Journalist Amy Larocca says our society's obsession with optimization and self-care has reached a fever pitch. She unpacks what it really means to take care of ourselves in How to Be Well. Also, Justin Chang reviews the Chinese film Caught by the Tides.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the wellness industry and why is it so influential?
In it, she dives into detoxes, colonics, infrared wraps, sweat lodges, wellness apps, and supplements to figure out what is real and what's really just good marketing. What she uncovers isn't just a collection of trends, but a vast and revealing system shaped by our beliefs about health, status, gender, and worth. She's asking, who does this culture of wellness really serve?
Who does it leave behind? And why even when we see through the sales pitch, we still buy in? Amy LaRocca is an award-winning journalist, serving as a fashion director and editor-at-large for New York Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country, and the London Review of Books. Amy LaRocca, welcome to Fresh Air. Hi, Tanya. Thank you so much.
Well, you know, Amy, I went into this book thinking I knew what the wellness industry was comprised of. But then I realized that there is so much under this umbrella of wellness that has made its way into the mainstream. So before we actually dive in, I want you to briefly define wellness and how big of an industry this actually is that we're talking about.
Chapter 2: How does wellness serve as a luxury good?
Well, it's enormous. And one way that it's sometimes helpful to think about wellness is to think wellness is a luxury good. I covered the fashion industry for 20 years. And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was...
I started to get intrigued by the many ways in which wellness was being sold using the same language and techniques that I'd watched luxury products be sold to women for 20 years. It was almost like women were being sold their own bodies back to themselves. And the wellness industry is something that women are confronted with and asked to navigate on some level every single day.
Of course, the degree of urgency varies wildly, but it's hard to imagine a scenario in which a woman is untouched. on almost a daily basis by wellness. And it's such a complicated and such a vast web, but we're all on this like sort of metaphorical and literal treadmill of self-improvement all the time. And that's how I think about wellness. It's beauty standards.
It's, you know, feeling bad about your neck. It's also the very, very, very real health concerns about ourselves and about our families that we're forced to
And you make the point to say it's a luxury good that is really marketed towards women. I actually want you to read the first page of this book, which defines the ultimate female customer.
Do you know a well woman? Odds are you do. She is everywhere with her clean, clear skin, sipping from a non-toxic container full of an expensive, mysterious broth. She is the friend who is not religious, but is spiritual. She swears by her transcendental meditation practice.
She swears by a lot of things, like a very specific whisk for her matcha that she sourced from a very specific, ethical, artisanal website. She is educated, but not rigid in thought. She is a seeker, and she is unashamed of her frailties because she is so actively engaged in finding unique solutions and cures.
You might know her only virtually, but she shares enough about herself for you to understand that she is simultaneously ambitious and content. She has so much advice on how you might be more like her, with her working definition of tincture and her pretty pill case full of pretty pills. She is beautiful, tranquil, fertile, productive. She is pure of intention, heavy metals. Food dies and dread.
You have a sense of humor and yet this speaks truth. I mean, depending on where you sit, the well woman, she sounds aspirational or, you know, on the other side of that, she sounds insufferable. Many of us know her. I mean, many of us also want to be her. Maybe we are her. What is it, though, about her pursuit of wellness that is part of a larger epidemic?
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Chapter 3: What role do celebrities play in promoting wellness trends?
Number one is you lost the notion that anyone had any idea that what was going on, that we lost the, you know, in the beginning, particularly when we were getting all sorts of information, when we had a president who was telling us to drink bleach, you lost the idea that there were experts involved.
And also a questioning of the experts with like the questioning of Dr. Fauci.
The questioning of Dr. Fauci, the idea that the advice would change on a daily basis. Wear your mask. Don't wear your mask. It can be on, you know, the virus is on. packages? Do you not need to wipe down your packages? You know, you can get the virus once. No, you can't. You can get it twice. The advice kept changing. And people were very unsure. Was the advice politically motivated?
Was it not politically motivated? And very quickly, you sort of had to rely on yourself. And you were looking for people to tell you with some degree of authority and certainty. So I think that was one example of losing faith in institutions.
Well, also the thing that happened during that period, that time period, was these people, these influencers that you said had been in this world for a really long time, then had our undivided attention.
Yeah, they really did, right? And so we were, you know, we were like, oh, yeah, I'll do whatever you tell me. I'll take this. I'll eat that. Yeah, so I think—but I think in general, one of the things about— The way healthcare works in America is that people aren't getting a lot of time with their doctors. People often don't know their doctors. People get switched around a lot.
You don't have what was a traditional sort of relationship with your family GP, right, who might have known your grandparents. That's just not how doctors are working right now. So these relationships that people form to Dr. Oz, Gwyneth Paltrow, people they see dispensing advice on television, on the Internet, take on a lot of significance.
And that advice, however compromised it may be by profit motives or having their own supplement lines to sell or protein powders or whatever it is, that sort of, you know, gets a little obscured in the idea that that might be someone's most consistent medical relationship, bizarrely.
Well, you actually became a version of the well woman for your research.
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Chapter 4: Who is Gwyneth Paltrow and why is she significant in wellness?
But afterwards, you do feel kind of great. And I don't think you've done any lasting harm to yourself.
Many of these things that you talk about in the book and you're talking about right now are kind of like these old practices that stem from something.
Very ancient practices.
Yeah, very ancient practices. But now they're a marketing tool to sell back to us. Because when I think about cold therapy, you know, polar plunge.
