What wellness costs us

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Speaker 9 We all want to live long, healthy lives without pain. That is like the single most important thing.

Speaker 10 The problem is that often what we see in the wellness world is that the cart is put before the horse.

Speaker 11 So if I'm coming in here on a day-to-day basis, I'm definitely hitting the cold plunge and I'm definitely hitting the sauna.

Speaker 12 A couple weeks back, producer Hadi Mawagdi got an opportunity to improve his mood, enhance his muscle recovery, and to have a great night's rest.

Speaker 10 We gotta get you the cold plunge with me, bro. Come on.

Speaker 15 I should have brought shorts.

Speaker 10 You know what they have here?

Speaker 15 Shorts for you.

Speaker 12 All he had to do was decide to take the plunge.

Speaker 10 We're literally taking a dip in wellness. Oh man.
All right, I'm ready. I'm ready.
I didn't know if I'm ready.

Speaker 10 Oh my goodness, this is freezing.

Speaker 12 I'm John Glenn Hill, and this is Explain It to Me from Fox.

Speaker 12 We're the show that takes on the big questions. Questions like, what is wellness?

Speaker 10 Wellness.

Speaker 12 It's a word influencers use as a hashtag in videos of them pouring collagen into their smoothies.

Speaker 17 Collagen is so good to help support healthy skin, hair, nails, joint support. It's just everything good, and it's so easy to throw into smoothies.

Speaker 12 That celeb chefs use to describe the theme of their newest book.

Speaker 17 This is the book that I wish I had when I was confused about what to eat and how to eat.

Speaker 12 And it's an obsession of the Secretary for Health and Human Services.

Speaker 8 We're spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care in our country, and we have the worst health outcomes.

Speaker 12 But what does it actually mean?

Speaker 21 Hi, this is Hannah calling from the Hudson Valley of New York. I'm a 35-year-old psychotherapist, so I think of wellness a lot.

Speaker 21 I also think wellness is so much more than just going to a yoga class and drinking electrolytes. I think it's a lot deeper.

Speaker 21 It's spiritual, and it's something that we all need to be thinking about on the regular.

Speaker 22 Here's how journalist Amy Laraka describes wellness. She's the author of How to Be Well, Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time.

Speaker 16 I've seen that word attached to absolutely everything.

Speaker 16 I've seen it attached to massages and I've also seen it attached to very serious things to do with important health choices like vaccines.

Speaker 16 And then I've seen it attached to really weird stuff like checking accounts, condos.

Speaker 22 After her research, Amy snailed down her own personal definition of it.

Speaker 16 My working definition is wellness is a luxury good and it's the packaging of our health and our beauty into a consumable for-sale product.

Speaker 22 We're going to hear more from Amy a little later in the show, but first, Hadi's going to take us to a place where wellness is top of mind, a health and longevity club called Kuya Wellness in Austin, Texas.

Speaker 22 Okay, Hadi, I assume that you are out of the tub and all warmed up. Are you ready to go?

Speaker 15 Absolutely. Let's do it, JQ.

Speaker 15 I had heard of these places called social wellness clubs. Folks pay lots and lots of money to be part of these clubs in New York and LA.
I've saw memberships for as much as $1,000 a month.

Speaker 15 And these places, they don't have gyms or massage tables. There aren't beauty offerings.
There's no med spa or body sculpting happening.

Speaker 15 And instead, this is a place where people rest, a place where people who are well get well.

Speaker 15 Here's Megan Butler. She's the president of Kuya.

Speaker 9 Kuya is very, it's a clinic, right? So we do wellness modalities, we have deeper medical experiences, but it doesn't feel like a clinic.

Speaker 9 And it's built that way on purpose, so you're invited to want to stay.

Speaker 15 You know, Megan told me about an infrared light sauna.

Speaker 9 You sit in the sauna about 15 minutes in a safe space to detox, right? To vasodilate.

Speaker 15 About ice baths, about sensory deprivation tanks.

Speaker 9 So there's no light, there's no sound, there's no weight. This is really the only time that you're completely weightless.

Speaker 9 You're laying down, but you're buoyant in about 2,000 pounds of sodium, magnesium, water.

Speaker 15 But also about injectables. These things are administered by health professionals and you can get things things like an IV vitamin therapy treatment.

Speaker 26 Today you're getting one of our most popular signature infusions. The Total Vitality Drip.

Speaker 25 It has an amino blend, a mineral blend, vitamin C, and also a bait complex in it.

Speaker 26 It's great for recovery.

