Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - A Cautionary Tale on Grifty Wellness MLMs and Made Up Diagnoses (Leaky Gut & Adrenal Fatigue?) with Anti-Diet Dietitian Christy Harrison
Episode Date: December 3, 2024In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, and today we’re talking with anti diet dietitian and fellow podcaster and author, Christy Harrison about wellness culture grifters. We’re going ...to be talking a lot about how wellness culture is co-opting intuitive eating, along with the rise in different dubious diagnoses and spurious cures including leaky gut, chronic candida and adrenal fatigue. We’ll be diving into how pseudoscience wellness programs focus their efforts on cancer patients and other vulnerable people. We’re talking about wellness MLMs and why the vast majority of supplements out there are poorly manufactured and kinda BS - and why the business model may actually be making you less healthy. And finally, I’ll be leaving you with some harrowing last thoughts about the real causes of health inequalities (aka. The social determinants of health) and how wellness culture depends on us simply ignoring them.Check in with today’s amazing guest, Christy Harrison! Website: https://christyharrison.com/Instagram: @chr1styharrison https://rethinkingwellness.substack.com/Food Psych Podcast: https://christyharrison.com/foodpsychRethinking Wellness Podcast and Substack: https://rethinkingwellness.substack.com/Anti-Diet Book: https://christyharrison.com/book-anti-diet-intuitive-eating-christy-harrisonThe Wellness Trap Book: https://christyharrison.com/the-wellness-trap 🥤 Check out my 2-in-1 Plant Based Probiotic Protein Powder, neue theory at www.neuetheory.com or @neuetheoryDon’t forget to Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review! It really helps us out. ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTERS ⤵️Neue Theory newsletterAbbey's Kitchen newsletter 🥞 FREE HUNGER CRUSHING COMBO™ E-BOOK! 💪🏼 FREE PROTEIN 101 E-BOOK! Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. 📱 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchen My blog, Abbey’s Kitchen www.abbeyskitchen.com My book, The Mindful Glow Cookbook affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NoHtvf If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review with your thoughts and let me know who you want me to discuss next!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You know, it's a predatory system, it's a predatory business model.
So many people who are vulnerable in multiple ways will be seduced or sucked in because
they're struggling with health conditions, perhaps, and they want to get, you know, whatever
the supplement is or the plan that's being sold as this miracle thing.
And then because if you're going to be using this product, you'll, you know, make more
money and you'll save more money if you're a distributor too.
And it's very appealing and seductive.
Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules,
call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good.
Friends, I honestly cannot even believe that we're in December already. What a ride of a year. But I also feel like it's a really important time to have conversations like the one we're going to
have today because I just know a lot of us are likely seeing a lot of family this month. And
that can mean a lot of icky diet culture and grifty wellness culture discussions. They are coming and I want
you guys to be prepared with some solid critical thinking skills. And today's guest is such a queen
in that arena. Christy Harrison is a journalist, registered dietitian, and certified intuitive
eating counselor. And as far as I'm concerned, is really one of the OG anti-diet culture
commentators. She's the host of two amazing podcasts, Food Psych and Rethinking Wellness,
and she's the author of the book Anti-Diet and her new title, The Wellness Trap. So today we're
going to be talking about a bunch of dubious diagnoses like leaky gut, chronic candida,
and adrenal fatigue. We'll be diving into how
pseudoscience wellness programs focus their efforts on cancer patients, which is particularly
disgusting. We will be talking about wellness MLMs and why they're so, so, so dangerous.
And I'll be leaving you with some very harrowing last thoughts about the real causes of health
inequalities and how much wellness culture
depends on us simply ignoring them. She's a juicy one, folks, so you're not going to want to miss
out. Quick little disclaimer here, folks, this content is never a replacement for personalized
healthcare advice. I will also be briefly talking about eating disorders, so please feel free to
skip this video if it's not supportive to your journey.
But also on a brighter note, I would love, love, love if you would please leave Bite
Back a review for this episode and just the podcast at large.
It really, really does help me out as a new podcast.
All right.
Thank you so much for joining me, Christy.
Thanks so much for having me, Abby. I'm excited to talk.
Yes, I'm a huge fan. I'm very excited to learn from you. And I have your new book,
The Wellness Trap, and I'm so obsessed with it. I think it's such great learning for all. Of course,
I'm going to link it in the show notes because you dive into a lot of topics in the book that are
so central to this podcast. And so I don't even know where to
begin because there's a lot we can we can discuss. But I really do look up to you as a real leader
in the kind of weight inclusive anti diet space. And also more specifically, just your knowledge
of the principles of intuitive eating, which, as you know, have just been so heavily co-opted by
diet and wellness culture. So thank you for doing what
you do here. No, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. But for those who are listening,
who maybe are a little bit more new to intuitive eating, and maybe their only experience or
understanding of it is through these co-opted versions, maybe you can tell us a little bit
about what it is actually and what it absolutely is not. Yeah. So intuitive eating is really a dynamic interplay between
inner attunement and outer awareness of, you know, nutrition facts, as well as your needs,
you know, your body's individual needs, but inner attunement, meaning, you know,
your attunement to your hunger and fullness cues, your desires, without the influence of diet
culture, without having, you know having unfounded diet beliefs be anywhere
in the mix.
