The Toxic World of Wellness
Are we gullible targets for a new snake oil?
In 1893, Clark Stanley stood on a stage at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, sliced open a rattlesnake, and threw it in boiling water. This spectacle gave birth to his famous “Snake Oil Liniment” purportedly full of healing powers.
The snake-oil salesman was born.
In truth, his product had no snake oil — used by Chinese railroad workers with some anti-inflammatory benefits — but only mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper, and turpentine. Years later, when the federal government cracked down on fraud, Stanley paid a $20 fine and went out of business.
Stanley was an outsized figure in the world of patent medicines — highly advertised “cure-alls” sold without a doctor’s prescription. Gifted in theatrics, Stanley excelled in promoting his wares in these so-called medicine shows.
Fast forward to the present era and the vast yet vague world of wellness. Social media is crawling with countless figures selling supplements and devices purported to make you healthier.
At the epicenter of today’s wellness world is Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle empire, Goop. What started as a newsletter in 2008, when Paltrow was starring in Iron Man, is now a $250 million juggernaut.
Goop’s offerings range from beauty and fashion to supplements and sex toys. The site includes advice on the latest wellness trends like bovine colostrum, mouth taping, and dopamine menus. Along with her curated product lists and podcast, Gwyneth hosts in-person summits where you can play in the “wellness playground” (tickets start at $1,200).
If you’re a student of history, you may find yourself feeling a sense of déja vu. As Rina Raphael says in her book, The Gospel of Wellness: “Goop isn’t all that different from the traveling salesmen of the nineteenth century, who turned medical road shows into popular venues of entertainment.”
Is yesterday’s cure-all today’s detox?
Goop isn’t the only player, and I’m not here to attack Gwyneth. (I find her charming and fascinating as a public figure.) The wellness world has exploded with purveyors. According to an industry group, the Global Wellness Institute, the wellness economy is close to $7 trillion in 2024.
Wellness isn’t all bad. It addresses some of the failures of modern medicine. But it’s also a cautionary tale about history and the power of marketing to manipulate consumers.
To put it bluntly, snake oil still sells.
Why Wellness Arrived
In the nineteenth century, there was a lot that medicine couldn’t fix. Patent medicines were popular because they were cheaper and easier to get, and they fulfilled an unmet need. That is still true today. Western medicine still has no answers for many diseases, which leaves people desperate for relief.
Wellness offers an antidote to doctors with poor bedside manners, unconscious biases, and dismissive attitudes. Women and Black people especially have been ignored, and their symptoms downplayed or ignored because they didn’t conform to white and male models of illness.
Our medical model only intervenes when disease has taken root, but many of us long for a healthy or youthful state that doctors can’t provide. Wellness tries to fill that gap and alleviate our fear of decay and death.
This is why wellness markets itself as “biohacking” to men who want to extend their lives, build more muscle, and retain a sexual vigor that fades with age. Many products that Gwyneth markets to women are ones that Alex Jones, the infamous Infowars podcaster, has marketed to men under different names.
Wellness calls out the conflicts of interest that drive drug manufacturers, claiming that “Big Pharma” needs sick people to make money. The industry’s track record shows that some pharmaceutical companies are profit-driven at the expense of patients’ health, such as being guilty of hiding bad data (Vioxx), downplaying side effects (OxyContin), or hiking the prices of critical medicines like insulin.
How Wellness Sells Modern Snake Oil
When wellness calls out the deficits of Western medicine and Big Pharma, it performs a valuable service. But it can go beyond that mission to promote unsubstantiated products and harmful beliefs.
In 2018, Goop settled a lawsuit brought by prosecutors in California for $145,000 for marketing jade vaginal eggs “without possessing competent and reliable scientific evidence.”
While Goop claimed the eggs could “increase vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general,” gynecologists were concerned that the products could cause “bacterial vaginosis and even deadly toxic shock syndrome.”
Other questionable claims include “crystal harmonics for infertility,” “rose flower essence tincture for depression,” and something called “rectal ozone therapy” — ozone gas injected through the rectum — although the FDA says there are no proven benefits and ozone has toxic effects.
Goop is hardly alone, though, in facing scientific scrutiny and fending off litigation.
Dr. Mehmet Oz paid $5.25 million to settle a false advertising class action for describing green coffee extract as a “magic weight-loss cure.” He’s also been excoriated for pushing unsubstantiated cures for cancer and covid. A lab analysis found the Alex Jones supplements they tested were just overpriced vitamins and minerals in non-therapeutic doses.
Unfortunately, the Food & Drug Administration has limited authority to regulate the wellness industry. Dietary supplements are treated as food, not drugs, and are not subject to pre-market approval. The FDA only steps in when a product causes harm based on consumers reporting adverse events. Even then, the FDA has limited resources to recall or ban products.
Customers can waste their money or, far worse, suffer serious harm. Take colloidal silver. It has no proven benefits and some serious side effects such as permanent blue skin and liver damage. Yet Paltrow and Oz endorsed it on The Dr. Oz Show, and Alex Jones promoted it as a covid remedy until state regulators stopped him.
