Going broke on wellness

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1:11We all want to live long, healthy lives without pain. That is like the single most important thing. The problem is that often what we see in the wellness world is that the cart is put before the horse.

1:27So 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.

1:33Jonquilyn Hill:We're all in our wellness era these days, and our producer Hadi Mawagdi had the chance to play around with some extreme wellness. He got to improve his mood, to enhance his muscle recovery, and to have a great night's rest. We gotta get you to cold plunge with me, bro. Come on. I should have brought shorts. You know what they have here? shorts for you. All he had to do was decide to take the plunge. We're literally taking a dip in wellness. Oh, man. All right, I'm ready. I'm ready. I don't know if I'm ready. All right, let's have a roll. Woo! Oh, my goodness. This is freezing. I'm John Blunhill, and this is a rerun of a favorite episode of Explain It to Me from Vox.

2:19Woo! Woo! Freeze, freeze. Breathe. Slow it down.

2:25Jonquilyn Hill:We're the show that takes on the big questions. Questions like, what is wellness? Wellness. It's a word influencers use as a hashtag in videos of them pouring collagen into their smoothies. 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. That celeb chefs use to describe the theme of their newest book. This is the book that I wish I had when I was confused about what to eat and how to eat. And it's an obsession of the Secretary for Health and Human Services. We're spending$4.5 trillion annually on health care in our country, and we have the worst health outcomes.

3:06Jonquilyn Hill:But what does it actually mean? Hi, this is Hannah calling from Hudson Valley of New York. I'm a 35-year-old psychotherapist, so I think of wellness a lot. 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. It's spiritual. And it's something that we all need to be thinking about on the regular. Here's how journalist Amy LaRocca describes wellness. She's the author of How to Be Well, Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time. I've seen that word attached to absolutely everything. 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.

3:54And then I've seen it attached to really weird stuff like checking accounts and condos.

3:59Jonquilyn Hill:After her research, Amy's nailed down her own personal definition of it. 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. We're going to hear more from Amy a little later in the show, but first, Hottie'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. Okay, Hottie, I assume that you are out of the tub and all warmed up. Are you ready to go? Absolutely. Let's do it, JQ. you. I had heard of these places called social wellness clubs.

4:40Folks 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. 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. And instead, this is a place where people rest, A place where people who are well get well. Here's Megan Butler. She's the president of CUYA. CUYA 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. And it's built that way on purpose. So you're invited to want to stay.

5:24You know, Megan told me about a infrared light sauna. You sit in the sauna about 15 minutes in a safe space to detox, right? To vasodilate. About ice baths. About sensory deprivation tanks. So there's no light, there's no sound, there's no weight. This is really the only time that you're completely weightless. You're laying down, but you're buoyant in about 2 ,000 pounds of sodium magnesium water. But also about injectables. These things are administered by health professionals and you can get things like an IV vitamin therapy treatment. Today you're getting one of our most popular signature infusions, the Total Vitality Drip.

6:06It has an amino blend, a mineral blend, vitamin C, and also a B complex in it. It's great for recovery. But these year-round memberships, they include free Kuya events like storytelling workshops, workshops, aromatherapy workshops, and breathwork classes inside of a sauna. On my count, in, two, three, four, out, two, three.

6:35Jonquilyn Hill:Oh my gosh. So who is the clientele at this place? Well, the easiest way for me to say this, JQ, is that these are really pretty young people. everyone there 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 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 I'll tell you about a guy I met named Chase Salazar. He was like all smiles to talk to me, especially about wellness.

7:19This man knew about peer reviewed studies. Google Scholar, baby. Google Scholar. He was telling me about his IV treatments. 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 PM so that he could pursue wellness. 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? 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.

8:06And 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's 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.

8:24Jonquilyn Hill:So that's Chase's story. What sort of treatments did you partake in? 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. 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. 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. 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 going to fix me.

9:11Jonquilyn Hill:Did any of this work for you? Did it fix you? Did it fix me? Is that the question? 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, and at the end, I felt really energized. I also felt super, super thirsty. So 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, I don't know, separation from the world? I didn't. I quickly realized, JQ, that like I'm scared of the dark.

