Today, Explained - Going broke on wellness

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

Americans spend billions on healthcare products, from green powders and cold plunges to costly gym memberships. Last summer we asked: what good do they do? This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Matthew Billy, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Visitors wear the Myblend myLEDmask2 "Anti-Aging" product at the FIBO trade show for health, fitness and wellness in Cologne, Germany. Photo by Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail] to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made. made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. We 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. 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 son of. We're all in our wellness era these days, and our producer, Hadimawadhi 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 got to get you to cold punch with me, well, come on. I should have brought shorts. Well, 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 different wellness. All right, I'm ready.

I'm ready. I'm ready. All right. That's how I can roll. Woo! Oh my goodness. This is freezing. I'm John Glenn Hill,

and this is a rerun of a favorite episode of Explain It to Me from Vox. Two. Okay. Three. Three. Pull it down. We're the show that takes on the big questions.

Questions like, what is wellness? Wellness. It's a. 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 used 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. country and we have the worst health outcomes. But what does it actually mean? 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. 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 LaRaca 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. And then I've seen it

attached to really weird stuff like checking accounts and condos. After her, research, Amy snailed 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 Cuyah Wellness in Austin, Texas. Okay, Hadi, I assume that you are out of the and all warmed up. Are you ready to go? Absolutely. Let's do it, JQ. 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 L.A. 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 Kuya. 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. And it's built that way on purpose. So you're invited to want to stay. You know, Megan told me about a infrared light sauna. You sit in the sauna about full. 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. It has an amino blend, a mineral blend, vitamin C, and also a big complex in it. It's great for recovery. But these year-round memberships, they include free Kuya events like storytelling workshops, aromatherapy workshops, and breathwork classes inside of a sauna. Find my count in two. 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. This 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 p.m. 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. 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'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. 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. 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. 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 sonnying and cold plunging and, I don't know, laying around on that soundbed after a very long work week. 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. All right, Hadi, thank you for going on this journey for us.

Oh yeah, it was a pleasure. Okay, so wellness is this trillion dollar industry, but how did it? we get here in the first place? That's next. Support for the show date comes from Mint Mobile. When I say Mint, you don't have to say anything. When we were kids, summer meant freedom, no homework, no teachers, no school. And as adult, summer still means freedom thanks to Mint Mobile summer sale. Nothing says summer, like a summer sale on your mobile plan. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, including their unlimited plans. Hey, you can free yourself from big wireless and get away from the gimmicks and

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but if you have listened to the show very loyally, you've probably heard it before because I've said it before. Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000, according to one study. Be prepared with Fetch Pet Insurance. Fetch is the most complete coverage for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate. Fetch covers accidents, illnesses, diagnostics, and more. Every vet in the United States and Canada is in network, and you can build a plan that fits your budget. And once approved, claims are paid back in as little as two days. To learn more, go to fetchpet.com slash save. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Dying to live well. We're back. It's explained 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 from seeking alternatives. The problem is that one of the way in which wellness promoters market their materials is by promoting, quote unquote, science or research to support their claims.

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. 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. I 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. 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. So when I hear the name Kellogg, I admit that I think of my Breckley.

for 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 serial 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, et cetera, which, you know, in and of itself is not a bad thing. I mean, diet, exercise, and sleep. 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 and eating well in 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 and he would view it in a very punitive way. 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. 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. 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, and he was very hostile to vaccines. Oh, okay.

So you're telling me that an anti-Vex 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, 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. 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. 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. At the same time, it really disadvantaged folks who were 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.

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 Howard 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 awesome. 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 an actually pretty good way to think about wellness. 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. 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, you know, if we ask one wellness guru to define wellness, we'll hear a different answer from another one. So that's then. But where does wellness stand now? That's after the break. Support for the show comes from Ship Station. If shipping is an essential part of your business, you can't afford to get it wrong. You need to get it right. You need your order fulfilled to be fast, efficient, and cost effective.