Speaker 15 But these year-round memberships, they include free KUIA events like storytelling workshops, aromatherapy workshops, and breathwork classes inside of a sauna.

Speaker 10 Find my count count. In

Speaker 10 two,

Speaker 10 three,

Speaker 10 four,

Speaker 10 out,

Speaker 10 two,

Speaker 10 three.

Speaker 22 Oh my gosh. So who is the clientele at this place?

Speaker 15 Well, the easiest way for me to say this, JQ, is that these are really pretty young people.

Speaker 15 Everyone there

Speaker 15 was in great shape and they're also making a lot of money. But the thing that really caught my eye when talking to people was that they were all looking for a way to relax.

Speaker 15 These are people who have high-powered jobs, they have busy schedules, and wellness is something that they find as a key or important factor in their life. So they're pursuing it.

Speaker 15 I'll tell you about a guy I met named Chase Salazar. He was like all smiles to talk to me, especially about wellness.
This man knew about

Speaker 15 peer-reviewed studies. Google Scholar, baby.
Google Scholar. He was telling me about his IV treatments.

Speaker 15 Chase was the kind of person who doesn't drink, limits the meat he eats, wakes up every morning at 4 a.m. and tries to get in bed before 8.30 p.m.
so that he could pursue wellness.

Speaker 11 Chase told me a story about being clinically obese when I was 15 and a doctor pulling me to the side and telling me, hey, do you want to live this lifestyle for your entire life?

Speaker 15 On top of that, unfortunately his mother dealt with cancer and he saw firsthand what it was like for her to deal with these health issues and it felt as though to chase that if she had been healthier to begin with maybe she could have fought that off a little bit longer trauma is a good reason for change sometimes and more importantly like You know, some people are like, the only way I learn is if I touch the hot stove type people.

Speaker 22 So that's Chase's story. What sort sort of treatments did you partake in?

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, when we started the episode here, you heard me gasping for air inside of a cold plunge with Chase actually. And I also did a sauna class, which included a cold plunge again.

Speaker 15 I will tell you, I don't think I've ever sweated so much doing absolutely nothing. I was just sitting there and just pouring out sweat.

Speaker 15 But I have to admit, by the end of it, I felt this high. And so did so many of the other people who were in there with me.

Speaker 22 Yeah. Okay.
I admit whenever I do a cold plunge or a sound bath or, you know, a new facial treatment, I think, this is gonna, this is gonna fix me. Did any of this work for you? Did it fix you?

Speaker 15 Did it fix me? Is that the question?

Speaker 15 I can tell you, JQ, that in the days before I visited Kuya, I was actually dealing with like one of those 48-hour flus. And then I got to Kuya.
I did my cold plunge and my heat, my sauna class.

Speaker 15 And at the end, I felt really energized. I also felt super, super thirsty.

Speaker 15 So, so

Speaker 15 I also got an IV treatment. And I definitely felt hydrated by the end of that IV.
Then the treatments continued. I decided to jump into a sensory deprivation tub.
Now, did I get that feeling of,

Speaker 15 I don't know, separation from the world? I didn't.

Speaker 15 I quickly realized, JQ, that, like, I'm scared of the dark.

Speaker 22 Oh, yeah, I would have a full-on panic attack in a sensory deprivation situation. No, thank you.

Speaker 10 All right.

Speaker 22 I guess like that makes me wonder.

Speaker 22 How do you think of wellness now that you've done all this? Has the way you've thought about it changed?

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 15 I guess it has

Speaker 15 because, you know, it's hard to not be skeptical of paying so much for a club. I don't know that these are practices I'll take into my everyday world,

Speaker 10 but

Speaker 15 I can see myself buying a day pass

Speaker 15 and going back and saunaing and cold plunging and I don't know, laying around on that soundbed after a very long work week.

Speaker 15 You know, wellness is still this phrase that we're trying to really dissect, but I did feel pretty great at the end of my trip.

Speaker 22 All right.

Speaker 13 Hadi Mawagdi, thanks for going on this journey for us.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah, it was a pleasure.

Speaker 22 Okay, so wellness is this trillion-dollar industry, but how did we get here in the first place?

Speaker 13 That's next.

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Speaker 8 Dying to live well.

Speaker 10 We're back.

Speaker 20 It's explain it to me. Okay, so as a whole, we're doing a lot of things in the name of wellness these days.

Speaker 22 But how did we get here?

Speaker 20 I spoke with Jonathan Stia to find out. By day, he's a clinical psychologist, but his side hustle is combating pseudoscience and misinformation.