And I think the real version of intuitive eating gets so twisted and so co-opted in
diet and wellness culture.
It's twisted into either it's the hunger and fullness diet, where you can only eat when
you're hungry and you must stop as soon as you're full, and any sign of fullness is a
sign you've eaten too much.
Or it's the don't eat emotionally diet.
You know, if you have a feeling, do anything but eat. And if you have the desire to use food for
a coping mechanism, it means you're doing it wrong. It means there's something wrong with you.
Or it's, you know, using it as a weight loss method, right? It's eating in this way so that
you'll shrink your body so that you'll lose weight. And if you're not losing weight or if
you happen to be gaining weight,
which in fact some people do when they practice intuitive eating
because they were weight suppressed and their body needed to gain weight,
weight restore, people will view that as a sign that they're doing it wrong,
that they're not practicing intuitive eating properly.
And there are a lot of people out there making money on telling people
that they can lose weight through intuitive eating, right?
And that the real way to do intuitive eating is as a diet. So I think it's
really important to name that it's not a diet, it's an anti-diet approach. The founders, Evelyn
Triboli and Elise Resch, who coined the term intuitive eating and developed the protocol,
you know, conceived of it as an anti-diet approach. And the subtitle of the latest edition of the
book is actually a radical anti-diet approach. So really we are not doing intuitive eating towards losing
weight or with any sort of nutritional fads or wellness diets in mind. Yeah. So helpful. And
you've got a course, I will link to that in the show notes below if folks are looking to dive
more into that, which I do suggest is helpful for everybody, really.
I want to circle back to extreme wellness culture, because your new book, The Wellness Trap, does an
amazing job at just really clarifying like all the the grifty pseudoscience out there that
ultimately does a lot of harm. And there's a chapter in the book called dubious diagnoses
and spurious Cures.
And one of the things that you discuss is how a lot of these kind of problematic pseudoscience recommendations center around cancer.
Why has cancer traditionally been such like an entry point for grifters?
I think it's because cancer treatment is so effective in many ways, but also has so many
side effects. And people are looking
for gentler approaches and approaches that maybe aren't going to have as many really severe side
effects on the body. And also, cancer is a multitude of diseases. It's not just one thing,
right? And we don't have a single cure for cancer. And some forms of cancer are harder to treat than
others, are more resistant to the
treatment methods we have that are evidence-based. And so people with not so great prognoses, I think,
are looking for alternatives and things they can do maybe in addition to or instead of the
conventional treatments. And people are desperate. I think people who have cancer understandably are
desperate for healing. Their loved ones as well are often looking for answers and
want to bring some kind of potential cure to their loved ones and might encourage them in
a certain direction, encourage them to try alternative treatments. And there's sort of
a gap there, I think, in conventional healthcare because, yes, we do know a lot about various kinds
of cancers. We meaning the healthcare establishment, not me personally.
But, you know, medicine does have a lot of great treatments for cancer and for various kinds of cancer.
And various kinds of cancer are also not very treatable or, you know, the prognosis is not as great as what people would hope.
And so I think there are gaps there that can easily be filled by, you know, wellness entrepreneurs and purveyors of pseudoscience and snake oil and all of that.
And I don't want to say that necessarily everyone who's offering alternative cures is a grifter necessarily.
You know, some of them definitely know exactly what they're doing.
Others are true believers and are people who really think that they're offering some kind of miracle cure.
Maybe they went through something themselves and they had a positive experience. And so they think that everyone's going to have that same
experience and it's, you know, it's not scientific, it's not evidence-based, but they,
they genuinely believe in it. So there's like a whole spectrum of reasons. I think people
will offer these kinds of cures, but unfortunately, you know, for cancer or for many other diseases as
well, there's just not great evidence-based treatments
out there. And these wellness solutions that are being offered are in many cases far worse
and are taking people farther from the healing that they actually desire and deserve and also
may in fact take them away from evidence-based treatments that could be helping them.
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And these messages often do do harm. You know,
there's a study that found that folks with cancer who chose alternative treatments instead of
conventional cancer treatment were 2.5 times more likely to die within five years. And that's not
to say that that's, you know, going to happen to everybody, obviously. But it's, you know,
we actually saw this come up
a few months ago. There was an Australian supermodel named Elle McPherson who claimed
that she, quote unquote, kind of healed through her breast cancer through following an alkaline
diet and working with a chiropractor, even though she actually had received two lumpectomy surgeries.
