Why The Wellness Industry is So Utterly Broken
The hustle-buy-justify cycle is failing at massive expense, but we don’t have to play
As a strength coach, I play a small part in a wellness industry that’s been growing at an incredible rate for over a decade.
This growth makes sense at first glance. Chronic illnesses like cardiovascular disease and diabetes are on the rise. Mental illness among adolescents and obesity across all categories has increased, and public anxiety around health has spiked along with it. With health care costs rising, sufferers are looking to supplements, diets, and coaches to fill in the gap.
It’s an incredible opportunity to help, but we should take pause before rushing headlong into a system that is already failing miserably. After all, our public health got worse while wellness spend bloated to an incredible 4.5 trillion dollars.
How can we reconcile the utter failure of the industry to address these health concerns with the growing number of people willing to buy?
And what role do we as coaches — and consumers — have in making it worse?
It starts with a real problem
People look to wellness to put off the doctor, get things done, and look good naked, whatever those things mean to them. These drives for health, performance, and appeal tie into deep needs, and they’re not going away.
On the individual level, marketers have manufactured some of that need. Companies sell perfect bodies, high energy, and brilliant creativity as the norm, building tension between everyone’s daily experience and the imagined space where they should be. Even without being saturated by “Inadequacy Advertising,” we feel sick and unfocused. There’s a reason Goop’s new vitamin regimen is called “Why Am I So Effing Tired?”
This individual malaise works its way out across our social networks. Increased rates of chronic disease increase costs. Increased anxiety pushes the desperate towards unscrupulous quacks. Social and economic inequalities increase stress and reduce people’s resiliency, making them more susceptible to illness, furthering those inequalities.
Some high-impact social movements and medical treatments may move the needle some, but change will be slow, and each new solution will bring its own set of problems.
For many, that’s not a good enough answer.
No one who’s suffering right now is going to wait for glacially slow-moving institutions and centuries of injustice to fix themselves. So they search for an immediate answer.
The hustle: the real solutions aren’t salable or scalable.
The broken cycle starts, then with the hustle. Someone identifies one piece of that need and creates a product or service to fix it.
They want to sell, they want to sell big, and the only way to do that is to appeal to human instincts.
Even the best ideas won’t address all the contributing factors or solve the problem for everyone, and there are will almost always be other viable solutions. But as Russell Brunson tells in his book Expert Secrets, gradual improvement doesn’t sell. Transformation sells.
So the hustler lies — or at the very least exaggerates and oversimplifies — defaulting to something like Brunson’s Big Domino Statement:
If I can make people believe that {my new opportunity} is key to {what they desire most} and is only attainable through {my specific vehicle}, then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.
The hustler tells a transformation story that encourages their customers’ dreams, allays their fears, justifies their past failures, and arms them against their enemies.
The more rabid hucksters in the keto-diet community are a perfect example.
They paint a picture of a world that runs by one simple trick: calorie balance is irrelevant if you’re not in a fat-burning state of ketosis, which you can only get through a low-carb diet. It sells the dream of a life as a fat-burning furnace eating deliciously fatty foods. They ease the fear of failure by explaining the customer’s past failures as the inevitable outcome of old, ‘mainstream’ knowledge. And to handle criticism, they invent an enemy: corrupt doctors, researchers, and industry marketers in the pocket of Big Sugar.
People don’t just buy — they buy-in.
If the offer is convincing, the cycle moves to its second stage: people buy.
Most people don’t buy a product because of careful reasoning or good research. People buy based on their feelings, community, or because of effective persuasion. After the purchase, they want to know they made the best choice, so they also buy-in to the transformation story.
But most of those stories are entirely wrong. There’s nothing magical about ketosis or a hormonal “Zone” that will burn away fat. Adding overpriced butter to your coffee isn’t a weight-loss hack, and no back-cracking tool will realign your chakras.
As the product gains steam and sells wider and wider, the false and oversimplified stories that made it appealing come under skeptical assault. The potshots I’ve taken at Goop, The Zone, and Bulletproof Coffee in this article are examples. Additionally, the buyer faces unexpected challenges when the story collides with their reality. They don’t get the transformation they expected. The new diet doesn’t feel natural and effortless.
At this point, some will chalk up the purchase as a mistake and move on.
But others recommit and become True Believers. They wish away their doubts with placebo and confirmation bias and reach out to someone or something that will justify their choice.
The cottage industries of ‘proof’ and support
This demand signal kicks off the third phase: justify.
