How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time

The present-day vogue for wellness is merely the latest attempt to convince women to buy products to correct for imagined deficiencies, according to this trenchant debut critique. Fashion reporter Larocca suggests that beauty product manufacturers responded to the rise of body positivity in the 2000s by promoting the concept of “glow,” rather than thinness, as the central marker of beauty, creating the illusion of inclusivity while insisting that looking good requires topical ointments and body brushes. Surveying the dubious science behind many wellness practices, she recounts getting a colonic (an enema “on steroids”) from a doctor who claimed that foods with opposite ionic charges “pile up... like sludge” inside the body without clinical intervention. Larocca also covers the more harmful aspects of the wellness space, positing that such trends as intermittent fasting and elimination diets promote disordered eating by implicitly equating skinniness with health. The nuanced analysis notes that while wellness culture’s appeal stems in part from legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s insidious influence on mainstream medicine, the supplements hawked by alternative medicine practitioners are usually subject to the same corrupting profit motives. Penetrating and thought-provoking, this will cause readers to think twice before reaching for the latest purported cure-all. Agent: David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)