Consumers are also susceptible to shady marketing. Companies cannot claim a product will treat or prevent a disease, but these limits are easily sidestepped in advertising, especially online and in social media.
Dr. Mercola, an osteopathic physician who pivoted to offering wellness advice and selling supplements on his name-brand website, has received 3 FDA warning letters for misleading marketing. In 2016, he settled an FTC complaint for deceptive marketing of tanning beds as beneficial for your skin and refunded $2.6 million to buyers.
How Wellness Has Turned Toxic
The FDA needs greater pre-market authority to protect consumers. But even if the FDA found products were safe, it wouldn’t solve the most significant harm wellness inflicts on consumers: It fundamentally distorts our relationship with our bodies.
Elise Loehen, Goop’s former chief content officer, has railed against the “toxicity” of wellness culture that made her feel the need to “punish” herself. For her, “cleansing” devolved into a battle with her body.
In an ironic twist, fear drives the wellness industry. It’s supposed to make us feel better yet it actively fosters anxiety: If you’re not eating “clean,” you’ll wreak havoc on your body by ingesting something terrible, like gluten. You’re riddled with toxins, and if you’re not vigilant about “cleaning,” you’ll fall prey to some pathogen lurking inside you.
In its toxic form, wellness does the opposite of its name: It installs in you a paranoid surveillance for signs of illness.
Wellness performs this devious feat by continuing to pretend its authority comes from its outsider status. Like a magician performing tricks, it’s about misdirection. It points fingers at the FDA, Big Pharma, and the medical establishment and, at the same time, tells you to ignore that wellness is for the well-to-do.
Big Wellness is here. Big Pharma may make a lot of money off of us, but so do the wellness influencers. They’ve become titans in their own right, with a market share that far outstrips the pharmaceutical industry’s estimated $1.4 trillion market.
Beth McGroarty, Global Wellness Institute’s VP of Research, has hailed Paltrow as “an absolute genius” for her capacity to monetize wellness “relentlessly.” Goop is worth around $250 million, and Gwyneth has a 30% stake in the company. Dr. Mercola admitted in a deposition in 2017 that his net worth was over $100 million. Prior to Infowars’ bankruptcy, Alex Jones reportedly was making tens of millions of dollars a year on supplements.
Wellness has become the enemy it sought to displace, and it suffers from the same problem for which it accuses Big Pharma: It needs you to keep buying, so you always need another issue to heal or a new level of optimum health to reach.
To escape this cognitive dissonance, we have to reject the idea that our bodies are sick vessels.
For years I was under the wellness spell. I’ve since stopped scrutinizing every non-organic food while blindly ingesting pills of dubious value. After wasting thousands of dollars on unhelpful products, I’ve learned that the right diet, regular exercise, and plenty of rest are what my body needs. I stick with the wellness practices that have truly benefited me, like meditation and acupuncture.
We need to interrogate the claims and credentials of wellness influencers. Apple cider vinegar isn’t a “cure-all.” Not everything that’s “natural” is good for us. Celebrity endorsements are not proxies for good science. And it’s not enough when companies rely on pre-print studies instead of peer-reviewed ones to back their claims.
What’s Next for Goop?
In 2019, in response to so much controversy, Goop launched a science and regulatory portal to substantiate its products. Yet the groundswell of criticism against the company — and the wellness world in general — has not subsided.
Perhaps sensing a sea change in the market, Gwyneth has started to pivot.
A few months ago, Goop reportedly slashed its workforce to shift its focus from wellness and supplements to skin care, fashion, and food delivery. If you’re a cynic, you might see this as a return to what wellness culture has always been: exquisitely repackaged diet and beauty standards.
In my view, this is what the brand has done masterfully all along.
In describing her covid recovery protocol, for example, Gwyneth mixes health supplements —butyrate and resveratrol — with lifestyle and beauty tips, like a vitamin C serum that helps Gwyneth “glow” (“People have asked me what I’m using, and this is over Zoom!”) or a non-alcohol cocktail that pairs beautifully with a $112 diamond-patterned old fashion glass.
She moves seamlessly from post-covid inflammation to casual entertaining. It’s a transition so smooth that to call it a bait-and-switch wouldn’t do it justice. Come for some healing, leave with a handbag.
Almost as smooth is Gwyneth’s transition back to the silver screen. After years at Goop’s helm, she’s reportedly about to star in a new movie. Rumors abound that she’ll hand the reins to someone else.
But you might say she never left acting at all.
Rina Raphael, who attended a Goop summit, claims that some of the brand’s devotees are in on the joke. Maybe selling candles scented like Gwyneth’s vagina and anti-anxiety healing stickers is akin to performance art. Arguably, more media outrage and scientific scorn mean more sales.
Is it all entertainment, like the nineteenth-century medicine shows?
Maybe the entire journey from wellness to beauty was always a performance — designed to shock, entertain, and, dare I say, leave you gooped — the kind of razzle-dazzle that even Clark Stanley, the original snake-oil salesman, would applaud.
