TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. Today, we are diving into the trillion-dollar machine that is the wellness industry. From what we eat and how we sleep to how we age, move and think, wellness promises to optimize every corner of our lives. Writer Amy Larocca asks what’s really behind all the promises of this industry in her new book, “How To Be Well: Navigating Our Self-care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure At A Time.” In it, she dives into detoxes, colonics, infrared wraps, sweat lodges, wellness apps and supplements to figure out what is real and what’s really just good marketing. What she uncovers isn’t just a collection of trends but a vast and revealing system shaped by our beliefs about health, status, gender and worth. She’s asking, who does this culture of wellness really serve? Who does it leave behind? And why, even when we see through the sales pitch, we still buy in.
Amy Larocca is an award-winning journalist, serving as a fashion director and editor-at-large for New York Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country and the London Review of Books. Amy Larocca, welcome to FRESH AIR.
AMY LAROCCA: Hi, Tonya. Thank you so much.
MOSLEY: Well, you know, Amy, I went into this book thinking I knew what the wellness industry was comprised of. But then I realized that there’s so much under this umbrella of wellness that has made its way into the mainstream. So before we actually dive in, I want you to briefly define wellness and how big of an industry this actually is that we’re talking about.
LAROCCA: Well, it’s enormous. And one way that it’s sometimes helpful to think about wellness is to think, wellness is a luxury good. I covered the fashion industry for 20 years, and one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was I started to get intrigued by the many ways in which wellness was being sold using the same language and techniques that I’d watched luxury products be sold to women for 20 years. It was almost like women were being sold their own bodies back to themselves.
And the wellness industry is something that women are confronted with and asked to navigate on some level every single day. Of course, the degree of urgency varies wildly, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which a woman is untouched on almost a daily basis by wellness. And it’s such a complicated and such a vast web. But we’re all on this, like, sort of metaphorical and literal treadmill of self-improvement…
MOSLEY: Right.
LAROCCA: …All the time. And that’s how I think about wellness. It’s beauty standards. It’s, you know, feeling bad about your neck. It’s also the very, very, very real health concerns about ourselves and about our families that we’re forced to deal with.
MOSLEY: And you make the point to say it’s a luxury good that is really marketed towards women. I actually want you to read the first page of this book, which defines the ultimate female customer.
LAROCCA: (Reading) Do you know a well woman? Odds are you do. She is everywhere with her clean, clear skin, sipping from a nontoxic container full of an expensive, mysterious broth. She is the friend who is not religious but is spiritual. She swears by her transcendental meditation practice. She swears by a lot of things, like a very specific whisk for her matcha that she sourced from a very specific, ethical, artisanal website. She’s educated but not rigid in thought. She’s a seeker, and she is unashamed of her frailties because she is so actively engaged in finding unique solutions and cures. You might know her only virtually, but she shares enough about herself for you to understand that she is simultaneously ambitious and content. She has so much advice on how you might be more like her with her working definition of tincture and her pretty pill case full of pretty pills. She’s beautiful, tranquil, fertile, productive. She’s pure of intention, heavy metals, food dyes and dread.
MOSLEY: You have a sense of humor, and yet this speaks truth. I mean, depending on where you sit, the well woman – she sounds aspirational, or, you know, on the other side of that, she sounds insufferable.
LAROCCA: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: But many of us know her. I mean, many of us also want to be her. Maybe we are her. What is it, though, about her pursuit of wellness that is part of a larger epidemic? Because you used that term in the subtitle of the book, that we are in the midst of a self-care epidemic. That is a very strong word.
LAROCCA: Yeah. I think when you look at the fact that we’re being asked to spend – or being told, really, that we are on this cycle of self-improvement that requires that in order to be this well woman, in order to be the ideal woman, we need to be spending a lot of money and being perpetually dissatisfied with our natural state is something that I think is an exhausting and dangerous idea.
MOSLEY: You know, the thing about it, and you actually laid this out in the book, is that through time, there has always been an element of that…
LAROCCA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: …That, you know, you could date all the way back to – I think you were reading a book that looked at diary entries of young girls from…
LAROCCA: Oh, that book is fascinating.