But people didn't hear the lumpectomy people, they hear the alkaline diet, which, you know, goes without saying,
it's total BS. I mean, you can't, what you eat can't change your pH of your body. And if it could,
you would die. We also tend to see a lot of these recommendations around cutting out sugar because
of the pseudoscience claim that sugar like selectively feeds cancer cells, which again,
untrue. And these messages, yeah, they're everywhere. And it is very dangerous.
But speaking of sugar detoxes as the catch-all cure, I want to talk about more dubious diagnoses.
And one that kind of comes to mind that often also recommends a kind of sugar-free life
is chronic candida.
Is that a thing?
What is it?
Yeah, so chronic candida or candida is a dubious diagnosis.
It's not real.
It's based on a grain of truth, as many of these dubious diagnoses are.
And the grain of truth is that candida albicans or various forms of Candida is, you know, they're a fungus that lives in and on the body that's part of our microbiome that can overgrow in certain select situations.
So if someone's on long-term antibiotics or if someone has immune suppression for whatever reason, you know, there are certain cases in which this fungus can overgrow in various parts of the body.
The most obvious is vaginal yeast infection that many people have experienced, but there's
other forms of yeast infections in different parts of the body. And it can become systemic,
and it's actually life-threatening if that happens. But that's in cases of if someone
has immune suppression or they're in long-term hospitalization. They have a lot of other co-occurring pre-existing
conditions that would make that happen. So people are not just walking around with systemic,
low-grade candida infections. And that's what this dubious diagnosis of chronic candida
claims is that overgrowth of candida in the body is responsible for digestive issues,
bloating, brain fog, fatigue, acne, weight gain, you know, all of
this, like the laundry list of things, right. That are sort of, um, you know, ailments that people
might be experiencing that, that they're looking for answers for that they don't have really good
understandings of the causes of, and you know, this catch-all diagnosis of chronic candidiasis
right there. It's so common in wellness culture, I think, to have these kinds of catch-all diagnoses, right? That's like, this is the one thing,
this is the one underlying cause, all your problems. And if you just treat this, it'll all
go away. And it's really seductive. It's really appealing. You know, I know as someone who has
multiple chronic health conditions myself and who had a long journey to get proper diagnosis and
treatment for those conditions, that it really is appealing to
think, you know, it's this one thing. And if I can just, you know, with the chronic candida
dubious diagnosis, the idea is, you know, you cut out sugar, you cut out carbohydrates,
you cut out things that quote unquote feed the candida, feed the yeast. And, you know,
in a sort of twisting of accurate science, it's like you're cutting out mushrooms,
you're cutting out yeast as well, because they're in the same, I forget if it's a kingdom or a phylum or, you know, it's the same
large class microorganisms, but, you know, candida has really as little to do with yeast that's in
your bread as, you know, a human does with an elephant, right? It's like, yeah, they might be
in the same general category of things, but there's no relation really. So it's a really problematic, dubious
diagnosis because again, these underlying, the symptoms that people have that they're maybe
searching for answers for could have other explanations. And people are being led astray
by this notion of chronic candida and being put on really restrictive diets or putting themselves
on really restrictive diets and triggering
disordered eating often or exacerbating preexisting disordered eating and oftentimes becoming more and
more obsessive about what's in their food. I think it's such a slippery slope in many cases.
I know it was for me and so many of my clients. And we see that in the literature as well, that
once people start cutting out a certain class of foods, cutting out large swaths of their menu, then it just becomes like, well, I'm still having this symptom. So maybe I
need to cut out more and the alternative medicine providers and, you know, functional medicine and
integrative medicine providers that are recommending these diets and pushing these
dubious diagnoses are right there to say, yeah, you know, we really need to cut out more. Let's
add more supplements. Let's do more restriction in your diet. And so it just pushes people to greater
and greater extremes with their eating. Yeah, this is unfortunately exactly my story too in my
late teens with orthorexia. It started out with cutout sugar, also recommended from a naturopathic,
holistic naturopath. And it spiraled into cut out fat,
cut out this like very, you know, very quickly, the list of safe foods got smaller and smaller
and smaller. And this kind of relates to another one of these dubious diagnoses that you discuss,
which apparently everybody is suffering from, which is leaky gut syndrome. So I feel like
leaky gut is now being blamed for everything under the sun from obesity to Parkinson's to
cancer, again, to of course, autism. What is leaky gut syndrome and what is it
not? Yeah. So again, it's a dubious diagnosis. It's not real. It's not recognized by medical
authorities, medical bodies. It's not an actual medical diagnosis, but it's something that,
again, is based on this small grain of truth, right? So there is this small grain of truth
in the research literature that certain conditions seem to be associated with
increased permeability of the intestines. And the small intestine, especially selectively permeable
to allow nutrients to pass through, to allow us to absorb nutrients from our food. And we want it
to be selectively permeable, right? We don't want it to be entirely closed off because we need to
be able to get those nutrients. However, there are certain conditions that
can increase the permeability and potentially, you know, researchers are still very much in the
process of sort of uncovering the mechanisms for this and how it affects our bodies and why.