10:08Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, yeah. I would have a full on panic attack in a sensory deprivation situation. No, thank you. All right. I guess like that makes me wonder, how do you think of wellness now that you've done all this? Has the way you've thought about it changed? Well, I guess it has. 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. But I can see myself buying a day pass and going back and sauna-ing and cold plunging. And I don't know, laying around on that sound bed after a very long work week. You know, wellness is still this phrase that we're trying to really dissect.

11:01But I did feel pretty great at the end of my trip.

11:05Jonquilyn Hill:All right. Hadi Mawagdi, thanks for going on this journey for us. Oh, yeah. It was a pleasure. OK, so wellness is this trillion dollar industry. But how did we get here in the first place? That's next.

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13:35Dying to live well.

13:40Jonquilyn Hill:We're back. 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. But how did we get here? I spoke with Jonathan Stia to find out. By day, he's a clinical psychologist. But his side hustle is combating pseudoscience and misinformation. 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. I would say that obviously we can't blame anyone for seeking alternatives. The problem is that one of the ways in which wellness promoters market their materials is by promoting quote-unquote science or research to support their claims.

14:21And 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. And if you dig even deeper than that, it opens up a can of worms because this is what in part we mean by pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is in short a very hijacked or fake attempt at science.

14:50I think we can trace the modern wellness industry back to about the late 19th century. That's when two prominent figures really played a role in shaping kind of the modern wellness industry we see today. One of those players was a guy named John Harvey Kellogg. 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. 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. And what John ended up doing in that center was promoting a lot of his ideas about health and about how to treat diseases.

15:44they 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.

16:00Jonquilyn Hill: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? 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. This magazine was followed by millions of people. So was he the inventor of wellness as we know it today? Not quite. When he was promoting his ideas, it was before the term wellness as we use it today was formed. 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, a bunch of vegetables and fruits, etc., which in and of itself is not a bad thing.

17:02I mean, diet, exercise, and sleep.

17:04Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, I was about to say, like, exercise, diet, sleep, eating fruits and veggies, that feels like something I hear from my doctor. Totally. And that's part of evidence-based care, and that's really foundational to even what we do in the hospital. 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. So John had a lot of ideas that if we weren't following a trifecta recipe of sleep, eating well and exercise, and we were doing other things like drinking alcohol or eating meat or sugar, or even if people were overweight, he considered that to be non-virtuous and essentially really bad behaviors.

17:47and he would view it in a very punitive way. Even masturbation was considered self-abuse by John Kellogg. He thought that it would lead to things like mental illness and cancer and moral destitution. And he would advocate treating people who would masturbate. In boys, he would recommend circumcision or bandaging their hands together. And in girls, he would recommend pure carbolic acid to the clitoris. Oh, my God. And even its removal.

18:18Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, my God. Yes. Was John Kellogg the only person like this of his time or was this more widespread? It was more widespread. And I would say that he was one of the most prominent ones. And then in parallel with his ideas, there was another huge player that played a role in the birth of the modern wellness industry. 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. I mean, Bernard McFadden would strut around New York barefoot so that his souls could absorb the Earth's energy. And, you know, he would sleep on the floor so that his energy would align with the Earth's natural magnetic rhythm.

19:00And he was very hostile to vaccines.

19:03Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, OK. So you're telling me that an anti-vax wellness influencer is not a new phenomenon. Very old. over a century old, and that's because a lot of these ideas tend to coalesce. And similar to John Kellogg, 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. And the problem with these ideas is that health is not a moral virtue. What these ideas do is they promote an idea about health that ignores the 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.

19:45Jonquilyn Hill: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. Around the same time that these wellness ideas were kind of percolating, there was also something called the Flexner Report of 1910. And that really ushered in the dawn of modern medicine. And what that report did was it essentially wanted medicine and medical schools to get their act together and make them much more scientific. And so it would encourage schools to either get rid of alternative medicine from their curriculum or just shut these schools down altogether.

20:32At the same time, it really disadvantaged folks who are economically underprivileged. 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.

20:53Jonquilyn Hill:What about the term wellness specifically, though? When did that officially become a thing? Some consider the father of the modern wellness industry to be Albert Dunn. 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. 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. And I think his definition was quite thoughtful, but it really didn't stick. I was about to say that's actually a pretty good way to think about wellness.

21:34Totally. It's sort of 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. And nowadays, in many parts of North America, wellness is everywhere and anywhere. And the definition has really ballooned to include anything and everything. And if we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we'll hear a different answer from another one.