Speaker 20 He wrote a book called Mind the Science that's all about it, and he says he gets why all this stuff appeals to people.

Speaker 8 I would say that obviously we can't blame anyone from seeking alternatives.

Speaker 8 The problem is that one of the ways in which wellness wellness promoters market their materials is by promoting quote-unquote science or research to support their claims.

Speaker 8 And when you do a deeper dive into that research, what people will often find is that you can find a study, say, to promote or to support any kind of treatment or claim.

Speaker 8 And if you dig even deeper than that, there's a whole, it opens up a can of worms because this is what in part we mean by pseudoscience pseudoscience is a is in short a very hijacked or fake attempt at science

Speaker 8 I think we can trace the modern wellness industry back to about the the late 19th century that's when two

Speaker 8 prominent figures really played a role in shaping kind of the modern wellness industry we see today.

Speaker 8 One of those players was a guy named John Harvey Kellogg.

Speaker 8 And what he and his brother did, his brother was named Will Keith, is they built something called the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was a really huge, famous medical center. It was a spa.

Speaker 8 It was a grand hotel. And it really attracted a lot of wealthy, high influential people from its time all over the world to this place.

Speaker 8 And what John ended up doing in that

Speaker 8 center was promoting a lot of his ideas ideas about health and about how to treat diseases.

Speaker 8 They tended to really blend a lot of what he called biologic living, which is really just a kind of virtuous way of approaching our health and kind of blending that with some of religious kind of Christian beliefs.

Speaker 25 So when I hear the name Kellogg, I admit that I think of my breakfast cereal. Was John Kellogg a scientist or an inventor of some kind? Is that where this came from?

Speaker 8 Kind of, yes. So his brother, Will Keith, actually started the cereal company.
John was a physician, and he was a best-selling author. He had a magazine.
He did lectures.

Speaker 8 This magazine was followed by millions of people.

Speaker 25 So was he the inventor of wellness as we know it today?

Speaker 8 Not quite. When he was promoting his ideas, it was before the term wellness as we use it today was formed.

Speaker 8 He was promoting a precursor to wellness called biologic living, which essentially promoted the idea that all diseases and all health conditions can be treated with basically a trifecta recipe of good sleep, good exercise, and eating a specific diet, which was sort of, in his view,

Speaker 8 a bunch of vegetables and fruits, et cetera, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. I mean, diet, exercise, and sleep.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I was about to say, like, Exercise, diet, sleep, eating fruits and veggies, that feels like something I hear from my doctor.

Speaker 8 Totally. And that's that's a part of evidence-based care and that's really foundational to even what we do in the hospital.

Speaker 8 The problem is that it's what we see even in the modern wellness industry is when people sell these things as a cure-all, as a panacea for all health conditions.

Speaker 8 So John had a lot of ideas that if we weren't following a trifecta recipe of sleep, eating, and eating well and exercise, and we were doing other things like drinking alcohol or eating meat or sugar

Speaker 8 or even if people were overweight, he considered that to be non-virtuous and essentially really bad behaviors, and he would view it in a very punitive way.

Speaker 8 Even masturbation was considered self-abuse by John Kellogg, and he thought that it would lead to things like mental illness and cancer and moral destitution.

Speaker 8 And he would advocate treating people who would masturbate. In boys, he would recommend circumcision or bandaging their hands together.

Speaker 8 And in girls, he would recommend pure carbolic acid to the clitoris.

Speaker 20 Oh my God.

Speaker 8 And even its removal.

Speaker 22 Oh, my God.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 25 Was John Kellogg the only person like this of his time, or was this more widespread?

Speaker 8 It was more widespread. And I would say, but he was one of the most prominent ones.

Speaker 8 And then, in parallel with his ideas, there was another huge player that played a role in the birth of the modern wellness industry.

Speaker 8 And he was a guy named Bernard McFadden, who some consider the 20th century's first celebrity health influencer. This guy was equally eccentric to John.

Speaker 8 I mean, Bernard McFadden would strut around New York barefoot so that his souls could absorb the Earth's energy.

Speaker 8 And, you know, he would sleep on the floor so that his energy would align with the Earth's natural magnetic rhythm. And he was very hostile to vaccines.

Speaker 20 Oh, okay.

Speaker 25 So you're telling me that an anti-vax wellness influencer is not a new phenomenon.

Speaker 8 Very old,

Speaker 8 over a century old. And that's because a lot of these ideas tend to coalesce.

Speaker 8 And similar to John Kellogg, you know, Bernard McFadden would also sell this kind of idea of health as a moral virtue, where it's all about virtuous eating, it's all about virtuous exercise.

