The Online Agony of Wellness Influencers
On Apple Cider Vinegar and Belle Gibson's spiritual heirs.
Today’s essay explores the world of wellness influencers, and includes discussion of disordered eating, MAHA, cancer (real and invented), the dynamics of high-control groups, and what colloidal silver does to the human body. If these are topics you’d like to avoid—and honestly, I get it—please feel free to opt out.
She’s an Instagram influencer. It doesn’t matter which one. Her name is unimportant. There are thousands of her. She’s white, a balayage blonde in clean-girl makeup, and always so skinny. For breakfast, she eats a tiny bowl of cottage cheese and ground beef. It’s honestly so good, she says. She makes concoctions out of protein powder, Greek yogurt, and unsweetened cocoa powder. No sugar, not ever. You won’t miss it, she says. Brownies you buy at the grocery store are toxic. This is soooooo much cleaner. Comment “brownies” in the comments for the recipe!
She’s keto. She’s vegan. She’s paleo. She’s doing her own research. She’s her own prescribing physician (just don’t ask about her credentials). She’s feeling so much better ever since she gave up sugar, did you know how much there is in fruit? At the grocery store, she films herself looking frightened of a rotisserie chicken (all that sodium) and saying she can’t pronounce “carageenan” on an alternative milk label, so it must be a dangerous chemical. She promises that just the right restrictive eating pattern will cure your leaky gut. She is a walking, talking trigger for latent eating disorders, and sometimes she looks so skeletal that when she pops up on your “For you” page, you report the account because you are genuinely afraid for her life.
To be clear, I’m not talking about someone specific. I’m talking about an entire swath of Instagram, a dark, twisty Venn diagram between orthorexia, medical misinformation, and wellness culture (is there even a difference), where adult women in Amazon matching sets share odd recipes that recycle the same three to four ingredients, or maybe they share indulgent one-pot dinner recipes, but you never quite get the sense they bother to taste their cooking along the way. I suspect it’s under-seasoned.
At the grocery store, she films herself looking frightened of a rotisserie chicken (all that sodium) and saying she can’t pronounce “carageenan” on an alternative milk label, so it must be a dangerous chemical.
I’ve been thinking about these wellness influencers a lot lately, ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda became the basis for health policy. Kennedy shares some major commonalities with wellness influencers, whose experiences, when they don’t resemble Jenny McCarthy’s foray into anti-vaccine activism, often look a lot like that of Belle Gibson, the Australian wellness influencer who scammed her way to a book deal by claiming that her unexciting recipes had cured her (made up) brain cancer, duping actual patients into abandoning evidence-based treatments along the way.
Netflix’s buzzy series Apple Cider Vinegar is a semi-fictionalized version of Gibson’s story, with Kaitlyn Dever perfectly cast in the lead role, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since it debuted in February—and since Kennedy became a cabinet member.
The series pulls a surprising amount from real life, and features a composite character, Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a cancer survivor who’s pulled into the world of alternative “treatments” aligned with Belle’s conviction that sticking to a specific diet can cure cancer all on its own. Complementary medicine is of course a real and beneficial thing, but this is something else—a rejection of evidence-based medicine altogether. Belle doesn’t actually have cancer, but Milla does, and the consequences of choosing a regimen of juicing and enemas instead of chemotherapy quickly destroy her life.
Apple Cider Vinegar isn’t the most artful depiction of wellness scamming and its discontents, but it’s instructive in that it shows how wellness scammers can gain power, and how that power can become destructive even to the person who wields it—especially if that person is a woman.
When men seek power and influence through debunked ideas about health and psychological wellbeing—or even legitimate spiritual practices—they often end up harming other people, a dynamic Dodie Bellamy explores in The Buddhist, her 2013 book about her ill-fated affair with a Buddhist teacher, whose interpersonal relationships clashed terribly with his avowed ideals. “The impression they give us is that their lives are in fairly close alignment to their teachings. I want to believe this,” writes Bellamy. “With the buddhist, it was always disconcerting to witness the gaps between the teachings and his life.”
These gaps are, of course, what makes Belle Gibson’s story so alarming: Her story wasn’t just misaligned with her experiences; it was completely made up.