MOSLEY: …The 1800s all the way to today. Whatever the trend is of the moment on how to be as a woman, we were in it. We were trying to…
LAROCCA: And the trend is always to improve…
MOSLEY: We were aspiring to be that.
LAROCCA: …Ourselves, right? You’re always trying to be something more. You’re always trying to be a better version. And this book is fascinating. The writer is named Joan Brumberg, and she goes through journal entries of young girls, and it’s like, you know, always girls are thinking, how am I going to be a better woman? How am I going to be more attractive, more appealing? How am I going to make people like me more? How am I going to be a better version of myself? And so much of wellness is about that. I became very interested in this notion that there is this kind of self that’s the ideal self.
And one of the ideas I became very fixated on – I started listening to a lot of wellness podcasts as I was doing my research. And so many of them were focused on this idea that you could get back to yourself. And they were often pitched to women at really crucial pivot points in women’s lives. You’ve just had a baby. Get back to yourself. You’re approaching menopause. Get back to yourself, as if there was some fixed idea of what the idealized self should be. And rather than saying, these are really important transitions in a woman’s life – you should roll forward; you should roll into and embrace the new identity – it was always like, no, no, no, no, there’s this fixed point that you should strive to return to. This sense of loss, this sense that you are always lacking and always chasing is really just common language that I think we as women have just taken as what we are – it’s a major part of womanhood – right? – is that we’re always striving.
MOSLEY: Is there something, though, about modern life right now…
LAROCCA: Oh, yeah.
MOSLEY: …That has made wellness feel urgent? It’s almost like a modern-day faith or religion to focus on yourself and improving yourself.
LAROCCA: Absolutely. So I think something about right now is that there’s a real sense of loss of faith in the institutions that we expect to guide us and the leaders that we expect to guide us when it comes to things like health. And I think you see that…
MOSLEY: Like traditional medicine, like a loss in faith of traditional medicine.
LAROCCA: A loss of faith in traditional medicine. And something that really intrigues me is that you get that on both sides of the political spectrum. So everyone is trying to prepare you for the end of the world. It’s just different ideas about why the end of the world is coming and different ideas about why there are no experts.
MOSLEY: Well, I think there also was something that happened – I mean, we actually know what happened around 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit, that it sort of supercharged this trend towards wellness but also, like, this lack of faith in traditional medicine.
LAROCCA: Yeah. So I think when the pandemic happened, I think a couple of different really crucial things happened. No. 1 is you lost the notion that anyone had any idea what was going on. You know, in the beginning particularly, when we were getting all sorts of information, when we had a president who was telling us to drink bleach, you lost the idea that there were experts.
MOSLEY: And also a questioning of the experts with, like, the questioning of Dr. Fauci.
LAROCCA: The questioning of Dr. Fauci. The idea that the advice would change on a daily basis – wear your mask, don’t wear your mask. You know, the virus is on packages. Do you not need to wipe down your packages? You know, you can get the virus once – no, you can’t – you can get it twice. The advice kept changing, and people were very unsure. Was the advice politically motivated? Was it not politically motivated? And very quickly, you sort of had to rely on yourself. And you were looking for people to tell you with some degree of authority and certainty. So I think that was one example of losing faith in institutions.
MOSLEY: Well, also the thing that happened during that period, that time period, was these people, these influencers that you said had been in this world for a really long time, then had our undivided attention.
LAROCCA: Yeah, they really did, right? And so, you know, we were like, oh, yeah, I’ll do whatever you tell me. I’ll take this. I’ll eat that. Yeah, but I think in general, one of the things about the way health care works in America is that people aren’t getting a lot of time with their doctors. People often don’t know their doctors. People get switched around a lot. You don’t have what was a traditional sort of relationship with your family GP – right? – who might’ve known your grandparents. That’s just not how doctors are working right now.
So these relationships that people form to Dr. Oz, Gwyneth Paltrow – people they see dispensing advice on television, on the internet, take on a lot of significance. And that advice, however compromised it may be by profit motives or having their own supplement lines to sell or protein powders or whatever it is, that sort of, you know, gets a little obscured in the idea that that might be someone’s most consistent medical relationship, bizarrely.
MOSLEY: Well, you actually became a version of the well woman for your research.
