overlooked in the marketing copy.
So, talk to us a little bit about your experience in the world of manifestation.
Yeah.
I apologize that I trolled some of them in the audience, but this is where it's, as you said, kind of nuanced because of course it's great to tell women that they can accomplish something, that they should have a positive mindset, but sometimes it can be taken to an extreme where you're almost excusing external circumstances that are beyond their control.
And it's almost like a foolproof system.
If you manifested something, it's because, you know, you worked really hard towards it and it's meant to be.
But if you didn't get it, it's because the universe didn't want you to have it.
So, you know, like, you almost can't go wrong.
What I saw was a lot of millennials being drawn to this idea because they were told that if they do the extra credit, in life, they'll get what they want.
It's kind of this sort of Protestant work ethic of like, if I work hard, if I believe in it, then I'll get it.
And that's what's drawing them to it.
So it kind of makes sense.
But you know, in the book, I talk about the dark side of this, in which, you know, some people are trying to manifest healing.
You know, some people are ignoring medicine because they think that if they think right, then they can get rid of their chronic conditions.
And that's where it becomes a very, very harmful idea.
Yeah, it's very predatory.
Speaking of predatory, my last question comes from Mr. Coffee Mold himself, Bulletproof Dave Asprey, who you spent some time with.
You note that he popularized the term biohacking.
Honestly, he's one of the biggest grifters I've ever come across.
His questionable claims while pimping products is infamous.
You write about his Santa Monica lab.
In his defense, the egg and bacon wrap on coconut wrap is delicious, but you call his gym that's right next door another great line in Equinox designed by Christopher Nolan.
I'm going to steal that somewhere, I'll credit you though.
But you frame the whole thing this way.
The wellness industry capitalizes on this bias, similar to how casinos enhance players' perception of control over the risk gambling.
Brands know this bias is psychologically beneficial.
A sense of control, which you spoke about, reduces anxiety, fear, and stress levels, all things that contribute to overall mental health.
When we believe we might be more in control, we're much more likely to buy something.
Now, I have a lot of thoughts on biohacking.
I mentioned earlier men lengthening their femurs to get taller.
Men predominantly have been leading the optimization and biohacking charge.
Of course, I'll be Marcus, Joe Rogan, etc.
But I've seen more and more women come into this space as well.
So, what do you think about that industry and how your feelings evolved over the course of writing the book?
Yeah, so I wrote about the fact that biohacking has kind of become a mainstay of wellness now, and that yes, it did start with men, but seeing how well it was doing with men, those same companies started targeting women.
But you know, the gripes are kind of the same between men and women.
You know, why did biohacking take off in Silicon Valley?
Because it's such a hyper-competitive industry where if you could have even just a 1% advantage over someone, that could mean that you get the job.
If you are not getting enough sleep, if you have no time for anything else except for work, and someone comes in and says, hey, I have this magical coffee that will give you more energy and you don't have to sleep as much, whatever it is, That's really, really alluring.
That's solving a problem for them.
Seeing that they were able to quote-unquote solve the problem for men, they started saying, hey, we can solve the problem for women.
We can solve fertility.
We can solve fatigue because you can't do your job and take care for your kids, whatever it is.
You know, I wanted to just rewind a little bit to the manifestation question because, you know, you apologized to the people that you say you trolled by saying, well, okay, if you take this to the logical conclusion, you know, do people who, you know, get led into Holocaust, do they lack the right energy to escape Nazism?
And you described them being stumped.
And it occurs to me that part of what's going on in order for the marketing of wellness to work is that the focus upon individualism has to be embedded within a kind of historical erasure.
You're not getting fit or becoming more activated or becoming more optimized within a kind of political and historical landscape.
You're doing it on your own.
You are just doing it.
You are on the top of the mountain, and it doesn't really matter where you are or where you come from or what your class background is.
And so I'm wondering if you see that as being part of the basic zeitgeist of wellness as well, is that it assumes that, you know, everybody is just sort of I don't know.
They're not living in time.
They're not living in a place.
They're not living with material limitations or, you know, personal histories.
Yeah, I write a lot about in the book and even just my articles about how we're kind of Putting everything on the individual and we're sort of decontextualizing it from society, from a political or historic standpoint.
We're kind of told to do everything on our own.
We have to clutch our crystals at home.
We have to ride our peloton in our bedroom.
We have to take a bubble bath.
It's all alone.
Then we wonder why we're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic.
When I spoke to researchers who really studied what self-care is, what real wellness is, they would often talk about how important the communal aspect is, social support, and that's been completely ignored by this industry.
Everything is about what you, the individual, can buy or do without anyone else.
Part of the, I mean, you've got goop in your subtitle, and I've got a quote and a question that relates to goop, but it also has to do with the way in which wellness practices almost cover over the fact that evidence-based research in women's health is lagging sorely behind.
But here's the quote.
You write, 30% of Americans now use alternative medicine, with women more accepting of it.
Some turn to alternative treatments as a complementary add-on, though many fully adopt them instead of Western medicine.
Women, or more accurately, dissatisfied women, lead this movement.
Women are stepping outside their doctor's office, searching for something.
And Gwyneth Paltrow's fattened golden goose is happy to lay vaginal jade eggs for them.
Banger line again.
But what precisely is inspiring this mass conversion?
Number one, as I had previously explored, the idea that women are unsatisfied with the medical experience of going to their doctor.
And you know, I spoke to one journalist who told me that Even if doctors just said, hey, we don't know what's going on with you.
We don't have an answer to this.
Because medicine doesn't have an answer to everything.
And of course, that doesn't presume that alternative medicine does have the answers.
But even if they said that, it would make the woman feel like they're not going mad.
Right.
When you have all of these other alternative healers who say that we do have the answers, but they'll take the time to get to know them, that's obviously very enticing.