But there are certain conditions like Crohn's disease or other inflammatory bowel diseases
where the intestine can be selective, more perme more selectively permeable, and allow perhaps
larger molecules to come through in a way that could potentially have some effects.
However, we really don't know cause and effect at this point of what is causing what.
And sort of the going theory in wellness culture is like, oh, leaky gut is causing all your problems. It's causing disease, it's causing symptoms. But researchers think that
actually it could be that, you know, these conditions that are associated with leaky,
you know, and it's also super confusing because some researchers in the scientific literature
will use the term leaky gut or leaky bowel, or, you know, they're sort of like turning
into this colloquial term that the actual term is increased intestinal permeability, but that's kind
of a mouthful. And so when researchers are trying to put things in lay terms, they will often use
the term leaky gut, but that's not the same thing as this sort of notion of leaky gut syndrome.
That's been, you know, that's proliferated in wellness culture. And so, yeah, so people,
you know, now we have all manner of wellness entrepreneurs telling people that they can
heal their leaky gut and therefore heal any underlying condition that they have or any
symptoms they might experience. And again, it's, you know, being touted as the underlying cause
and the solution to all these different things that are just totally unrelated,
you know, not just intestinal issues, but again, things like, you know, brain stuff, autism,
right. As people have linked it, you know, spuriously linked supposed leaky gut to autism,
you know, and again, there's these grains of truth and research where there may be a link in certain conditions, but it's still very much being teased apart. There is no diet that's going to cure leaky gut. There is no supplement that's going to cure leaky
gut or reduce your intestinal permeability. Nothing has really been scientifically validated
in that sense, in the way that wildness culture is telling people, again, cut out gluten,
cut out dairy, cut out all these foods, add these supplements, do all this restriction and, you know, in the name of healing your leaky gut, and then you
will therefore put your Crohn's disease into remission or whatever it might be, right? And
that's so seductive, again, to anyone with a chronic health condition that is lifelong, that
is, you know, that ebbs and flows, that can be really debilitating and hard to manage. And there
are some really great treatments for some of these conditions in conventional healthcare, but they, you know, have side
effects and they don't always work for everyone. And so it's, it's incredibly appealing, I think.
And, and just also, you know, this idea that some, the one thing could explain everything
that's going wrong in your life, right? So you just deal with a leaky gut. And I've actually
heard even like a researcher who is sort of prominent in this area, who's almost like a scientist influencer, who sort of helped spread the popularity of leaky gut, Alessio Fasano, who's like very much seen as sort of leaky gut. And whatever nuance he brought in the
paper itself, that title is just so black and white and can be so easily taken out of context
and gives so much fuel to this fire of the dubious diagnosis and all the spurious cures that are out
there for this so-called condition. Yeah. I think in general, wellness culture oversimplifies things. And so that's, you know, part of, we tend to hear that term a lot by grifters, you need to quote unquote, get to the root cause. And that, you know, you know, conventional medicine ignores the quote unquote root cause. And in this case, the root cause of all that ails you is this leaky gut. When we actually look at the totality of the
evidence, where we look at situations where there is intestinal permeability, it's much more likely
that, you know, the leaky gut or the intestinal permeability is a symptom of an existing condition
like IBD that potentially damages the gut rather than leaky gut causing IBD, nevermind literally
everything else. So, you know, for example, when we look at research on children with autism,
we see that not all kids with autism don't have quote unquote leaky guts. If, and if leaky gut
was the root cause of autism, wouldn't you think that we would see all children with autism have
leaky guts? So it is so it is so difficult
to tease those things apart for for the lay person. But I've got one more I wanted to kind
of touch on, which is adrenal fatigue. Because again, you know, that last 10 years, I've just
heard nonstop adrenal fatigue, especially, you know, when we when we went through COVID as well.
So that was became a, you know, it really kind of went through
a wave of popularity. What's adrenal fatigue? Yeah. So again, adrenal fatigue is not a real
condition. It's not a recognized medical diagnosis. An endocrinology society went so far as to publish
a paper that said adrenal fatigue is not real. A review of the evidence, right? It was like this
very frank sort of title for a research
paper and marshaled a lot of evidence to show that, you know, this is just not a real condition.
But it again does have grains of truth in it, right? People can feel sort of existentially
fatigued. I know I, as a mother of a small child have felt that for sure. And also someone with
multiple chronic health conditions, including Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which can ebb and flow and have, you know, really significant effects on fatigue.