LAROCCA: (Laughter) Oh, I tried.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
LAROCCA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: You underwent colonics…
LAROCCA: Oh, I did. Yes.
MOSLEY: …And drank green juices, all types of things. You brought your skeptical journalist self to this process, but you also brought a little bit of belief in it, too, right?
LAROCCA: Yeah. I mean, look, don’t we all want to feel better? And as long as something is really not going to hurt you, as long as you really haven’t stretched yourself financially, you know, why not try it? And definitely, you know, all the cold therapy is something that I think, why not give it a try?
MOSLEY: What is that? What do you mean?
LAROCCA: There’s a great belief in wellness about making yourself very, very, very cold, which you can accomplish in sort of large walk-in refrigerators or in very, very icy bathtubs, all of which, you know, you pay for. You can also go home and turn your shower on very, very cold.
MOSLEY: And what is that supposed to do for us?
LAROCCA: It gives you a kind of restart, right? It gets your heart pumping. It gets your blood pumping. And you do feel quite alive and awake afterwards, and that’s the thing. Although there was one time when I went in one and I became convinced that I was so cold that my shin bone had just snapped spontaneously from the cold. And I was like, I don’t know if I can stand up. I think my bone has just popped. But it hadn’t. I was just that cold. But afterwards, you do feel kind of great, and I don’t think you’ve done any lasting harm to yourself.
MOSLEY: Many of these things that you talk about in the book and you’re talking about right now are kind of, like, these old practices…
LAROCCA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: …That stem from something sometimes…
LAROCCA: Very ancient practices, yeah.
MOSLEY: Yeah, very ancient practices. But now they’re a marketing tool to sell back to us, because when I think about cold therapy, you know, polar plunge.
LAROCCA: That’s right.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
LAROCCA: And the hot and the cold and, you know, the different baths in different cultures. It’s very common – right? – like the shvitzes in Eastern Europe and the Japanese baths and the Korean baths. I mean, all of these things have been around for a very long time. And it’s really often a question of packaging and marketing.
MOSLEY: If you’re just joining us, my guest is journalist and author Amy Larocca. We’re talking about her new book “How To Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure At A Time.” We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAKE SHIMABUKURO’S “FIVE DOLLARS UNLEADED”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley, and today, I am talking to journalist and author Amy Larocca whose new book, “How To Be Well,” delves into the booming world of wellness where she investigates the industries that many have turned to in pursuit of health from cryotherapy to colonics, and what that pursuit reveals about our culture and our longing for control.
I want to ask you about the influence of celebrity on this because it’s very clear how celebrities can be used to sell all sorts of things. There’s one particular celebrity, though, in this moment who holds an outsized portion of this market. Can you quantify Gwyneth Paltrow’s power and popularity in the wellness space?
LAROCCA: I mean, it’s enormous. It’s tremendous. You can talk about the dollars with Goop, although it can be hard to ’cause it’s, you know, a private company. But she – her name is really synonymous with wellness. The first question, as I’ve been writing this book, I can’t tell you how many people say to me, if I say, oh, I’m writing this book about wellness, the next words out of their mouth are some version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Are you writing about Gwyneth Paltrow? And she, for better or for worse, is the face of the industry.
MOSLEY: You’ve written about, though, this cottage industry that has sprung up because of Gwyneth Paltrow, that is debunking many of the claims that come from Paltrow’s company, Goop. I mean, Goop, just to set the stage for those out there who might not know, it’s a lifestyle brand. It’s a beauty brand. It’s a publication. It’s a podcast. It is all of these things, and you can kind of tap into it based on wherever you are. And I want you to read a section from one alternative healing method that grabbed a lot of attention and has been a big part of this cottage industry that has been debunking many of the claims that she has made through Goop.
LAROCCA: (Reading) Goop has a history of promoting alternative healers using the popular platform to amplify their techniques. Goop answers with an innocent, just asking questions, stance, but it presents a danger far more real than the shameless attention grabs. Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco gynecologist, has become famous for disassembling the myths Goop pushed via her blog, wielding the Lasso of Truth and later on a Substack called “The Vajenda.” It started with a response she published in 2015 to Paltrow’s recommending vaginal steaming to balance female hormone levels. It’s one of the core beliefs of patriarchy that women are dirty inside, Gunter wrote.
