Wellness is a crock of kale

Young, pretty and unqualified? That’s all you need to set yourself up as a wellness influencer and start raking in the cash from the desperate and gullible, writes Karen Brooks.

IF ever a word captured our capacity to embrace (or fall for) trends, it would have to be “wellness”, wouldn’t it?

Dominating social media, advertising and being spruiked within an inch of its life by various businesses and individuals, wellness, a concept which once existed in the shadow realms of “alternative lifestyles”, is officially mainstream — so much so former actor Gwyneth Paltrow is now its patron saint.

What exactly is wellness and what does it suggest about us as a society that we’re turning more and more to its practitioners, products and websites?

According to the World Health Organisation the difference between health and wellness is that while health focuses on ensuring one is free from disease or infirmity, the other is about the “active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life”.

While there’s no doubt wellness as a holistic concept is both worthy and desirable and there are many legitimate professionals with proper qualifications marrying their knowledge with sound health and affirming lifestyle choices, there are also predators cashing in on people’s (and it’s mainly women’s) insecurities, fears and longing to feel and look better.

Who can forget Belle Gibson, the wellness blogger who faked cancer and claimed to have been cured through good nutrition and alternative therapies? Duping her many followers and extracting a great deal of money, positive accolades and contracts in the process, she‘s still facing fines for misleading and deceptive conduct.

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Disgraced wellness blogger Belle Gibson pretended to have cancer to sell books. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Gibson isn’t the first or last to try to profit from people’s desire to be well in every sense, particularly when they’re diagnosed with a serious if not terminal illness or, for some reason, doubt medical science. Look at former Playboy model, Jenny McCarthy, the anti-vaxxer who proudly claims, “the university of Google is where I got my degree from”.

It’s enough to make you toss back a rainbow and quinoa shake, isn’t it? Or stick a jade rock where the sun don’t shine and take a coffee enema (yes, they’re recommended on a famous wellness site).

Across the world, there are wellness leaders attributing their vigour, looks, shape and lives to a range of diets, exercise programs, beauty creams, organic foods and drinks, which you too can partake in if only you buy the expensive products/ books/subscribe to their blogs.

At one level, the rise of so-called wellness gurus and the attraction they hold for women is understandable. Too often, when women attend the doctor with a hazy or difficult to diagnose complaint, they’re dismissed or seen as hypochondriacs/hysterical. Unable to find solutions to their problems, embarrassed and frustrated, they seek alternative sources. Turning to others who have experienced similar symptoms or seem to understand their issues and can even offer remedies, the heady combination of faux empathy, serious consideration and explanation even if it is, as one critic called them “f--king batshit”, as well as an entire community sharing the same ethos and preparedness to spend, is irresistible.

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Gwyneth Paltrow has created a multimillion-dollar empire by flogging goods of dubious benefit and unverified promised. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

According to Taffy Brodesser-Akner, writing in the New York Times Magazine, “The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favour among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces.” She adds, “Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed.”

So many of these wellness practitioners are feted by media, advertisers, publishers and even experts keen to jump on the wellness bandwagon. These pretty young, and often inexpert, poster-girls are laughing all the way to the bank.

But, as obstetrician and gynaecologist Jen Gunter, asks, why is it that when Big Pharma makes piles of cash, it’s evil, but when the “Wellness Industrial Complex” does, it’s not?

Gwyneth Paltrow is arguably the most famous of wellness gurus. Her brand, GOOP, has tentacles in many different markets from beauty products, drinks, advice, detoxes, diet, vitamins, blogs, podcasts, expensive summits, and TV production etc. and has an estimated worth of more than $250 million.

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In what has to be the ultimate paradox, the more Paltrow is criticised and a “cultural firestorm” erupts, the more traffic and thus revenue her websites and business generate. As she told a marketing class recently, it doesn’t worry her because she can “monetise those eyeballs”.

Caring and helping folk to aspire to wellness is making some people very rich and credit cards and wallets around the globe — and more importantly, some bodies and minds too — most unwell.

I’m all for wellness and what it represents in terms of a all-inclusive, common sense approach to healthy living — emotionally, psychologically and physically — and those who legitimately help us to achieve that.

But forking out ridiculous sums of money to be told to bathe in unicorn milk while inhaling baby breath and using a salt hairbrush, is nothing but a big pile of costly GOOP.

Karen Brooks is a Courier-Mail columnist.

@KarenBrooksAU