People with, you know, chronic fatigue syndrome, ME-CFS, like all of these things can have an
effect on people's, you know, levels of fatigue. And there are real reasons why people might feel
also just like, you know, life stress in general, this world that, you know, I don't
want to over oversell it, but like some people do feel that we're living in just a dumpster fire of,
you know, a society these days. Right. And COVID of course was such a huge traumatic experience
for so many people. So, you know, all of that can really just wipe us out and make us feel
existentially exhausted. And then there are
all these other things. So the concept of adrenal fatigue was created by this naturopath and
chiropractor in the 1990s named James Wilson, who developed the notion of adrenal fatigue without
any sort of scientific validity. There was no evidence behind this, but he claimed without
evidence that stress causes the adrenal glands to get overworked. Adrenal glands are
what's responsible for responding to stress and producing cortisol in response to it. And he
claimed that excessive stress can cause the adrenals to get overworked or overtaxed and
not make enough cortisol that we need, resulting in extreme fatigue, but all these other systemic
issues too. And there's just no evidence behind that. Actually, the adrenals don't get overworked in that way. They are more than capable of handling whatever stress
we experience. There certainly are effects of chronic stress that have nothing to do with that,
but the adrenals don't get burned out. But sustained high cortisol over time can certainly
have systemic effects on the body. But it you know, it doesn't work in the
way that this guy claimed. And yet this notion of adrenal fatigue became very popular in alternative
medicine circles and really took off with the internet as well and, you know, started to be
spread around. And now we have, you know, naturopaths and alternative medicine providers
using this questionnaire that Wilson developed to quote unquote diagnose people with adrenal
fatigue based on just a series of questions, self-reports, there's no biomarkers, there's
no blood being taken. Not that every blood test is valid either, and we can get into that too
about all the spurious tests that are out there. But with this so-called notion of adrenal fatigue,
there really isn't any evidence that it exists. And yet people are being sold this bill of goods and told that they have this condition and that they need to do a
restrictive diet. They need to take these supplements. And unfortunately, some of the
supplements can actually have the very effects that people are looking to cure. And so one of
the treatments that is often recommended in functional medicine circles is corticosteroids,
which are supposed to replace the depleted cortisol that people supposedly have
for their adrenals being burnt, being burnt out, which is not a thing. Um, and actually being on
long-term glucose or corticosteroids, long-term corticosteroid use is actually, um, a risk factor
for something called adrenal insufficiency, which does have, you know, it's, it is a real condition. It's very rare. There's genetic versions of the condition that,
you know, are, are super, super rare. But then one of the versions that is called secondary
adrenal insufficiency is, is something that can actually happen as something that can actually
happen from taking steroids long-term. And so people are actually giving themselves or being, you know,
sort of told to do something that is going to cause the very issues that they're hoping to outrun
by taking these pills. And what's interesting is that all these dubious diagnoses, what they
have in common is this laundry list of symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, bloating, weight gain.
Like they're so general that we basically all experience
them. So it almost feels like the demographic that some snake oil salesman is selling their
adrenal fatigue cleanse or their kind of candida diet is quite huge. They can reach a wide audience
with this. But speaking of BS cures for BS diseases, I want to talk about MLMs because you really can't
talk about problematic wellness or diet culture and not talk about MLMs, which I know you talk
about in the book as well. And we know that wellness is the biggest category in the MLM
industry. Why do you think that is? And why are MLMs ultimately just so dangerous for folks?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think MLMs are, you know, by far the biggest category,
partly because I talked to someone who's an economist who studies MLMs and supplement
industry. And he said that it was like the profit margins in that sector are just wild, you know,
that you can spend very little to make a really large profit and that
there's no regulation or oversight either, right? That's the other piece is that the FDA is actually
not allowed to test supplements for safety or efficacy before going to market because of a
1994 law that was enacted largely because of supplement industry funding. And so, you know,
really this country has a very
lax and almost no regulation of supplements. Yeah. It's the wild west.
The FDA can only recommend or, you know, require that a supplement be pulled from the market after
it's been on the market and has been, you know, there's been complaints about it. It's been tested
for safety or efficacy at that point. However, even in that
process, things often still stay on the shelves for five years. They're not regulated in the way
they really should be. Warning letters are not very effective. Supplement industry is problematic.
It is absolutely the Wild West. I think that that's part of it, is that a lot of these wellness MLMs
are based largely on supplements. Supplements are a huge profit driver for companies, you know, so they, so, uh, a wellness MLM might sell
supplements as sort of its core thing, but then it also sells, you know, other, whatever weight
loss tools or shakes or whatever it might be. Although those oftentimes often do fall under
the realm of supplements as well. Um, so there's that piece of it. And then I think there's the
other piece of like the lack of regulation of the business model, because the business model
has been compared to a pyramid scheme. It's certainly a pyramid shape. So basically,
the only difference is that there is an actual product to be sold in an MLM, whereas in a pyramid
scheme, there's no product being sold. However, in practice, the product itself is such a minimal part of how
someone could actually make any sort of profit in an MLM. So, you know, they're buying in at
really high rates or spending thousands of dollars to get into the MLM to like, you know,
buy the introductory kit that they need to be able to sell the product and then their actual profit
or whatever they could earn. It's not even really a profit for most people, very like 1% of people actually make any sort of profit in MLMs, according to some research.