And yet, Goop presents this as female empowerment. It’s bad feminism, and it’s bad science. She took Goop on for a number of disproven theories about underwire bras causing breast cancer, about the benefits of coffee enemas. Dear God, no, Gunter wrote in her book, “The Vagina Bible,” I just can’t even. Caulfield, for his part, argues that Paltrow is perhaps not the best messenger for ideas about beauty and health. The fact that individuals who have won the beauty gene lottery are setting universal beauty standards is a bit like using NBA power forwards to inspire people to endeavor to be tall.
MOSLEY: This particular section of the book, I mean, you really lay out the power of celebrity in every sense of the word. You saw it in fashion. They’re the perfect vessel, as we said, for an aspirational self. But what makes what Gwyneth Paltrow and elements of what she does, and many others who are in this influencer space, potentially dangerous?
LAROCCA: I think what makes Gwyneth Paltrow dangerous is that people really listen to her. And as we talked about earlier, is that in the absence of advice from experts, she becomes an expert. And I think that’s where it gets dangerous. I think people also forget that she’s selling beauty products, and that’s her motive. Because a lot of the early positioning of Goop was, we’re just here to ask questions, it obfuscates the, we’re here to sell things, which is actually what they’re there to do.
So for example, I remember reading something in Goop in the early days of the Goop blog, and it was about cancer-causing chemicals in your shower. And basically, if you read this piece, you would just think your shower was like a cancer box. Like, you were just going into your shower to get cancer. You’re not going in there to wash your hair. You were not going in there to wash your face. You were going in there to give yourself cancer. It was in the water. It was in the shower curtain. It was in your…
MOSLEY: Phyllodes (ph) in your shampoos and things like that.
LAROCCA: Oh, my God, it was a shampoo. It was in the shampoo bottle. I mean, it was terrifying. You’d never shower again if you read this article. And at the bottom of the article, you could click to buy a water filter. You could click to buy shampoo that was safe, that was in glass bottles, that cost a hundred and twenty dollars. And the link to buy it was right there. It was a Goop product. And it was the most terrifying thing I’d ever read. And you would just finish this and think, God, I must really hate myself, and I must really not care about my family, if I’m not going to buy this water filter, if I’m not going to buy this shampoo in this beautiful glass bottle. What kind of person wouldn’t?
MOSLEY: What has Gwyneth Paltrow said about this? Has she responded to this? Because now, I mean, the groundswell, of course, is really big, but it also is such a successful venture. Goop is hugely successful at the same time.
LAROCCA: Yeah. I mean, she really deflects. She really says – she uses a lot of, like, you know, don’t shoot the messenger kind of stuff. And I’m just asking questions, and I’m just here to point these things out, and – she really never takes responsibility.
MOSLEY: If you’re just joining us, our guest today is journalist and author Amy Larocca. We’ll be right back after a short break. I’m Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GONZALO RUBALCABA & DONGFENG LIU’S “JASMINE FLOWER”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley, and today we are talking to award-winning journalist Amy Larocca about her new book, “How To Be Well: Navigating Our Self-care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure At A Time.” In it, Larocca investigates the $4 trillion wellness industry, from IV drips and goat yoga to the deeper social forces driving our quest for perfection and optimization. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Town & Country and the London Review of Books, among others.
I have to talk with you about another celebrity that you reference many times in the book, and it’s really important because of her scope and influence over time in our society, and that is Oprah. Full disclosure, I’m the generation that grew up on Oprah. I’m the latchkey kid who came home and watched her until my mom got home from work. And so many of the references you make in this book, I remember watching them in real time as a child. She really is the original health influencer of our time. How would you describe her influence and maybe even her contribution to what we know as wellness, which kind of started around ’94 when she changed the format of her show?
LAROCCA: Yeah, I mean, it’s enormous, right? To start with the positives, her openness, her willingness to talk about it. I think a lot of her biggest contributions are around mental health and her willingness to really bring things that had been previously off-limits for – you know, into the conversation. When it comes to physical health, it’s a little bit more complicated because she has been willing to go off the mainstream and promote some kind of out-there things that have been disproven.