That's right. And the hot and the cold and the, you know, the different baths and different cultures. It's very common, right? Like the Schwitz's in Eastern Europe and the Japanese... baths and the Korean baths. I mean, all of these things have been around for a very long time. And it's really often a question of packaging and marketing.
I want to ask you about the influence of celebrity on this because it's very clear how celebrities can be used to sell all sorts of things. There's one particular celebrity, though, in this moment who holds an outsized portion of this market. Can you quantify Gwyneth Paltrow's power and popularity in the wellness space?
I mean, it's enormous. It's tremendous. You can... Talk about the dollars with Goop, although it can be hard to because it's a private company. But her name is really synonymous with wellness. The first question as I've been writing this book, I can't tell you how many people say to me,
If I say, oh, I'm writing this book about wellness, the next words out of their mouth are some version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Are you writing about Gwyneth Paltrow? And she, for better or for worse, is the face of the industry.
You've written about, though, this cottage industry that has sprung up because of Gwyneth Paltrow that is debunking many of the claims that come from Paltrow's company, Goop. I mean, Goop, just to set the stage for those out there who might not know, it's a lifestyle brand. It's a beauty brand. It's a publication. It's a podcast.
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Chapter 5: What are the criticisms against Goop's wellness claims?
Goop has a history of promoting alternative healers using the popular platform to amplify their techniques. Goop answers with an innocent, just-asking-questions stance, but it presents a danger far more real than the shameless attention grabs.
Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco gynecologist, has become famous for dissembling the myths Goop pushed via her blog, wielding the lasso of truth, and later on a substack called the Vagenda. It started with a response she published in 2015 to Paltrow's recommending vaginal steaming to balance female hormone levels.
It's one of the core beliefs of patriarchy, that women are dirty inside, Gunter wrote. And yet, Goop presents this as female empowerment? It's bad feminism. And it's bad science. She took Goop on for a number of disproven theories about underwire bras causing breast cancer, about the benefits of coffee enemas. Dear God, no, Gunter wrote in her book, The Vagina Bible. I just can't even.
Caulfield, for his part, argues that Paltrow is perhaps not the best messenger for ideas about beauty and health. The fact that individuals who have won the beauty gene lottery are setting universal beauty standards is a bit like using NBA power forwards to inspire people to endeavor to be tall.
This particular section of the book, I mean, you really lay out the power of celebrity in every sense of the word. You saw it in fashion. They're the perfect vessel, as we said, for an aspirational self. But what makes what Gwyneth Paltrow and elements of what she does and many others who are in this influencer space potentially dangerous?
I think what makes Gwyneth Paltrow dangerous is that people really listen to her. And as we talked about earlier, is that in the absence of advice from experts, she becomes an expert. And I think that's where it gets dangerous. I think people also forget that she's selling beauty products. And that's her motive.
Because a lot of the early positioning of Goop was we're just here to ask questions, it obfuscates the we're here to sell things, which is actually what they're there to do. So, for example, I remember reading something in Goop in the early days of the Goop blog, and it was about cancer-causing chemicals in your shower.
And basically, if you read this piece, you would just think your shower was like a cancer box. Like you were just going into your shower to get cancer. You're not going in there to wash your hair. You're not going in there to wash your face. You're going in there to give yourself cancer. It was in the water. It's in the shower curtain. It was in your shampoo. It was in the shampoo bottle.
I mean, it was terrifying. You'd never shower again if you read this article. And at the bottom of the article, you could click to buy a water filter. You could click to buy shampoo that was safe, that was in glass bottles, that cost $120. And the link to buy it was right there. It was a Goop product. And it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever read.
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Chapter 6: How did Oprah influence the wellness movement?
Yeah, I mean, it's enormous, right? To start with the positives, her openness, her willingness to talk about it. I think a lot of her biggest contributions around mental health and her willingness to really bring things that had been previously off limits for, you know, into the conversation.
When it comes to physical health, it's a little bit more complicated because she has been willing to go off the mainstream and promote some kind of out there things that have been disproven.
Well, one moment that you highlight. So Jenny McCarthy appeared on Oprah in 2007. She claimed that vaccines caused her son's autism, even with the overwhelming scientific evidence disproving that link. But the fact that it happened on Oprah's platform at a time when anti-vaccine beliefs were still considered fringe, it kind of put it on the mainstream stage.
And it's so interesting, right, because Jenny McCarthy says, well, at first I thought this couldn't be real because if it was real, it would be on Oprah. And, of course, in saying that, well, now it's on Oprah. Therefore, now it's real. That was a very meta. It was, right? Yeah. So that happens again and again with Oprah.
I talk in the book about her going to see John the Healer in Brazil, who's someone who's in prison now.
Can you remind us who that is? He was known as John of God.
Yes, John of God, who's a healer in Brazil who would rape patients, claiming he was putting his healing energy inside of them. And Oprah really was willing to push the envelope, and it came with really mixed results. So her openness sometimes led to, you know, some pretty complicated stuff that I personally wish had been better vetted because her influence is so tremendous.
Yes. I mean, she introduced us to many folks who then went on to have their own platforms, like Dr. Oz, who is a very polarizing figure and controversial figure in this moment. But when you look back, I mean, even to what's happening today with wellness influencers, celebrity health evangelists, do you think that they have a duty to understand the weight of their influence?
Is there a responsibility there, especially in a space where people are often vulnerable and looking for help?
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