They will, you know, the real way that they make money is to recruit other people, right? To get
people in what's called their downline. So they have other recruits or other distributors under
them, and then they're taking a cut of their sales. And that's how they end up making their
money and getting more and more and more people in their downline. So I think that's the other
piece of it is that it's a predatory system. It's a predatory business model. And so many people who
are vulnerable in multiple ways will be seduced or sucked in for both of those reasons, you know, because they're
struggling with health conditions perhaps, and they want to get, you know, whatever the supplement
is or the protocol or plan that's being sold as this miracle thing. And then the business model
is so predatory that, you know, people get sucked in and told like, oh, it actually behooves you to
become a distributor because if you're going to be using this product, you'll, you you'll make more money and you'll save more money if you're a distributor too.
And you can make back some of what you're spending.
And it's very appealing and seductive.
And there's very little oversight on what claims can be made, what health claims are being made.
Because in theory, there is some enforcement on sort of what official channels can say, right?
Like what the official representatives
of the company are supposed to say or allowed to say. And the MLM companies do crack down a little
bit if they see someone making a public statement that's getting reported on social media or
something like that for, you know, making a claim like this can cure COVID or whatever, which was
huge during the pandemic. You know, a lot of MLM supplements supposedly are curing COVID or
essential oils or whatever it might be. But then in practice, like the way that this sort of
distributed marketing model works is that, you know, the salespeople don't work for the company.
They're considered independent distributors. So they can say whatever they want in their
marketing and they have guidance of what they're supposed to say and not say from the company,
but it can be super confusing, honestly. And the way that supplements are regulated, I think, plays into this because,
again, as part of that 1994 law, supplement companies can make what's called structure
function claims. So they can't claim that a supplement will cure or prevent any sort of
disease, but they can make a claim about the structure or function of the body and how it
supposedly supports it. So they can't say, you know, prevents heart disease or cures heart disease,
but they can say supports heart health. You know, they can't say prevents like diabetes
related mortality, but they can say supports a healthy metabolism or whatever. So it actually
in practice, you know, speaking of like casting a wide net and
sort of being relevant to a large audience, right? Like these structure function claims actually kind
of make the product more relevant to a greater number of people, right? There's only a certain
number of people with diagnosed heart disease, for example, but there's lots of people who want
to support their heart health and who think that's a good thing. So I think it's, yeah,
I think the MLM industry sort of pulls in a lot of these things with,
you know, a lot of these different sectors in wellness culture where people are vulnerable,
where there's a lack of regulation and oversight. It all kind of comes together in this nexus of
MLMs and it makes it just the wild west in so many ways, both in terms of the products being sold,
their safety and efficacy and the business model and sort of how people are sucked in, in that way. And then as soon as people are in that universe,
they often feel trapped and beholden to the company and like they can't get out unless they,
you know, make their money back. And so then they become ambassadors for this product and
this company that, you know, in some cases, especially in
the later stages when people are starting to get out, they don't even necessarily believe in,
but they feel like they have to just sell, sell, sell in order to make ends meet, you know?
And they're often sold this promise of like, work from home, spend time with your kids,
you're a new mom, get your body back and also like be there for your child while making an
income for your family. It's really
appealing and very understandable why people fall for it. And I think it's just a whole shady
industry that needs much more regulation. Yeah. This is something that I've spoken about
everywhere on my social media. This is ultimately the reason behind why I develop my own line new
theory is because the supplement industry is completely the Wild West.
It's not well regulated.
A lot of the MLM products out there have not been third party tested.
And like you said, the kind of health advisors out there, the advisors or the representatives can make claims without repercussions.
And of course they can.
They're largely lay people.
They're not dieticians.
They're not necessarily founders. Not to mention, there's just so much irony in the system because,
you know, they're out there promoting health. They're out there recommending to women to take
this on as part of their lifestyle to improve their health. When we know how important social
determinants of health are in determining health outcomes. And financial health is so central to our overall
well-being. And MLMs largely are enticing women who are already financially struggling with the
promise of financial freedom, be a boss, babe. And then the majority of these folks end up losing
money. So not only are the products generally shit, poorly manufactured, lack efficacy,
lack testing, making claims that they really should not be making because the supplement
industry allows them to because it's so poorly regulated, and therefore they're unlikely to
improve physical health. But now they're actually draining families further and may actually worsen
health through that.
So it's vicious.
It's very predatory.
And you're absolutely right.
It needs way more regulation.
But that kind of brings me to my last question here, which is, you know, in the book, you talk a lot about moving from solely focusing on physical wellness to focusing on well-being.
What does that mean to you? Yeah, I think wellness is so focused on the physical and, you know,
might pay lip service to mental health or sexual health or financial health or whatever it might be, especially these days.
I think the wellness companies and entrepreneurs have gotten wise that there is more to health
and that social determinants of health exist, but it's not at all central.