MOSLEY: Well, one moment that you highlight – so Jenny McCarthy appeared on “Oprah” in 2007. She claimed that vaccines caused her son’s autism, even with the overwhelming scientific evidence disproving that link. But the fact that it happened on Oprah’s platform at a time when anti vaccine beliefs were still considered fringe – it kind of put it on the mainstream stage.
LAROCCA: And it’s so interesting – right? – because Jenny McCarthy says, well, at first, I thought this couldn’t be real ’cause if it was real, it would be on “Oprah.” And, of course, in saying that, well, now it’s on “Oprah.” Therefore, now it’s real.
MOSLEY: That was a very meta moment (ph).
LAROCCA: It was, right?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
LAROCCA: So that happens again and again with Oprah. I talk in the book about her going to see John, the healer in Brazil, who’s someone who’s in prison now.
MOSLEY: Can you remind us who that is? He was known as John of God.
LAROCCA: Yes, John of God who’s a healer in Brazil who would rape patients, claiming he was putting his healing energy inside of them. And Oprah really was willing to push the envelope, and it came with really mixed results. So her openness sometimes led to, you know, some pretty complicated stuff that I personally wish had been better vetted because her influence is so tremendous.
MOSLEY: Yes. I mean, she introduced us to many folks who then went on to have their own platforms, like Dr. Oz who is a very polarizing figure and controversial figure in this moment. But when you look back, I mean, even to what’s happening today with wellness influencers, celebrity health evangelists, do you think that they have a duty to understand the weight of their influence? Is there a responsibility there, especially in a space where people are often vulnerable and looking for help?
LAROCCA: You know, more and more I do because the state of health care is so jagged in America that if you’re someone with the influence of Oprah Winfrey, you’ve got to know that people are really listening and that it’s very likely that people are not getting adequate health care through traditional channels.
MOSLEY: Have there been any major lawsuits or anything based on promises or fads or anything that’s been touted by influencers, celebrities that are of note that, like, really stuck out to you? I remember…
LAROCCA: Well, Dr. Oz.
MOSLEY: …Many, many years ago…
LAROCCA: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yes, with Dr. Oz. Yes.
LAROCCA: Dr. Oz, yeah. He was – and he was brought in front of Congress for doing this. He went on his television show and talked about a miraculous green coffee pill that could make anyone lose weight, and he described his guest as a naturopathic doctor. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a marketing executive representing a company that sold green coffee extract, and Dr. Oz stood to benefit from the sale of this green coffee extract. And of course, there was no proven medical benefit, and it wasn’t going to help people lose weight. So he will do things like that.
And there was actually a British medical journal that ran a review, and it found that at least 50% of the advice given on his show was not backed by scientific evidence or was, in fact, contradicted by publicly available evidence and that a lot of the advice he gave that was solid was, like, really basic. Like, smoking is bad for you. So he wasn’t giving great advice on his show, and it wasn’t particularly deep that it was bad advice.
And so, his colleagues at Columbia University cosigned a letter asking that – and he did ultimately lose his affiliation with Columbia. It just was too much. I mean, his mentor at Columbia described him as one of the most talented surgeons he’d ever worked with. But profiting so boldly off of information that was so demonstrably incorrect just wasn’t – it was too much, no matter how talented a surgeon he was.
MOSLEY: If you’re just joining us, my guest is journalist and author Amy Larocca. We’re talking about her new book, “How To Be Well: Navigating Our Self-care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure At A Time.” We’ll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BAD PLUS’ “THE BEAUTIFUL ONES (INSTRUMENTAL)”)
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. And today, I am talking to journalist and author Amy Larocca, whose new book, “How To Be Well,” delves into the booming world of wellness, where she investigates the industries that many have turned to in pursuit of health from cryotherapy to colonics, and what that pursuit reveals about our culture and our longing for control.
OK, Amy, let’s talk a little bit about the use of language. You have a fascinating few chapters or a few sections where you really break down language in the wellness industry. And you write that wellness is just as much about looking better as it is about feeling better, and that line between the beauty industry and the wellness industry has all but disappeared.
