By Leslie Price
Rina Raphael is a writer who covers technology, health, and wellness. Her new book, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care, is available for pre-order now..
In the beginning of the book, you detail all these experiences that, embarrassingly, sound amazing to me, like the cannabis retreat, the cool acupuncture studio, and the yoga party. It sounds really fun.
It was fun, but I don’t know if it made me healthier.
But you also talk about how you used to subscribe to some wellness practices until you started questioning the entire thing. What did you do that maybe you wouldn’t now?
I was a workout maniac. I had to work out every single day, either at a boutique fitness gym, or I had to run four to five miles. If I didn’t do it, I would punish myself. I tracked everything with fitness trackers. So if, for example, I had to be at work earlier and I couldn’t do my full mileage, then I’d be like, okay, I can’t eat a full lunch. Or I can’t go out to dinner tonight with my friends. I have to cancel and go on another run.
I’m not saying this is everyone’s experience, but the wellness industry made me fetishize health. I only used to buy organic. I used to try to do “clean eating,” which gave me disordered eating. I was also spending an enormous amount of money experimenting. Buying natural wine, buying supplements, all the things that I believed could make me healthier. And I don’t necessarily know that they made me healthier. I just wasted a lot of money and it took a lot of time.
It was very exciting in the beginning. But all of the things that were promised to me – community health, energy – it felt like it was actually zapping that for me. I talk a lot in the book about how gyms promise community and family. But if you’re going through a breakup or your parent dies, a gym instructor isn’t going to show up at your door with a casserole. It’s not a real community. It’s based upon your ability to pay the gym fee. So good luck if you lose your job, or if you get injured.
There’s a gym I profiled that didn’t make it into the book that’s just for pregnant women. And when I went there and interviewed the women, they told me that they’d all been kicked out of their other gyms. At a certain point, their instructors had said, okay, I’m very nervous having you in this class. I don’t want you to get hurt.
And perhaps I can understand that, but this idea that we’re teaching people that find their community at their gym…I just think we’re steering people in the wrong direction. It can leave people really lonely.
I’m not saying that everyone goes to the gym to find a community, but what I do hear from a lot of women across the country of a certain income class is that they are lonely. They want to see people, but it’s so difficult to get your friends together. I mean, if you have tried to get your friends together, even for a dinner, it’s like herding cats. So the idea of showing up every week [to the gym to] see people and socialize is obviously very appealing to women who work hard and don’t have much time to socialize.
What do you think was the turning point for you and your skepticism towards wellness? In the book, you discuss how you felt after your father died and where you actually found community, but do you feel like that was the moment or did it come before? Was it one thing, or a lot of things?
It was a bunch of little incidents, but part of it was that I was a wellness industry reporter. I would write about these companies from a business-magazine perspective. It wasn’t that we ignored the science, it was that the science was secondary. We cared about market growth. We cared about creative campaigns and growth agendas.
An interesting thing started happening. I would get called out on social media by scientists and doctors saying, you are completely wrong. Did you talk to an expert before you wrote this story? I’d say, well, it’s the same thing I see in the New York Times or the Washington Post or all my women’s magazines. And they said, yeah, guess what? They’re all fueling misinformation. You are all wrong. And by the way, those reporters from those top magazines and publications, they also didn’t speak to the experts. I started realizing that wellness was being treated a lot like fashion. It was a new trend and no one was investigating it. I started questioning: What am I doing? Am I feeding more misinformation? What’s the real story? The way wellness has been treated by the media is the way that we treated tech about 10 to 15 years ago, which is that we kind of assumed the best. We were optimistic. We were like, Facebook, that sounds great. It’s going to unite the world. Then you start realizing there are huge problems. I think that’s what we’re seeing now with wellness.
I decided I was going to take a step back, and was no longer going to profile these companies and give them glowing press coverage.
I covered this industry for the last seven years. I don’t think someone could have written this book in a year and a half if they weren’t a reporter with that knowledge and research. I’d love to take credit and be like, yeah, I’m a master researcher. I never sleep. But the truth is, I got the book deal because I covered this industry and then did a 180 and was like, fuck this industry, it’s getting out of hand.
What do you think is the most pervasive wellness belief out there, and what do you think will be the most difficult for people who have internalized these wellness concepts to read in the book?
It really varies – every group [of people] has different concerns – but it’s astonishing to me how much clean beauty is taken at face value. I took it at face value. It’s so intrinsic now for a woman to be afraid of “chemicals.” And I’m putting that in air quotes because everything is made of a chemical.
Clean beauty has taught us to be terrified of synthetic chemicals, and that natural is always better. I speak to a lot of people in Malibu who are anti-vaxxers and their ideas started with clean beauty. They were told that chemicals are bad, formaldehyde is bad. That fear migrates. Then they’re afraid of anything put in their food or their medications, then vaccines. It gets more and more extreme. When you give people faulty scientific ideas, you don’t know where it’s going to end up. There are anti-vaxxers who’ll tell me, we can’t take the flu vaccine because it has formaldehyde. You know what else has formaldehyde? An apple. In fact, it has even more formaldehyde, but you don’t see people terrified of eating an apple.
The must-read newsletter for adult women. Join us!
Your Email
Subscribe
I was going to ask you about the pipeline from wellness to extremism, because we’re seeing the effects of that now.
I had a whole chapter on vaccines and anti-vaxxers that got cut because I think there’s fatigue around that. One of the things that I try to really hit home in the book is how gendered this is. If you open any women’s magazine or go to a digital site and type in the word “toxic” in, you’ll get thousands of articles about what’s “toxic” and how to buy your way out of it. Type “toxic” in to a men’s site, and you’ll get a couple pieces about your relationship with your boss.
