THE WELLNESS TRAP

A hard look at health and diet scams.

Harrison, a dietician, journalist, and author of Anti-Diet, mounts a persuasive critique of the multitrillion-dollar wellness industry. Distinguishing between wellness and well-being, the author faults the wellness industry for selling the idea that individual choice—“the things you do,” rather than genetics or social determinants—is central to attaining and maintaining health. “And doing those things,” Harrison notes, “typically requires a fair amount of economic privilege.” Emphasizing the overlap between wellness and diet culture, the author shows how restrictive diets, juice cleanses, and intuitive fasting have incited eating disorders. “For many people,” Harrison asserts, “wellness culture’s views on food are a gateway into a belief system where every product is a potential threat, every lifestyle choice a matter of life and death.” Wellness culture denigrates conventional medicine, portraying doctors, in league with big pharma, as more interested in financial gain than healing. In contrast to medical diagnoses, wellness practitioners have invented ailments such as adrenal fatigue, leaky gut syndrome, and chronic candida, for which they offer a host of useless supplements and expensive treatments. Harrison sees a strong link between the claims of much alternative medicine and conspiracy theorists: Both believe “nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.” Both spread misinformation and disinformation—about the perils of vaccination, for example—through social media. Harrison urges tech companies to stop this insidious spread and calls on Congress to repeal a 1994 law that barred the FDA from testing or approving herbal and dietary supplements. Most empathically, she urges us to think critically about the wellness industry’s claims. “Wellness culture is a trap,” she writes, “keeping us stuck in a narrow view of what it means to be well and exposing us to much that is harmful—weight stigma, scams, conspiracy theories, damaging approaches to mental health, false diagnoses.”

A sobering, well-informed analysis of widespread deceit.