Communities form around the original ideas for their common defense. If that sounds exaggerated, try offering a skeptical opinion on any Reddit group for the paleo or carnivore diets and watch the piranhas pile on.
Authors and ‘thought leaders’ build careers and impressive speaking fees by serving as “Defender of the Faith.” Gary Taubes has taken on the mantle as crusader-in-chief for the low-carb community with two best-selling books on the topic — Good Calories, Bad Calories and The Case Against Sugar. In these, he takes the role of a lawyer prosecuting sugar for crimes against human health and tells the story that elevated insulin, rather than excess intake, causes fat gain. Time hasn’t favored his claim, and his last book was published four years ago, but a quick Twitter or Reddit search will reveal that many in the low-carb community still invoke his name.
It’s perfectly acceptable to search for the truth and build supportive communities, especially when billions of dollars and countless quality years of life could be saved if you’re right.
The problem arises when the search for truth starts and ends on a broken premise, funded by True Believers who will only continue to pay you if the results come out the way they want.
This dynamic plagues research groups, think tanks, and studies from the start. Even those that aren’t entirely corrupted — like tobacco-funded research in the late 1950s or a recent canceled NIH study on alcohol — are still likely to be affected by subtle bias that can have outsized effects on the final result.
And the cycle starts again.
Research and experiments generate new ideas to study.
Dr. Atkins renewed interest in low-carb diets. The public bought in and saw results, but we were uncertain whether it was safe, so researchers looked for answers. They investigated the difference between ketoacidosis (dangerous) and ketosis (a benign effect of low-carb diets).
Enterprising hustlers saw the connection between ketones and the wave of interest in low-carb diets and began to sell them without evidence of effectiveness. People bought them. Dr. Oz, looking to position himself as a cutting-edge weight loss leader, pitched “Raspberry Ketones Plus” on his popular show. His endorsement justified the story for a whole new group and started the cycle again.
Each turn around the spiral, the products get more elaborate, justifications pile higher, communities dig deeper trenches, and “diet” gets added to “religion, sex, and politics” as something you don’t talk about in polite company.
Stepping out of the spiral
At a global level, I don’t have a solution.
The tactics that serve the hustler are the ones that feed the cycle. Although there are exceptions, market incentives push the most radical and dogmatic claims to the top. Defensible, reasonable solutions don’t create hoards of True Believers willing to follow the leader, buy, and defend the story.
But on the personal level, there’s a lot we can do at each step:
- Apply the Serenity Prayer:
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
This classic appeal should remind us that not all illnesses can be cured, not all pains can be fixed, and whether they come or go is often not in our control. The consumer too eager to see every imperfection as a failure is an easy target.
- Rarely buy ‘stuff’: Incredibly strong, fit, and healthy athletes accomplished their feats long before the advent of modern supplements and lifestyle hacks. Their ‘secret’ to success was the same as it is today: dedicated training over long periods and a splash of talent. Unless the new gadget helps you commit and train harder, and has strong evidence behind it, it’s likely useless.
- Commit to experiments, not stories: Do you want to go Paleo? Great! Curious about CrossFit? Give it a shot! Dedicate yourself to it for a set time — I recommend three months — and assess the results. You don’t need to buy a hundred silly theories for why something works — you only need to know if it will work for you. And the only way to know that is to do it.
- Get off of Twitter: This applies to all social media, but Twitter seems to be the most wretched hive of scum and villainy. We all feel the urge to argue and defend what we know to be true. When you feel that instinct, pause. Look up published research on the topic. Outline an article. Commit to at least ten minutes of work to ensure you understand both your opinion and theirs. If you can’t budget even that little time to check yourself, it’s not worth arguing.
For those of us in the field, I think it’s important to question how much of what we do perpetuates this broken system.
Watching hustlers and hacks get successful selling expensive junk, it’s easy to justify using the same tactics. We’re confident that our methods work, that we have the real solution, so if we paint in broad strokes, cultivate a following of True Believers, and demonize Big Something to spread the word, that’s an acceptable price for change. And so the spiral continues until it grows beyond our control.
At the level of coaches, doctors, and other providers, there’s a better way. We can collaborate with others who are taking the slow route of changing behaviors, systems, and institutions. We can build supportive, positive communities, encourage passion in executing the basics, and innovate new, easier ways to build healthy habits in an unwell world.
And at the consumer level, with a small pause and thoughtfulness, we can slowly reverse a trillion-dollar waste and help make ‘wellness’ a word that works for good.
