A Cautionary Tale on Grifty Wellness MLMs and Made Up Diagnoses (Leaky Gut & Adrenal Fatigue?) with Anti-Diet Dietitian Christy Harrison

In 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/foodpsych Rethinking Wellness Podcast and Substack: https://rethinkingwellness.substack.com/ Anti-Diet Book: https://christyharrison.com/book-anti-diet-intuitive-eating-christy-harrison The Wellness Trap Book: https://christyharrison.com/the-wellness-trap • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase: Amazon Barnes & Noble Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google Play Kobo Apple Books (Audiobook) Audible abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters: Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books: Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book Protein 101 E-Book 👋 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchen TikTok: @abbeyskitchen YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen Blog: abbeyskitchen.com Book: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:25Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 0:40Abbey Sharp?

  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. Kristy Harrison is a journalist, registered dietitian, and certified intuitive eating counselor.

• 1:21Abbey Sharp?

  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

• 2:06Abbey Sharp?

  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 Fight Back a review for this episode and just the podcast at large. It really, really does help me out as a new podcast.

• 2:41Abbey Sharp?

  All right. Thank you so much for joining me, Kristi.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me, Abbey. I'm excited to talk.

• 2:46Abbey Sharp?

  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 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.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  No, thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

• 3:28Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so intuitive eating is really a dynamic interplay between inner attunement and outer awareness of nutrition facts as well as your needs, your body's individual needs, but inner attunement, meaning your attunement to your hunger and fullness cues, your desires, without the influence of diet culture, without 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, right? 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.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  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, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  It's an anti diet approach. The founders Evelyn Tribole and Elise Rush, 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, you know, with any sort of nutritional fads or wellness diets in mind.

• 5:35Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, so helpful. And, and you've got a course. I will link to that in the show notes below if folks are kind of 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 know, 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?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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. You know, I think people who have cancer understandably are desperate for healing.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Their loved ones as well are often, you know, 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, you know, there's sort of a gap there, I think, in conventional health care because, yes, we do know a lot about various kinds of cancers. You know, "we" meaning like the health care 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

• 7:44Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  And these wellness, you know, 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.

• 8:43Abbey Sharp?

  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, quote, 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.

• 9:26Abbey Sharp?

  They hear, 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, and these messages, yeah, they're everywhere and, and it is very dangerous. But speaking of sugar detoxes as the catchall 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?

• 10:11Speaker 00

  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 can, that lives in, 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 the, this fungus can overgrow in various parts of the body. The most obvious is, you know, vaginal yeast infection that many people have experienced, but there's other forms of yeast infections in different parts of the body.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  And it can become systemic and it's actually life threatening if that happens. But that's in cases of, you know, if someone has immune suppression or they're in long-term hospitalization, you know, they have a lot of other. Co-occurring, you know, 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, you know, 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, 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.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  And, you know, this catch-all diagnosis of chronic candida is 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. Right, yeah. 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, and 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,

• 12:22Speaker 00

  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, 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, there's no relation, really. So it's, it's a really problematic dubious diagnosis, because again, you know, these underlying, the symptoms that people have that they're maybe searching for answers for could have other explanations, you know? 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

• 13:05Speaker 00

  disordered eating, often or exacerbating pre-existing disordered eating, and oftentimes becoming, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  And so it just pushes people to greater and greater extremes with with their eating.

• 13:51Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, this is unfortunately exactly my my story too, in my my late teens with orthorexia. It started out was cut out 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.

• 14:25Abbey Sharp?

  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?