Men are not targeted the way women are targeted. That’s because this industry knows that women are taking care of their families more. They really feed off of women’s insecurities and vulnerabilities [similar to how] the beauty industry has. You don’t see men terrified about not buying organic. I think if women understood how much these companies, especially a lot of the organic companies, are going after moms who are going to be scared, they would be sickened. I’ve spoken to scientists within organic companies who would try to explain to the marketing team: This is not the approach we want to do. No one is going to be unsafe if they eat conventional foods. They’re like, no, but moms will respond to it.
There’s so much real wellness, which is just proper nutrition, fitness, and community support – real things that don’t require a new accessory or spending a ton of money. And then, there are things that are promising, but we really have to wait. And Americans don’t ever want to wait for anything. We love to shop, we express ourselves through consumerism. I say we’re a dreamer society, because we love the fantasy. We believe we can do anything. We’ve taken that striving, hard-work mentality and applied it to health. In some ways, that can help us. But in other ways, it can actually hurt us.
There are a lot of lines in the book that are incredibly quotable, but one of them I saved was: “We have become a self-care nation, though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of well-being.” By most metrics, as a wealthy nation, we are not doing very well with our health. But we spend so much money.
Do you feel like the book is a condemnation of the wellness industry? Or do you think it’s a condemnation of what our country has done to us, that we’re pursuing wellness?
It’s both. Of course wellness is a big trend globally, but what’s going on with Americans, and specifically American women, is something that is not replicated in certain European countries where they have a more communal mentality, meaning it’s not all on the individual to make themselves healthy, or in places where they have subsidized or socialized healthcare. It’s not happening in places where they have six weeks of mandated vacation from the government. There are unhealthy trends in this country that make women seek solutions. I can’t list them all, but even something like not having good childcare policies, or not having maternity leave.
Women are exhausted, so if they see something that promises them relaxation, of course they’re going to be more susceptible to it. You don’t see that in other countries that have more communal support. Here, we’re told we have to eat healthy, but we’re not really in an environment that makes it easy. And even if we did have more access to fruits and vegetables, who has the time to cook them?
It’s not so simple. There are a lot of people who are just like, we just need to build more gyms in lower-income communities and we need to give them more vegetables. Who has the time if they’re working two jobs? There is something to be said about the fact that we’re not necessarily always set up for health. I mentioned the fact that we’re kind of dreamers, we love to believe in the fantastical, the aspirational, the unbelievable, and that sometimes makes us more susceptible to easy fixes in a bottle.
We’re also really, really hard workers. It also can be applied to how we look at health. People [feel like] they have to work so hard for their health. This is what I mean by fetishizing it. This is where you see people whose [wellness practice] comes to define them. I don’t know if you’ve met these people before, but they need to always talk about what they’re eating or what diet they’re on or what boutique gym they’re going to. It gives them purpose and identity and meaning.
It’s also that this industry has taken advantage of the fact that we have now equated health with a purchase. That’s really, really problematic.
A lot of “solutions” seem simple. People need to get more sleep. People need to be able to live in a place that’s walkable. People need access to fresh food. People need to have the time to prepare fresh food. But the way our society is structured, a lot of people just do not have access to those basic needs. One of my personal theories is that people buy things because buying a thing is easier than trying to get to the root problem.
We’re almost sedating women instead of telling women, your anger is valid. Why don’t you take that and channel it and do something about it? I experienced my workplace unionizing, and women came together and said, two weeks of maternity leave is not going to work. It’s not you need to go home and put on a face mask. It’s ridiculous and infantilizing.
Do you think that the pandemic marked a turning point in the way people view their relationship with wellness practices? Perhaps it reasserted the value of vaccines? But it also might have caused people to double down on a fear of medicine.
In terms of what I call the wellness industrial complex, that has changed. You are right. Different groups have responded differently. The pandemic really did push people to reevaluate their personal health and their health information. A lot of consumers took a step back from the things they used to depend on. The boutique gyms, the fancy vacations, and the spa kind of went out the window during the pandemic. They had to come up with replacements that were a lot simpler, like going on a hike, going for a walk, sitting down with a cup of tea.
The second part is trial and error. Fool me twice, shame on me, you know, that sort of thing where people bought these things and then you would ask, hey, how’s that CBD cream turning out? And they’re like, I don’t think it does anything. You have a more critical consumer, who has learned that they can’t take marketing copy at face value. And then, Gen Z is having a very big effect on this industry because a lot of Gen Zs, not all of them, I would say the elder Gen Zs being raised by practical Gen X parents, aren’t as impressed by a celebrity spokesperson. They’re invested in science and medicine. They are also rebelling against this very perfectionist productivity mandate that the wellness industry has stressed. You have to be perfect looking and have your pastel Lululemon outfit. They hate that. They’re like, why are you trying so hard?
But at the same time, the industry has started targeting more vulnerable populations. They’re going after the elderly, they’re going after parents of sick children. And so, while some people have become more aware and invested in their science literacy, there are others who have been targeted more by health influencers or the industry.
I think also people are fatigued.
I do see a course correction. But one thing that I still don’t see is actual communal support. This industry has really focused on what you, the individual, can do to make yourself feel better. It doesn’t include the fact that we need a supportive community, not just to live well, but for mental health, even spirituality
It’s leading to this very huge loneliness epidemic. All you have to do is go on Reddit or any parenting messaging board to see how alone people are. That is not easily remedied by a wellness app. We need government help, we need different policies, and we need different solutions. It’s not something that the private sector can tackle [on its own]. We need the public sector to get involved. But one of the biggest pieces of wellness, to me, is communal support and outreach. Being with people, feeling love, feeling supported. And we’re just ignoring it.
The must-read newsletter for adult women. Join us!
Your Email
Subscribe