But also, one of the biggest issues that we have is that we don't have enough research or enough funding for women's health conditions.
We're really lagging behind.
Women's bodies were not included in clinical trials until the 90s.
These are gaps that don't take a couple years.
We're behind decades.
So women are legitimately complaining that, hey, you don't have the answers for me.
Why don't you have the answers for me?
Well, here comes another industry that says that they are prioritizing what's wrong with me.
And in terms of Goop, you know, they'll publish guides and articles on things like Lyme disease, on chronic conditions, that often don't get the same attention from their doctor's office or from mainstream media.
And for women who are suffering, who really don't feel like they have a support system, I mean, that's like mana from heaven.
They need that, and so they feel as if Goop is caring for them, because no one else is.
You know, I haven't realized until this moment that into this gap of research and care, there's an incredibly powerful and expanding word that is not just about
Paltrow coming along and saying, I'm going to address your concerns because what she also does is she brings the idea of intuition to bear on the wellness market.
She tells her consumers You can actually find out the answers that are actually being withheld from you or that are being neglected or ignored.
I haven't really made that connection before.
I think the word and the concept of intuition really falls into this vacuum and catches fire in this absence of care.
Yeah, and the way they talk about intuition and their role in it, they use a lot of this term empowerment.
Right.
We will empower you, right?
And this is where it gets back to control.
When you think about that, when you look at your options and you say, well, I'm being ignored, I'm being gaslit, or the industry isn't prioritizing me, and then someone comes along and says, no, I'm going to empower you.
Right.
And together we will get through this.
Even just the fact of telling a woman, I believe you.
It's not all in your head.
Right.
That's very, very powerful.
And this is where I think that the medical industry can learn a little bit from wellness about what certain women need from them.
Right, and how those needs can be met with something that satisfies what feels like a spiritual impulse because it's filling a real emptiness.
And that's my last question, though.
Like, we know, we understand this conversion process that people go through in order to become full-on But how long do you think it will last?
I mean, you know, the three of us, we kind of bottomed out in terms of disillusionment maybe about eight years before you did.
Like, we went through a Gen X stage of going Hmm, you know, yoga's great, but, you know, have you tried having a regular job?
And wellness folks who are at peak enthusiasm now will inevitably bottom out someday.
And I have like a nine-year-old son, and it's hard to imagine that some of this BS will retain its halo for long enough to ensnare him at some point.
I mean, it might.
It'll have to change.
But, you know, if you look into your crystal ball, Will Generation Z be doing juice cleanses in 10 years or not?
Well, I have some good news.
It already is changing.
I wrote a piece for the LA Times just a few weeks ago that was called, The Goopification of Wellness is on its Way Out and You Can Thank Gen Z. We are seeing that both the consumer and the industry is changing.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
So number one, coming out of the pandemic, in which there was such a focus on health and on misinformation, you're seeing a group of consumers really sort of reflect on where they're getting their information from and what sources they follow.
But also, you know, it's almost as if there's a been there, done that mentality.
At this point, so many women have like, you know, a cabinet filled to the brim with sham tinctures and elixirs and products and supplements that they're almost just kind of like, yeah, I'm not buying the marketing claim cure-alls anymore.
Not only that, not only that, but their kids are going to look into those cabinets and they're going to say, oh, fuck that.
What's going on?
That is just, what are you doing?
It'll be like me looking into my mom's cabinet, right?
Yeah, and you know, I've spoken to analysts who say that CBD is on the decline.
And I say, why?
And they said, because it was overhyped and people tried it.
And I'm not saying it doesn't work for some people, right?
So many of these things are subjective, right?
So it might work for some people, might not for others.
Well, especially, especially when you wipe your ass with it.
I mean, I think that's just key.
You're so relaxing.
You take your time.
Do you have to fold it over?
Anyway, forget it.
Let's go on.
Yeah, so there is a bunch of people who are just, you know, kind of thinking, you know, fool me once, Gwyneth, you know, shame, you know, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
There's a little bit of that.
And also, you know, now we have all these science-based influencers.
You know, we got people like Lab Muffin Beauty Science.
We got, you know, Timothy Caulfield.
We got Food Science Babe.
All these people who are debunking all these claims on social media.
They're having a dent.
And they're cool.
They're cool.
They're so cool!
They're amazing.
They're hilarious.
And then the third is that Gen Z associates all of this hyper-productive, perfectionist-like obsessiveness with sort of the girl-boss millennial culture.
And they are rebelling against it.
You know, you speak to Gen Zers and they're like, if I want to have an Oreo, I can have an Oreo and I'm not going to drop dead.
This is so uncool.
And you know, it's funny.
I spoke to some experts who said it's partially because the elder Gen Zers were raised by practical Gen X parents who are like, this is nonsense.
Yeah.
So there is a course correction coming underway.
That being said, of course certain groups are preyed upon more than others.
So the elderly, moms of kids with special needs, those with chronic conditions.
But we are already seeing that there's a little bit more reflection.
You know, you don't hear about as many ridiculous products coming out as we did, let's say, three, four years ago.
That's awesome.
So the takeaway is Generation X parents are going to just, like, save everything.
Completely.
But also just women are tired.
We're tired of being told what to eat, what to do, what to buy, especially after the pandemic.
Everyone's talking about mental health now.
And I think people are using that prism to also look at their health and wellness rituals.
And they're like, you know what, I'm not going to drive myself crazy doing some eat your body up workout.
And that's why when you even ask people like, hey, what are you doing for fitness these days?
They'll talk about, oh, I work out to feel better, to release some stress, not to get a specific Body type.
So, I'm a little hopeful.
Like, I already feel it coming.
This is great.
This is a really happy episode.
I'm really glad that we did this.
Usually we are so fucking depressed when we finish up.