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that don't talk to each other. Introducing O-DU. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-3 at O-D-O-D-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. Well, wellness. Remember how Hottie tried all those different wellness treatments? Well, Amy LaRaca 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. 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. These mushrooms make you feel better. They increase focus, energy while keeping you calm and stress-free.

This is the future of foundational nutrition. One scoop once a day. Being a human is hard, especially if you're a woman who's also having trouble doing that totally normal thing all humans do. Oh, you mean pooping? And that's where it gets into, why do people want it? Because it's a luxury product. Why do people want a proud of handbag?

And I think wellness is kind of following that trajectory. I'm a wellness girlie. Of course I start my morning with oil polling. I'm a wellness girlie. Of course I only use clean. vegan cruelty-free makeup products. Because we have a really messed up health care system in this country, but health care to the very wealthy is excellent, probably the best it's ever been anywhere in the world. Again, wellness

is a luxury. 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? I think we got there because so many segments of the population. have been neglected and really mistreated by the medical establishment. Patients were being harmed by a lot of the embedded conflict of interests within United's Business Empire and its operations. 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.

Who is wellness marketed towards? Who is wellness for? for everyone? Right now it's really being marketed to everyone. It's kind of like the sort of devil wears Prada blue sweater, right? 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, 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 you're working. You're one.

wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. 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. You've talked about this idea of being a well woman. Yeah. How can you be a well woman and is it worth it? Well, I mean, if you think of like the Orwell woman as Gwina Paltrow, no, most of us are never, ever, ever going to be that.

And thank God. 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. But I think what you can do, and a lot of people keep asking me, well, you know, what's your takeaway? And you've researched all these things and you've tried all these things. 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. You need to drink some water. You need to manage your stress levels. It's really the basics that matter. 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. Yeah. You've talked about the discrepancies and 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. I read all the time about, like, just what it takes to keep LeBron James up and running. Yeah, for sure. But you know what? Like, LeBron James is a professional athlete.

Like, do it, LeBron. Like, that's your work. But it feels like it's like you all should be doing these things too. That's right. It's like, I can't afford that. I am not King James. I am so sorry. 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. And when I click on this email, inside this email, it's going to tell me, like, everything. And then I'm like, oh, not this time. And then the next email will come, like, wellness secrets. And I'm like, ooh, here they are. What are some of the most interesting wellness treatments you tried out when you were writing this book? I definitely did a lot of, like, cold and hot stuff. So I've been in the cryo chambers. I've been in the cold plunges. I definitely, like, experimented with. some of the food stuff. 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 calonic, which do not recommend 1,000%. Oh, okay, because people have told me they're like, I do it. It's great. You should do it. I think it's chasing that sort of high feeling of emptiness. There's a lot of unanswered questions and hypocrisies and wellness. So you'll spend all of your time being like, oh, my microbiome, my gut, I have to fix it. I have to fix it. 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, I'm like, I thought I was building my flora, you know. Now you're just going to wash it all out. So yeah, so there's a lot of things that don't add up. 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. Why is it that we give these things a try, you know? Like, I admit if there's a cold plunge and a sauna, I'm going to go back and forth. Oh, yeah, I'm in there. I'm going to do that temperature.

I'm in there. Yeah, like, some of this is fun. 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. 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 stuff? supplements. 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? 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. 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? I would. And that's our show. We actually did an entire series about wellness. You can find those episodes in the feed. And we're working hard on new episodes for you, including one about why we can't remember being babies. What's your earliest memory and how old do you think you were? Or if you're a parent, how do you feel about all the time you spent with your kid that they probably won't remember? Call 1-800-6-18-8545, or you can send an email to AskVox at Vox.com.

episode was produced by Hottie Mawagdi. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda Kennedy, Melissa Hirsch did the fact-checking, and Matthew Billy engineered. I'm John Glyn Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you?

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