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So again, it's a dubious diagnosis. It's not real. It's not recognized recognized by, you know, medical authorities, medical bodies. It's it's not a, you know, 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 this of the intestines. And, you know, 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. That those nutrients. However, there are certain conditions that can increase the permeability.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  And potentially, you know, researchers are still very much in the process of 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 permeable, right, 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,

• 16:15Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  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, is people have linked it, you know, spurious, linked, suppose a leaky gut to autism. You know, and again, there's these grains of truth in 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, you know, or reduce your intestinal permeability. Nothing has really been scientifically validated in that sense, in the way that, you know, wellness culture is telling people, again,

• 17:40Speaker 00

  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 incredibly appealing, I think. And just also, you know, this idea that some 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

• 18:25Speaker 00

  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 a, you know, seen as sort of a godlike figure in some functional medicine circles, right? He has said, he wrote a paper that's like, "All disease begins in the leaky gut." And, you know, 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.

• 19:00Abbey Sharp?

  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

• 19:43Abbey Sharp?

  leaky gut causing IBD, never mind 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 layperson. 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, you know, it really kind of went through a wave of popularity. What's adrenal fatigue?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so again, adrenal fatigue is not a real condition. It's, 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, 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.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  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 fatigued. 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,

• 21:52Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, you know, more than capable of handling whatever stress we experience. There's certainly are effects of chronic stress that have nothing to do with that. But, you know, the adrenals don't get burned

• 22:37Speaker 00

  out, but like sustained high cortisol over time can certainly have systemic effects on the body. But, you know, it doesn't work in the way that this guy claimed. And yet, this, 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 diet, you know, quote unquote, diagnose people with adrenal fatigue based on just a series of questions, self-reports. There's no, you know, biomarkers, there's no blood being taken, like there's 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, you know, with this so-called notion of adrenal fatigue, there really isn't any evidence

• 23:22Speaker 00

  that it exists. And yet, people are being, you know, sold this bill of goods, 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, you know, replace the depleted cortisol that people supposedly have for their adrenals being burnt, being burnt out, which is not a thing. And actually, being on long-term gluco or corticosteroids, long-term corticosteroid use is actually a risk factor for something called adrenal insufficiency, which does have,

• 24:04Speaker 00

  you know, it is a real condition. It's very rare. There's genetic versions of the condition that, you know, are super, super rare. But then one of the versions that is called secondary adrenal insufficiency is, is something that can actually happen, is 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, these pills.

• 24:34Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:48Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:01Abbey Sharp?

  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, you know, in, in the MLM industry. Why do you think that is? And why are MLMs ultimately just so dangerous for folks?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'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 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 from largely because of supplement industry funding. And so, you know, really this country has a very lax and almost no regulation of supplements.

• 26:09Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, it's the Wild West.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  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 and it's been tested for for safety or efficacy at that point. However, even in that process, things are often still stay on the shelves for five years. You know, they're not regulated in the way they really should be, you know, warning letters are not very effective. Supplement industry is problematic. It is absolutely the Wild West. Yeah. And so I think that that's part of it is that, you know, a lot of these wellness MLMs are based largely on supplements and supplements are a huge profit driver for companies, you know, so they so a wellness MLM might sell supplements as sort of its core thing, but

• 26:53Speaker 00

  then it also sells, you know, other whatever weight loss tools or shakes or whatever it might be, although those often time often do fall under the realm of supplements as well. 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, you know, 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

• 27:38Speaker 00

  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 the real way that they make money is to recruit other people. 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, that's how they end up making their money and getting more and more and more people in their downline, right? So I think that's the other piece of it is that it's a predatory,

• 28:14Speaker 00

  you know, 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 know, 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

• 28:57Speaker 00

  being made, because in theory, there is some enforcement on sort of what official channels can, can say, right? Like whether, 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, the salespeople don't work for the company. They're just, they're considered independent distributors. So they can say whatever they want in their marketing and they have, they have guidance

• 29:40Speaker 00

  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,

• 30:23Speaker 00

  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, it makes it just the wild west in so many ways and both in terms of the products being sold, their safety and efficacy and the business model and sort of how people

• 31:05Speaker 00

  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 know, you're a new mom, get your body back and also like be there for your child while making an income for your family. You know, it's really appealing and very understandable

• 31:48Speaker 00

  why people fall for it. And I think it's just a whole shady industry that needs much more regulation.

• 31:53Abbey Sharp?