In The Buddhist, Bellamy’s breakup leads her into research on cult dynamics, and the way spiritual leaders abuse their power. “I read many excuses for spiritual teachers having sex with students (it makes the student get enlightened faster, did you know that?)—I read of rapes, druggings, humiliations, knowingly passing on HIV,” a barrage that “depressed and creeped me out,” she writes.
Women do things like this, too, of course. But they don’t in Apple Cider Vinegar, where the power they wield is softer, less blunt-force, and arguably no less damaging for it. Young women are also more likely to gain their power through social media than through the spiritual routes Bellamy outlines, although the end result is largely the same—a group of followers dedicated to one person’s perceived (and often fictitious) wisdom.
While men like the Buddhist, in Bellamy’s telling, seem more likely to abuse their power in relationships with other people, many women1 in similar positions, even when they do awful things, often end up turning their twisted ideologies right back on themselves. They’re not immune to the impact of their own toxic teachings, perhaps because, when it comes to wellness culture especially, women are given a social message that “The ideal woman… is always optimizing,” as Jia Tolentino once put it. Just because you’re profiting off harmful advice doesn’t mean it can’t harm you, too.
In Apple Cider Vinegar, Milla’s lifespan is significantly shortened because of her commitment to alternative treatments, a decision that brings her fame and a huge social media following, but can’t heal the tumors in her arm. The series ends with Milla’s acceptance that she is going to die, and her rejection of the alternative treatments that hastened her death. It’s devastating, but it’s also a rare example of someone deep in the Just Asking Questions rabbit hole finding a way out, however short-lived.
Many cult members and wellness scammers never even get close.
Apple Cider Vinegar contains a rare example of someone deep into the Just Asking Questions rabbit hole finding a way out. Many cult members and wellness scammers never do.
Amy Carlson, the leader of the Love Has Won cult in Colorado, died in 2021 of anorexia, alcoholism, and continuously consuming colloidal silver, which she had promoted as an alternative treatment for COVID-19. Originally used to treat wounds in the time before antibiotics, colloidal silver has no real medical purpose at all. The FDA has stated that it isn’t a safe or effective way to treat any medical condition, but it nonetheless reemerged during the pandemic, alongside many scammy alternative treatments edified by the likes of Joe Rogan.
Ingesting colloidal silver in excess isn’t just worthless medically. It’s actively dangerous: It can turn skin permanently blue, disrupt the absorption of medications, and harm the kidneys, liver, and nervous system.
The 2023 documentary about Carlson, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, is essentially a slow-motion snuff film: It shows Carlson’s decline, as she physically shrinks, her skin turns blue, and she eventually succumbs to her health conditions in a hotel room at Callahan’s Mountain Lodge in Ashland, Oregon, surrounded by her followers, who would then travel with her body back to their compound in Colorado. In the documentary, Carlson’s followers explain that they enabled her substance use because it was justified within the cosmology of her teachings. (Even if you like cult documentaries, take care with this one. It’s as dark and upsetting as it sounds.)
The consequences for Belle Gibson weren’t as brutal, and while Carlson’s disordered eating and alcoholism are well documented but seem to have been brushed off by her community, Gibson was never really ill at all, though the idea of illness was a crucial element of her social media persona.
In Apple Cider Vinegar, Gibson bakes a dry-looking tart for her publisher, who’s underwhelmed by the pastry but decides to sell Gibson’s book based on the young woman’s story alone. She doesn’t bother to fact-check Gibson’s claims that her cooking cured her brain cancer, and the publisher’s choice to privilege appearances over substance, persona over quality, is unsurprising: Book publishing is a business. And now so are Instagram and TikTok.
In the years since Gibson first started telling her fabricated cancer story, the prominence of social media influencers like her has exploded. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of TikTok accounts American adults follow now belong to individual influencers, the contemporary equivalent of Belle Gibson’s Instagram presence.
Which is hidden now. Gibson’s books were pulped2, her lies uncovered by reporters, and her Instagram account is now private. But a juggernaut of other creators has filled the Belle Gibson-shaped hole in the internet, from the wellness influencer telling you vaccines contain 5G and the vegan moms warning you about the toxic chemicals in your breakfast cereal to the influencer describing her proprietary line of collagen shakes as the secret cure Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about.