LAROCCA: Yeah, I always think about this salon that used to be in the Waldorf Astoria hotel called the Kenneth salon. And everything sort of smelled of hair spray. And you wanted your hair to not move, and your lipstick was waxy, and women wore all this foundation and makeup. And the beautiful woman was assembled. And how far that is from the beauty ideal of today and this wellness ideal – everything is supposed to be natural. Your hair is these long, beachy waves and your skin is supposed to glow from within. I think a lot about the corset and how women don’t wear corsets now. But you have this internalized corset that’s made of your ab muscles.
MOSLEY: (Laughter).
LAROCCA: Which is really hard to get. And it’d be one thing to be, like, laced up and, you know, tied into it. But, like, you’ve got to get it through doing a lot of core work. And so it’s not that you aren’t shellacked, but the shellacking is interior.
MOSLEY: Yes. So you break down how certain trendy wellness and beauty buzzwords are really just new packaging of old ideas. And I just heard you use one of those words, and that’s glow. Glow is everywhere. It’s on my vitamin labels, on my makeup, my cleansers, my serums. But what we’re really talking about when we say glow is another word that we don’t really use because it’s ageist, and that’s youthfulness.
LAROCCA: It’s all youth. And I remember when I used to go to the gym, they would talk about, you know, getting thin or your bikini body. They won’t say that anymore, right? They’ll say strong or healthy.
MOSLEY: Healthy
LAROCCA: Or fit. But we know what they mean. And we know what they mean when they say glow – not old.
MOSLEY: Do you think consumers are fully aware of what we’re being sold? Because, you know, now we’re in the moment of body positivity, and we’re also talking so much about ageism. And so are we really understanding that when we use those terms, we’re really saying the same things?
LAROCCA: I think we do. And I also think body positivity, which I was sort of excited to see on the rise, took a deep dive with the introduction of semaglutide and GLP-1 therapies. We were seeing – you know, you hesitate to say a lot, but like a scooch more body positivity on the runways. And in fashion advertising, even sort of on retail sites, you would see more diversity in models. That’s been scaled back. Ozempic and its, you know, imitators and competitors have really just knocked that right back to where it started pretty quickly.
MOSLEY: Yeah, because those drugs were developed for diabetes, but now they’re being used for weight loss.
LAROCCA: Now they’re being used for weight loss by plenty of people who have no – not even prediabetes. So I think that to say we’re in a moment of body positivity – I think we were approaching one, and we just reared right back. And I think, you know, yeah, we talk about ageism, but I think that the emphasis on youth is just so powerful.
MOSLEY: Let’s talk a little bit about men, though, and the roles that they play in all of this, especially as consumers. I thought it was very interesting you wrote about the story of Hims. That’s a brand, a wellness company that seems to market – any man who spends any time online, a Hims ad has come up before you.
LAROCCA: (Laughter) Yes.
MOSLEY: Can you talk about how Hims fits into this landscape and what its rise maybe says about the way wellness is being packaged and sold to men?
LAROCCA: Yeah. And when Hims first came on the scene, it was so fascinating because it was being sold as the first men’s wellness company. That was kind of the pitch. And so of course I was like, what is the first men’s wellness company? And its first product was generic Viagra. Women are getting wellness, and it’s like, it’s going to make you young. And you’ve got to take care of your family, and you’re poisoning them, and you’ve got to protect your children. And you’ve got to – and men were like, wellness? Here’s some Viagra.
MOSLEY: You’ll have vitality, baby. Yeah.
LAROCCA: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
LAROCCA: And I was like, wow, that’s a totally different marketing angle.
MOSLEY: You write about the CEO of the company, though. And he talked about his own relationship with this.
LAROCCA: One of the other things that immediately, when I started to look at men and their relationship to wellness, was that men use this totally weird tone when they talked about wellness, like baby talk. And I was like, this is bizarre. Like, the marketing of the men’s erectile dysfunction drug on Hims in the beginning, it was like, ain’t no one have time for bad sexy time, I think was the tagline. And I was like, what? Why can’t men use adult words to talk about erectile dysfunction? And it just blew my mind because it was like women are dealing with this all the time, all day, all night. And it was like men will only log onto these sites at 3 o’clock in the morning or in the privacy of their own home.