Speaker 8 And the problem with these ideas is that health is not a moral virtue.

Speaker 8 What these ideas do is they promote an idea about health that ignores this science, and then they downplay the role of other important things that we know play a role in health, like genetics social factors and just plain old bad luck it's very interesting that all of this happened in the 19th century because i also think of that time as a lot of like i don't know advancements in science and in health totally

Speaker 8 around the same time that these wellness ideas were kind of percolating, there was also something called the Flexmir Report of 1910. And that really ushered in the dawn of modern medicine.

Speaker 8 And what that report did was it essentially wanted medicine and medical schools to get their act together and make them much more scientific.

Speaker 8 And so it would encourage schools to either get rid of alternative medicine from their curriculum

Speaker 8 or just shut these schools down altogether. At the same time, it really disadvantaged folks who were economically underprivileged.

Speaker 8 And what that did is it opened the arms, so to speak, for, again, alternative medicine or wellness to kind of step in and to take the role of the art of listening and humanizing and comfort.

Speaker 25 What about the term wellness specifically, though? When did that officially become a thing?

Speaker 8 Some consider the father of the modern wellness industry to be Halbert Dunn.

Speaker 8 He was a biostatistician and he first used the term wellness as we use it today, publishing an article in the Canadian Journal of Public Health in 1959.

Speaker 8 And what Dunn did is he distinguished good health, which he defined as freedom from illness, from what he dubbed high-level wellness, which is a kind of optimal functioning in one's environment.

Speaker 8 And I think his definition was quite thoughtful, but it really didn't stick.

Speaker 25 I was about to say that's an actually pretty good way to think about wellness.

Speaker 8 Totally. It's sort of, yeah, one's freedom from living and then you have an optimal functioning in one's environment.
The problem is that from there, the term wellness quickly took a life of its own.

Speaker 8 And nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere. And the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything.

Speaker 8 And if we, you know, if we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we'll hear a different answer from another one.

Speaker 12 So that's then.

Speaker 20 But where does wellness stand now?

Speaker 36 That's after the break.

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Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 well,

Speaker 12 wellness.

Speaker 12 Remember how Hadi tried all those different wellness treatments?

Speaker 20 Well, Amy Laraka does that for a living all the time. She's a journalist and author of the book, How to Be Well, Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time.

Speaker 16 We become obsessed with this idea of wellness, which is something that we can take on for ourselves, that we can buy, that we are told if you spend enough money, you can have it.

Speaker 8 These mushrooms make you feel better.

Speaker 8 They increase focus and energy while keeping you calm and stress-free.

Speaker 34 This is the future of foundational nutrition.

Speaker 8 One scoop, once a day.

Speaker 23 Being a human is hard, especially if you're a woman who's also having trouble doing that totally normal thing all humans do.

Speaker 16 Oh, you mean pooping?

Speaker 16 And that's where it gets into why do people want it? Because it's a luxury product. Why do people want a Prada handbag? And I think wellness is kind of following that trajectory.

Speaker 18 I'm a wellness girly. Of course I start my morning with oil polling.
I'm a wellness girly. Of course I only use clean, vegan, cruelty-free makeup products.

Speaker 16 Because we have a really messed up healthcare system in this country, but healthcare to the very wealthy is excellent. Probably the best it's ever been anywhere in the world.

Speaker 16 Again, wellness is a luxury.

Speaker 22 Yeah, you know, we have like this Western idea of treating the whole patient, but it feels like a lot of people have lost faith in traditional medicine. How did we get there?

Speaker 16 I think we got there because so many segments of the population have been neglected and really mistreated by the medical establishment.

Speaker 8 Patients were being harmed by a lot of the embedded conflict of interests within United's business empire and its operations.

Speaker 19 Steward executives had slowly taken money out of the system and that patient care had suffered. We found 15 patients died and thousands more were put at risk.

Speaker 22 Who is wellness marketed towards?

Speaker 12 Who is wellness for?

Speaker 25 Is it for everyone?

Speaker 16 Right now it's really being marketed to everyone. It's kind of like the sort of devil wears Prada blue sweater, right?

Speaker 38 You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

Speaker 38 But that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact,

Speaker 38 you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

Speaker 16 But I would say it is really marketed at kind of white women with disposable income because there's money to be spent and there's, you know, a lot of historical precedent for sewing insecurities and getting money out of that population.

Speaker 22 You've talked about this idea of being a well woman. Yeah.
How can you be a well woman and is it worth it?