Gibson’s books were pulped. But a juggernaut of other creators has filled the Belle Gibson-shaped hole in the internet.
And I understand where this comes from. I’ve covered health policy. In a country where many people struggle to access even the most basic evidence-based medical care, latching onto the idea that the cure for what hurts can be found within a peppy parasocial relationship isn’t a good decision, but neither are most things done out of desperation. I too have had a meaningful tarot pull during a fraught inflection point in my life. I’m fairly convinced that acupuncture paused my migraines during an extremely stressful period in 2017. But I also have a sumatriptan prescription and a therapist.
As it stands, while Gibson’s been thoroughly debunked and deplatformed, the same can’t be said for her imitators currently flooding our phone screens. They are fascinating to me, in that very “the best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity”3 way.
A few weeks ago, I was texting with a friend who shares my morbid fascination with scammy wellness influencers. She told me that recently, she’d deleted Instagram from her phone and stopped engaging with them. Following unhinged (or just depressing) wellness accounts, she said, did not feel like a healthy choice.
As a compulsively curious person, I often have trouble looking away. But these accounts feed on our attention, and that attention can lead to true—and often avoidable—suffering in real life. Maybe it’s time to starve the beast.
What I’ve been up to: I’m writing a biweekly politics newsletter you can subscribe to here. My most recent installment was about the major cut to abortion services funding that ended up in Washington State’s budget. It’s not archived online anywhere (you gotta subscribe!) but here’s an excerpt:
The budget, finalized over the weekend, includes a 55% reduction in funding for the state’s Abortion Access Project, which supports reproductive health care clinics across the state, and was part of Washington’s state-level response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of national abortion protections in Roe v. Wade – one of many across the country, as state legislatures scrambled to clarify existing abortion law and fill in gaps in care widened by the court’s ruling.
In 2023, I reported on this major shift, and the numerous municipal and legislative efforts to preserve and bolster abortion access in the Northwest. That year, the Legislature passed a suite of new policies related to reproductive health care, including the elimination of cost-sharing for abortion, new protections for digital health data, the distribution of the state’s three-year supply of the abortion pill mifepristone and $21 million in funding for abortion and reproductive health care.
I also got to yap with my friend Sarah and her friend Alex on their podcast You Are Good about Body of Evidence, a terrible movie. Normally I’d recommend seeing the movie before listening, but definitely don’t do that—unless you really want to see extremely rainy footage of Portland and Olympia and don’t mind dreadful acting and a nonsensical story.
What I’ve been reading and listening to: I’m still making my way through The Cider House Rules and it continues to blow my mind. I don’t normally read epic-length novels due to my attention span and strongly held belief in the power of brevity, but John Irving’s prose and characters and worldbuilding are really changing things for me, and despite being published in 1985, the subject matter could not be more relevant. John Irving! We love him and are correct to do so!
I felt a deep kinship with the grimacing elder millennials in THAT NYMag piece.
Today, in stories with surprise endings: Utah and Idaho banned unofficial flags from government buildings, which mostly affected Pride flags, so city leaders in Boise and Salt Lake City responded by introducing officially sanctioned Pride flags—and more. Salt Lake’s new official flags honor the LGBTQ+ community, transgender rights, and Juneteenth. “Each flag also includes the sego lily, a city symbol and Utah’s state flower,” reports the NY Times.
What I’ve been watching: The final season of You, the Penn Badgley-plays-a-serial-killer show, which isn’t always good but IS always taking big swings, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which I saw twice in one week because I loved it so much. The music seems like it never stops? There’s an end-credits sequence that’s actually crucial to the storytelling? TWO Michael B. Jordans? It’s inspired by the legend of Robert Johnson’s guitar tuned by the devil? You have my attention! Like everyone who’s suddenly taken an interest in the election of the new pope (and the new pope himself), I also watched and loved Conclave, which I knew would be fun but which exceeded my expectations, especially Isabella Rossellini’s sitting-up-from-a-computer acting and Ralph Fiennes as a middle-manager cardinal having his most stressful day at work ever.
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Playing you out: Mt. Fog!
There is clearly a market for these scammer stories, if the homescreens of every streaming service I currently subscribe to is any indicator.
Although you can see some of the (unappetizing) recipes on this account.
Yeats.