A gap in the market
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wellness industry has seen an explosion in popularity – particularly among men, a change for a culture long associated with either crunchy hippies or affluent white women like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Put simply, “wellness” describes anything we use to support our overall health and wellbeing, outside of just treating illness and injury. But this belies a more complex reality: For some people, wellness means meditating and taking multivitamins. For others, it’s getting expensive IV infusions at high-end clinics. And for an alarming number of Americans, wellness means refusing to administer lifesaving vaccinations to vulnerable children.
“COVID-19 caused so much fear of the unknown. People who originally had felt like they had control over their health no longer felt that way,” said Mariah Wellman, a professor in the College of Communication at Michigan State University. “Wellness influencers were able to make people feel like they had control of their health again, through accurate and inaccurate information.”
Wellman studies social media influence on the wellness industry. She argues that wellness was historically supportive of mainstream medicine. But in the last decade it has increasingly become a social media-oriented industry that is often at odds with established science and medical professionals.
“[Wellness influencers] were there in the right place, at the right time,” she said. “We were seeing an increase of issues in our healthcare system. Patients are seeing their doctors for less and less time, fewer times per year.”
Patients, Wellman said, “feel ignored and devalued” by their doctors — especially when they come into an appointment having tried to research their own health concerns before seeing a physician. After losing trust in their medical providers, some Americans are looking for medical guidance and relationships outside traditional healthcare.
“Social media has such a low barrier to entry, and the accessibility is so high,” Wellman said, that users “get to communicate with these people on a pretty intimate level, on a day to day basis.”
By the digits
$6.3 trillion: The estimated value of the wellness industry, according to the Global Wellness Institute.
$250 million: How much Spotify pays Joe Rogan for the exclusive rights to his podcasts, which serve as an introduction to the world of health, fitness, and wellness for many people.
$75,000: The amount that one 81-year-old biohacker told Quartz he spends annually on anti-aging medical treatments.
32.1%: The proportion of American children who don’t eat vegetables every day, according to a 2021 report.
100 million: The number of Americans who don’t have primary care physicians, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
Don’t Die: A case study in extreme wellness
Death greets all who enter the Don’t Die Summit. Death, in this case, is a person who wears a grim reaper costume and menaces all who ask questions. Death refuses to speak and offers no answers.
In a different context, Death would probably be the strangest being present at the convention in New York on a snowy mid-February morning. But there’s an altogether stranger individual at the Don’t Die Summit: The event’s founder is Bryan Johnson, a man who would tell you he is death’s greatest enemy.
Johnson, 47, has built a second career based on his pursuit of immortality. He routinely goes viral for his bizarre health experiments: injecting his teenage son’s blood into his middle-aged body, swapping out all the plasma in his body, and using stem cells from young Swedish volunteers to alleviate his joint pain.
While Johnson describes his followers as part of a “longevity movement” and his adherents often refer to themselves as “biohackers,” the Don’t Die community is essentially a tech bro-oriented offshoot of the wellness industry.
His team markets the Don’t Die Summit as “the number one longevity event” in the world, where attendees “explore the newest therapies and technologies, and connect with like-minded individuals who share the goal of living longer, healthier lives.”
“We are at war with death,” Johnson tells the assembled masses of his followers. “We’re trying to create a new era of human beings.”
Though Johnson frames himself as a sort of general in this war, the Don’t Die Summit seems more like a religious revival than a base camp. He opens the event by asking his followers to share their recent “debauchery.”
One audience member says that she ate a quarter of a hamburger and fries for dinner the previous day. Another admits that when his father died 10 days earlier, he indulged in ice cream. A third person shares that he’s going to Las Vegas soon. But his weakness isn’t drinking. It’s “getting free stuff.” After each confession, the audience, led by Bryan, says, “we accept you.”
“It’s like a megachurch,” one skeptical attendee remarks afterwards. “It’s Bryan Johnsonism.”
If it is a religion, there seems to be quite a few heretics. While audience members seemed eager for absolution from the sins of eating sweets and fried food, during one-on-one conversations, many Don’t Die attendees said they were skeptical of Johnson’s claims or resistant to sacrificing drinking, going out in the sun, or staying up late – all of which are habits Johnson decries on stage.
In fact, almost every person at the Don’t Die Summit who expressed genuine enthusiasm for the movement also had something to gain financially. This wasn’t just the case for the vendors at the summit’s “Longevity Park” selling products including iRestore Elite Hair Growth Systems ($2,499), Sapphire Zero Gravity blue light phototherapy devices ($4,399), and hyperbaric oxygen tanks ($220 for a 60 minute session at one New York wellness center.)
It was also true for an Austrian health enthusiast building his own cryogenic chamber and a Philadelphia businessman bragging that his own hyperbaric chamber was more powerful than the one on display.
While it will be years before the scientific community can definitively prove (or disprove) if any of Johnson’s experiments actually stop death in its tracks, there’s one certainty in 2025: There’s a lot of money to be made in health and wellness.
Quotable
“You know, I use organic products, but I get lasers. It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu.” —Gwyneth Paltrow, in 2013, on the contradictions between her high-rolling lifestyle and her commitment to wellness.
Pop quiz
Which of these products was not sold by Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop?
A. A $66 egg-shaped jade or rose quartz stone that could be inserted into the body to “increase vaginal muscle tone”
B. Vagina-scented candles
C. Actual “goop” that could be used to “cleanse your chakras”
D. Body Vibe Stickers to “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies”
Check out the answer at the bottom of this email.
Brief history
Mid-19th Century: The German Lebensreform movement emerges in response to rapid advances in technology. The movement is both the origin of organic farming and also an early instance of people refusing to get mandatory vaccines.
1948: The United Nations establishes the World Health Organization (WHO), with the premise that “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” This is the root of the word “wellness.”
1975: Physician and alternative medicine advocate John Travis establishes the first wellness center, in California.
1980: The first ever Whole Foods Market opens in Austin, Texas.
1998: The now-discredited scientist and doctor Andrew Wakefield holds a news conference calling for the suspension of administration of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, due to his now-debunked theory that vaccination causes autism.
2008: Gwyneth Paltrow launches Goop as a weekly newsletter with the slogan, “Nourish the Inner Aspect.”
Fun fact!
Americans spend significantly more on wellness than any other country. In 2023, the United States wellness industry was worth $2 trillion. China, in second place, only spent $870 billion.
Watch this
Please Don’t Destroy: Wellness
Exhausted Saturday Night Live cast members discuss their “wellness” regimens, which include “intermittent sleeping” and drinking smoothies made of, “milk, ice cream, and chocolate sauce.”
Take me down this 🐰 hole!
Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Bryan Johnson have had Netflix shows about their respective approaches to wellness. The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow features mushroom trips and psychic mediums. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever showcases the medical treatments Johnson uses in an attempt to de-age himself.
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Today’s email was put together by Madeline Fitzgerald, who drank a lot of vitamin-enriched, prebiotic soda while writing it.
The correct answer to the pop quiz is C.