Goop might have an article about it once in a while about mental health or whatever, but
I think in practice, the impact of so many of
these wellness interventions on people's mental health and wellbeing is just completely neglected.
And, you know, the way that going on a restrictive diet and taking a whole bunch of supplements and
spending all of your savings on these interventions in the hopes that they're going to work,
the way that impacts people, both in terms of, you know, their feelings of self-efficacy of, you know, being able to take care of themselves
and making the right choice. You know, I've talked to so many people who felt just so guilty and
ashamed of having been sucked into this world and feeling like they, you know, did themselves a real
disservice and their families a real disservice and like feel, you know, why, why would I get
duped by this? Like, how could I be so, you know, whatever, but they're not, you know, I think there's so many good reasons why people
get sucked into this. And then also the, the disordered eating piece of it, which, you know,
is, was sort of my entry point to this as a dietician, like seeing people get so sucked in
and activated and have their eating disorder or disordered eating symptoms, um, worsened,
you know, really challenging
their recovery by being a part of MLMs or wellness culture in general. That's a really huge piece of
it as well that, you know, wellness culture just puts so many people at risk of disordered eating.
We're in a culture already that, you know, because of diet culture that is so endemic within our
society that makes people feel so bad about
their bodies and feel ashamed of what they eat and that, you know, have these beliefs in good
and bad food and that they need to restrict and that they need to always be trying to lose weight.
And, you know, all of that is so detrimental to well-being. And there's so much weight stigma
baked into our society, so much, you know, food stigma baked into our society. And then to have wellness culture come along and say, you can heal yourself, you can take
matters into your own hands, your health is within your control as long as you do these
things, cut out these foods, add these supplements.
It is so appealing and such an obvious slide from where we already exist as a culture and have
existed, right? It's, and wellness culture, you know, as I talk about in the book, it really
builds on the pillars of diet culture, these, you know, the core, the sort of core beliefs of diet
culture being that weight loss is good, you know, worshiping thinness and equating it to health and
moral virtue, promoting weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, whether that's health
status, moral status, social status, or all the above, really demonizing certain foods while elevating
others and oppressing people who don't match its supposed picture of health in various ways.
And it really is rooted, as I talked about in my first book, Anti-Diet, rooted in
anti-black racism, the work of Sabrina Strings, sociologist, really captures And, and so I think there's that piece of
it, right? Wellness culture just really plugs into this preexisting belief system of diet culture and
builds on top of it. And then there are all these other ways that it sort of promises to be something
different, right? It's like, well, diets haven't worked for you, but try this for wellness. This
is our wellness plan. This is a protocol that actually is going to work. And yeah, you know, old, old school diets are out, wellness is in, and here's how
you achieve it. And I know so many people who, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to write
the wellness trap is that I've worked with so many clients who like really started to see through
diet culture and see it for what it was and start to heal their relationship with food and their
bodies and, um, you know, move away from disordered eating to a more intuitive approach, but then got seduced and sucked in by wellness
cultural approaches because there were chronic conditions they were still dealing with, or they
were going through a life change like menopause or perimenopause or, you know, having had a baby
and trying to quote unquote, get their body back and all of this stuff that, you know, there are a
lot of symptoms and issues that might come up with that. And wellness culture is
sort of right there to sell a supposed solution. And the promise, as you mentioned, of getting to
the root cause, this integrative, functional, alternative medicine kind of worldview of
doctors, they only want to treat the symptoms. They don't have your best interest at heart.
We're going to actually get to the root cause. We're actually going to treat you, you know, treat the whole
person, whatever. It's, it's also seductive and appealing. And I know I fell for it myself too,
back in the day. And, and still, you know, these days, if I'm having flare-ups of a chronic
condition, there's just, there's an appeal to that, right? It's like, oh, if only that were true.
And now I know better and I, you know, I'm less likely to get sucked in, but I think all of us
are vulnerable at some level. And, you know, I think we just need to be vigilant. So that's one of the
reasons I wrote this book was just to help people be more aware of what's going on in that world,
in the wellness world and how it can really dovetail with and exacerbate disordered eating.
Oh yeah. Such amazing, amazing points. And, you know, I've talked about this before, but I feel
like, you know, what I want people to understand is like for extreme wellness culture to operate and thrive, it kind of, it needs to actively deny the role of any internal, external factors related to health, including those important kind of, you know, components of holistic well-being like social health, financial health, et cetera. And in the case of something like an MLM
or like expensive or useless cancer treatments,
it may actually be causing
or amplifying some of these health disparities.
And that's the real disappointment in it all.
But thank you, Christy, for sharing this all today.
It's, your knowledge is so useful to us all.
And congratulations on the new book,
The Wellness Trap.