It was like they had to be treated like little children and that they would only do it under the cover of darkness kind of thing. And even when I spoke to the founder of Hims, it was like, oh, yeah, my sister said you need these products – and I said, OK, well, you’ve got to order them for me. And it was, like, all deflection. So that was, like, a very interesting beginning to that. And then the other angle that men sort of started entering this was this biohacking angle, where you had men, largely based in Silicon Valley, taking on this approach that, like, well, we can hack these very complicated systems, how hard could the human body be?
MOSLEY: Can you describe a little more what biohacking actually is?
LAROCCA: Yeah, for sure. So it’s a very basic idea – right? – which is that if you can treat any system as something that can be perfected, why should the human body be different? So if you think of the example of a cup of coffee, I drink this coffee, I get more energy, my output improves, and you just take that and you extrapolate out from there, and you’re able to take data. So I weigh myself. I get a certain number. I eat 10 cookies. The next day I weigh myself and the number is larger. I eat no cookies; the number is smaller. You know, so it’s very, you know, basic data tracking.
MOSLEY: And to a certain extent, we all do that. But then, what is the extreme version that you’re starting to see?
LAROCCA: You’re starting to see very extreme versions of it. A lot of us are taking part in tinier ways, like you get an Oura ring or a Fitbit, and you get your sleep stats in the morning, and you think, oh, if I have a glass of wine with dinner, my readiness score, my sleep score goes down. That kind of thing. But then you have people taking it to really big extremes, like taking drugs for conditions they don’t have, like prediabetes or a heart disease, or people wearing hearing aids when they’re not hard of hearing ’cause they think it increases their alertness. All sorts of things. And then you have people, these men – Bryan Johnson is someone who is getting blood infusions from his 18-year-old son.
MOSLEY: Right, he’s the – that entrepreneur that has a special on Netflix about trying to stay alive forever.
LAROCCA: That’s exactly right. So it’s taken to extremes.
MOSLEY: Did your wellness journey for this book change anything with you? Did it make you happier? Did it feel like you transcended something?
LAROCCA: Did it make me feel like I transcended? Oh, God.
MOSLEY: Because, really, that is what is at the core of this, is us transcending into some version, better version of ourselves.
LAROCCA: I definitely will not buy stuff in the same way that I maybe would before. I’ve got a really pared-down routine.
MOSLEY: More pared down than when you started writing this book?
LAROCCA: Oh, yeah. I’ve got a pretty bare shelf in the bathroom. And I don’t feel tempted to try products, supplements, things like that. I know what I like, and I’m not as easily seducible as maybe I was before. I’ve given up that hope, I guess.
MOSLEY: You said at the end of the book that this was a love letter to your daughter. And I’m thinking back to what we were talking about, about those adolescent girl diary entries that go as far back as 1892, where each generation is dealing with some version of whatever the thing is that we need to, you know, the ideal that we’re trying to attain. Do you feel like there’s any real way to fight it? Like, what did you come away with in thinking about what you want to impart on younger generations and your daughter?
LAROCCA: Yes, it really is for my daughters. And I think that was something I realized in the writing of this book because they are coming into their adolescence now and facing all these pressures. And, you know, on some levels, it’s really fun – right? – and on some levels, it’s scary. Like, I don’t want them to waste time or energy on things that I think aren’t worth their time or energy. But I know they will because that’s part of modern womanhood, not even modern womanhood, as that brilliant book that we’ve talked about has shown us. But I want them to be a little bit smarter about it and understand where these things come from and be a little savvy.
And I want them to feel like they have a little bit of control and, you know, that they’re not just sitting ducks for all these marketers. I guess that’s what I would hope for, for them. I don’t expect them to be able to withstand these forces. They’re just sort of too big and too powerful. But, yeah, I – you know, I guess I would like for this generation to have some awareness, that they don’t have to just improve themselves every day. They can be a little bit more satisfied with what they’ve already got.
MOSLEY: Amy Larocca, I really appreciate this conversation, and thank you for this book.
LAROCCA: Thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be here.
MOSLEY: Writer Amy Larocca. Her new book is called “How To Be Well.” Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the documentary drama hybrid “Caught By The Tides.” This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TERRY SLINGBAUM’S “WATER GAMES – RAVEL RE-IMAGINED”)
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