  Yeah, you know, this is something that I've spoken about everywhere on my, on my social media. This is ultimately the reason behind why I, you know, developed 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, 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 laypeople. They're not dieticians, they're not necessarily founders. Not to mention, there's just so much irony in this system because, you know, they're, they're out there promoting health. They're out there recommending to, to women to take this on as part of their lifestyle, to improve their health.

• 32:37Abbey Sharp?

  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, you know, 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.

• 33:19Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 33:45Abbey Sharp?

  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?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think wellness is so focused on the physical and, you know, it might pay lip service to mental health or sexual health or financial health, or whatever it might be, you know, especially these days. I think the wellness companies and entrepreneurs have gotten wise that there is more to health and, and, you know, that social determinants of health exist. But it's not really. It's not at all central. I mean, 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 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

• 34:41Speaker 00

  to work, the way that impacts people, both in terms of their feelings of self-efficacy, of being able to take care of themselves, of making the right choice. 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 did themselves a real disservice and their families a real disservice and like, why would I get duped by this? Like, how could I be so, whatever? But they're not. I think there's so many good reasons why people get sucked into this. And then also, the disordered eating piece of it, which was sort of my entry point to this as a dietitian, like seeing people get so sucked in and activated and have their eating

• 35:20Speaker 00

  disorder or disordered eating symptoms worsened, 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 wellness culture just puts so many people at risk of disordered eating. We're in a culture already that, 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 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 all of that is so detrimental to wellbeing and there's so much weight stigma baked into our society, so much food stigma

• 36:02Speaker 00

  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 so, it's just an obvious sort of slide from where we already exist as a culture and have existed, right? 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 obtaining higher status, whether that's health status, moral status, social status,

• 36:45Speaker 00

  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 that. And, and so I think there's that piece of it, right? Wellness culture just really plugs into this pre-existing 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, 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.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  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 if what it was and start to heal their relationship with food and their bodies and, you know, move away from disordered eating to a more intuitive approach, but then got seduced and sucked in by wellness culture 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, and wellness culture is sort of right there to sell a supposed solution. And the promise, as you mentioned, of like getting to the root cause, right?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  This, you know, integrative functional alternative medicine kind of worldview of like, you know, doctors don't, they only want to treat the symptoms. They don't have your best interests 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 all so 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, 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.

• 38:58Abbey Sharp?

  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 wellbeing, 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, Kristy, for sharing this all today. It's, your knowledge is so useful to us all.

• 39:41Abbey Sharp?

  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?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  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

• 40:31Speaker 00

  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, you know, protect themselves and think critically about the claims and Social media, you know, 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's, you know, drops in podcast feeds every week. And there's written content as well. You can find that all at rethinkingwellness.substack.com

• 41:14Speaker 00

  or just search for rethinking wellness wherever you're listening to this.

• 41:17Abbey Sharp?

  Amazing. I will be leaving links to all of those, plus your OG Pod, Food Psych, in the show notes. Thank you so much, Kristy, for joining us.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 41:29Abbey Sharp?

  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, quote, "right" choices, you can prevent or cure disease, achieve an ideal body, and optimize health indefinitely. It frames health as something that is entirely

• 42:10Abbey Sharp?

  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.

• 42:51Abbey Sharp?

  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 healthcare 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 1/2 years between the most wealthy and least wealthy communities.

• 43:35Abbey Sharp?

  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

• 44:20Abbey Sharp?

  are white. And if you make less than $20,000 per year, you're more than 1.5 times more likely to have IBS than if you are making $75,000, likely related to increased life stress. Chronic stress, access to preventative healthcare, 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,

• 45:03Abbey Sharp?

  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

• 45:47Abbey Sharp?

  "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,

• 46:28Abbey Sharp?

  you know, acknowledging our own internal and external roadblocks to "health" with compassion and empathy is integral to helping us avoid these really dangerous wellness and diet culture traps. But thank you again to Kristy 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 SaaS, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening.