The Wellness Trap

March 1, 2023

In Anti-Diet, Harrison excavated the racist, classist, and capitalist roots of the diet industry. Her latest book covers similar ground. Harrison describes wellness as a set of expensive practices and a related belief system that maintains a hierarchy privileging thin, white, affluent people. This saleable version of wellness culture is racially, culturally, and socioeconomically exclusive--almost parodic when discussed in relation to wacky Goop-style trends, but tragic when one considers the ways in which racial and socioeconomic discrimination lead to poor access to healthcare for some. At times, the author succumbs to her rigid, black-and-white thinking, and there's a slight preachiness that many will find off-putting. Her rhetorical strategy, to simply invert the tactics of wellness-industry pundits lauding the evils of fast food, only provides skeptics with reasons to distance themselves from Harrison's argument. Well-researched and carefully documented as it is, the book feels a bit sprawling and unfocused--perhaps justifiably, since the wellness complex has, as Harrison describes it, infiltrated everything from medical research to social media. VERDICT This title demonstrates that the wellness industry differs from true well-being as much as spa treatments differ from Audre Lorde's original idea of self-care for activists. A valuable addition to conversations about race, class, ableism, and diet culture.--Emily Bowles

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 20, 2023
“Wellness culture is a trap, keeping us stuck in a narrow view of what it means to be well and exposing us to much that is harmful,” contends nutritionist Harrison (Anti-Diet) in this incisive takedown. She surveys the dangers posed by the alternative medicine industry, including the largely unregulated vitamin and supplement market, restrictive diets that can induce disordered eating, and Western practitioners’ superficial commodification of such traditional Eastern healing disciplines as yoga or Ayurveda. Harrison situates contemporary wellness purveyors in the tradition of 19th-century snake oil salesmen and posits that both exploit medical uncertainties to lure desperate patients into buying products that don’t work. Proposing smart and wide-ranging solutions, she advocates for legislation to ameliorate the social determinants of ill health and calls on readers to evaluate potential misinformation by following the SIFT formula: stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims to their original source. The historical perspective elevates Harrison’s analysis, and her empathy for those who fall for disinformation yields illuminating insight (getting into wellness culture, she writes, “starts with feeling disappointed, unheard, or excluded by the Western medical system”). This is an ideal companion for those disillusioned by the medical establishment.

April 1, 2023
A hard look at health and diet scams. Harrison, a dietician, journalist, and author of Anti-Diet, mounts a persuasive critique of the multitrillion-dollar wellness industry. Distinguishing between wellness and well-being, the author faults the wellness industry for selling the idea that individual choice--"the things you do," rather than genetics or social determinants--is central to attaining and maintaining health. "And doing those things," Harrison notes, "typically requires a fair amount of economic privilege." Emphasizing the overlap between wellness and diet culture, the author shows how restrictive diets, juice cleanses, and intuitive fasting have incited eating disorders. "For many people," Harrison asserts, "wellness culture's views on food are a gateway into a belief system where every product is a potential threat, every lifestyle choice a matter of life and death." Wellness culture denigrates conventional medicine, portraying doctors, in league with big pharma, as more interested in financial gain than healing. In contrast to medical diagnoses, wellness practitioners have invented ailments such as adrenal fatigue, leaky gut syndrome, and chronic candida, for which they offer a host of useless supplements and expensive treatments. Harrison sees a strong link between the claims of much alternative medicine and conspiracy theorists: Both believe "nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected." Both spread misinformation and disinformation--about the perils of vaccination, for example--through social media. Harrison urges tech companies to stop this insidious spread and calls on Congress to repeal a 1994 law that barred the FDA from testing or approving herbal and dietary supplements. Most empathically, she urges us to think critically about the wellness industry's claims. "Wellness culture is a trap," she writes, "keeping us stuck in a narrow view of what it means to be well and exposing us to much that is harmful--weight stigma, scams, conspiracy theories, damaging approaches to mental health, false diagnoses." A sobering, well-informed analysis of widespread deceit.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.