Speaker 16 Well, I mean, if you think of like the or well woman as going to Paltro, no, most of us are never, ever, ever going to be that. And thank God.

Speaker 24 I eat dinner early in the evening. I do a nice intermittent fast.
I have bone broth for lunch a lot of the days. And then for dinner, I try to eat, you know, according to paleo.

Speaker 16 But I think what you can do, and a lot of people keep asking me, well, you know, what's your your takeaway? And you've researched all these things and you've tried all these things.

Speaker 16 My takeaway is like really basic. You need the meat.
Like you need to sleep. You need to move your body around.
You need to eat food that's as close to its original form as possible.

Speaker 16 You need to drink some water. You need to manage your stress levels.
Like it's really the basics

Speaker 16 that matter.

Speaker 16 And I don't say that lightly. I know for a lot of people, those basics are very elusive and very difficult to attain, but they're really what make the difference.

Speaker 22 Yeah, you've talked about the discrepancies in who gets to be well in America. And, you know, if you're lucky, you have access to a lot of state-of-the-art treatments.
Yeah.

Speaker 22 I read all the time about like just what it takes to keep LeBron James up and running.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure. But you know what? Like LeBron James is a, is a professional athlete.
Like, yes. Do it, LeBron.
Like that's your, that's your work.

Speaker 22 But it feels like it's like you all should be doing these things too. That's right.

Speaker 23 It's like, I can't afford that. I am not King King James.

Speaker 22 I am so sorry.

Speaker 16 I mean, that's just a, it's working on you, right? It works on me too. Oh my God, it works on me.
So I'm like, yes, I am going to click on this email.

Speaker 16 And when I click on this email, inside this email, it's going to tell me like everything.

Speaker 16 And then I'm like, oh, not this time. And then the next email will come like wellness secrets for.
And I'm like, ooh, here they are.

Speaker 22 What are some of the most interesting wellness treatments you tried out when you were writing this book?

Speaker 16 I definitely did a lot of like cold and hot stuff. So I've been in the cryo chambers.
chambers, I've been in the cold plunges. I definitely like experimented with some of the food stuff.

Speaker 16 But to be very honest with you, I don't like messing around with food stuff. It's too close to disordered eating.
And I did bite the bullet and get a colonic, which do not recommend 1000%.

Speaker 22 Oh, oh, okay, because people have told me they're like, I do it, it's great, you should do it.

Speaker 16 I think it's chasing that sort of high feeling of emptiness. There's a lot of unanswered questions and hypocrisies in wellness.

Speaker 16 So you'll you'll spend all of your time being like, oh, my microbiome, my gut, I have to fix it. I have to fix it.

Speaker 16 And then you're like, I'm just going to go to this place and have someone like turn a garden hose up my butt. And like,

Speaker 16 I'm like, I thought I was building my flora, you know, now you're just going to wash it all out.

Speaker 16 So yeah, so there's a lot of things that don't add up.

Speaker 16 But I've just, I've sort of realized when it comes to the things that don't add up, the consistent factor that makes people kind of overlook things not adding up is like weight loss.

Speaker 22 Why is it that we give these things a try? You know, like I admit,

Speaker 22 if there's a cold plunge and Asana, I'm going to go back and forth.

Speaker 23 Oh, yeah, I'm in there.

Speaker 22 I'm going to do that temperature. I'm in there.
Yeah. Like some of this is fun.

Speaker 16 I am not here to make anyone feel bad about anything they do. And like, as long as you're not like putting yourself in real financial distress to do these things, like do it.

Speaker 16 And then I think there's, you know, there's a sort of more sinister part of it. Like, why are we taking all these supplements?

Speaker 16 Why are we so scared of the pharmaceutical industry, but so willing to gobble these partially labeled, untested tablets handed to us by like influencers, not doctors, you know?

Speaker 16 So there's a lot of like hypocrisies and things that don't make sense. But the truth is like there's a lot of pressure, like this idea that you're supposed to live up to something.

Speaker 16 But I think like also we all want to feel good. And if there's a way to feel better, I think, wouldn't you want to try it?

Speaker 10 would

Speaker 14 we have some more episodes about wellness coming up and as part of that we're talking about exercise how has your relationship with it changed over the years give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.

Speaker 12 This episode was produced by Hadi Mawagdi. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy.
Melissa Hirsch did the fact-checking, and Matthew Billy engineered.

Speaker 14 I'm your host, John Glenn Hill.

Speaker 13 You can find more great podcasts by checking out podcasts.boxmedia.com.

Speaker 12 Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 10 Bye!

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