And you've got a new podcast, Rethinking Wellness. Do you want to just kind of quickly tell us about what you're
kind of covering in that? Sure. Yeah. So Rethinking Wellness really expands on the conversations I had
for The Wellness Trap. It was, you know, born out of these interviews I did with sources for that,
that I just wanted to keep having those conversations and expanding on this idea of,
you know, wellness culture and dubious diagnoses and
how that all intersects with diet culture and disordered eating and looking at, you know,
health and wellness trends from a lens of critical thinking and compassionate skepticism. So, you
know, I'm not here to demonize people who fall into those traps because again, I have done it
myself and I think we're all susceptible. So I try to bring a real lens of compassion to my work and my approach. But, you know, at the same time, really pulling back the curtain and looking at the science behind some of these claims, especially, you know, health and wellness claims, food, nutrition claims that are being made in wellness culture and looking at what the science really says and how people can protect themselves and think critically about the claims and social media analysis of social media is definitely a part
of that as well.
Thinking critically about influencers and algorithms and how that all plays a role in
amplifying misinformation and disinformation.
And yeah, I've just found it really fascinating.
I've been doing it for about a year and a half now and it's on Substack so you can get
the podcast as
well as the written newsletter. And it drops in podcast feeds every week. And there's written
content as well. You can find that all at rethinkingwellness.substack.com or just
search for Rethinking Wellness wherever you're listening to this.
Amazing. I will be leaving links to all of those plus your OG pod,
Food Psych, in the show notes. Thank you so much, Christy, for joining us.
Thank you so much.
Such an important conversation with some really good reminders of specific common points of entry
for wellness culture grifters and pseudoscience. And as I alluded to a moment ago, you know,
wellness culture often promotes the idea that individuals have full
control over their bodies and health outcomes through personal choices like diet, exercise,
and lifestyle habits. This belief rests on the assumption that if you make the quote-unquote
right choices, you can prevent or cure disease, achieve an ideal body, and optimize health indefinitely.
It frames health as something that is entirely within one's grasp, ignoring the complex web of
internal and external factors that are inevitably at play. And that's not to say that our health
destiny is set in stone and nothing that we can do can shift our trajectory or improve
outcomes, that is absolutely not true. Otherwise, my RD colleagues wouldn't have jobs helping people
reduce their cholesterol levels or improve their A1c. But it's important to still acknowledge that
the control that we have to make those choices can and often is hindered by various social and economic systems
that are outside our individual control. I'm largely talking about the social determinants
of health. The social determinants of health relate to an individual's place in society
that impacts their health risks and outcomes, including income, employment, education,
social supports, and physical access to health care or health promoting activities,
along with experiences of discrimination that often affect care. If this is the first time
you've heard that term, the social determinants of health, I wanted to share some statistics and
examples to help illustrate its effects.
In Glasgow, male life expectancy ranges a full 15 and a half years between the most wealthy
and least wealthy communities. In London, if you're traveling east from Westminster Station
into some of the lower income neighborhoods, each stop on the tube represents nearly one year of life expectancy lost.
In Canada, for every $10,000 increase in family income, your kids are 12% less likely to be
classified as obese.
If you only have a high school education as a white man, you're 42% more likely to have
type 2 diabetes compared to men with a bachelor's degree or higher.
For Hispanic men, not going to college is associated with a 64% greater likelihood of
diabetes. If you're a black woman, you're 2.6 times more likely to die giving birth than if
you are white. And if you make less than $20,000 per year, you're more than one and a half
times more likely to have IBS than if you are making 75k, likely related to increased life
stress. Chronic stress, access to preventative health care, food insecurity, lower health
literacy, and lack of recreational time are just some of the many reasons for these statistics. So for example,
we have ample evidence that a lot of folks who are already struggling financially find themselves
living in lower income food deserts that lack easy access to fresh nutritious foods. The result is
that nutritious foods become even more expensive and inaccessible, and fruits and vegetable consumption then declines. Being of
lower socioeconomic status can also result in healthcare providers skipping over important
lifestyle recommendations. So for example, one study found that lower income patients with IBS
were less likely than their more middle class counterparts to be given any education or information about low FODMAP
foods to help improve their symptoms. Counter to what extreme wellness culture might have you
believe, if we put genetics aside for a second, socioeconomic factors are the biggest factors
related to health outcomes, accounting to 50% of outcomes compared to the 34% related to the
quote-unquote health behaviors that people actively engage in. As we've hopefully illustrated though,
our ability to participate in healthy behaviors are in many ways dependent on our socioeconomic
position, so I do think it's nearly impossible to tease these contributors apart.
To achieve true holistic wellness and well-being, we need to address these systemic inequalities
and access to quality care and healthy behaviors rather than drive people further into poverty
with MLMs or dubious cancer curing scams.
We're going to be exploring these themes in a lot more detail
in episodes to come because, you know, acknowledging our own internal and external roadblocks to
quote-unquote health with compassion and empathy is integral to helping us avoid these really
dangerous wellness and diet culture traps. But thank you again to Christy for sharing her expertise
and thank you for joining me to bite back against these systemic forces that make achieving true
well-being a challenge for so many. Signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abbey Sharp.
Thanks for listening. you