Extreme diets and health trends people are swearing by | 60 Minutes Australia

if you're sitting at home feeling fine thinking you're perfectly healthy well half your luck but be warned living among us is an increasing number of new age gurus who believe you've still got some issues that need fixing now it turns out very kindly they can help for a price they claim that coffee enemas carnivore diets intravenous drips even burning vagina-centered candles will give you much needed zest these days the largely unregulated world of Wellness is worth seven trillion dollars that's three times more than the traditional pharmaceutical industry but is all this effort to get healthy actually making us sick [Music] there's no better way to start an investigation into the Wellness industry than by making sure my chakras are aligned with a bit of Sunrise yoga and as we breathe in we're lifting up the top leg as high as you can exhale floating down this simply glorious location is the Eden Health retreat in the Gold Coast Hinterland in an industry that's seen its fair share of flashes in the pan this place is a Mainstay of the wellness movement [Music] why do you think people come here they're aware that something in life isn't right at the moment and so they're coming for the space to pause and look at what it is that's not working and it's space to really pause and reflect um Shona Phillips is the general manager at Eden where for 700 a night guests can keep it simple with some clean eating or Branch out into some more left field relaxation treatments like sound Bowl therapy health and wellness is a long game there's no quick fix when you see some of the new health Trends hitting the headlines each year did your eyes sort of roll back in your head a little bit you think oh here we go definitely we've seen so many different practices come and go in the health and wellness space and those that have stuck are the ones with integrity and evidence behind them Wellness now there's a word you don't hear every day it means exactly what you might think it means the opposite of illness thank you it was the late 1970s when Wellness first burst onto the scene and it's been evolving ever since and because you're a woman for much of your life you need iron much more iron than even a man that's why we offer you one a day vitamins plus iron I I don't know how I'm alive right now but in the last few years it's been turbocharged by influencers and podcasters across the world all with a new must-have product that you simply have to buy if you're serious about your health how bad to feel good every day and perhaps there's no more famous or some might say an Infamous face attached to the modern Wellness movement than Gwyneth Paltrow when I started goop in 2008 I was like my calling is something else besides you know making out with Matt Damon on screen or whatever the actress is now worth a quarter of a billion dollars thanks to her Empire goop which promotes everything from Fitness Trends to candles that well you can read the label as we're recording this right now you have a little IV so which is so I'm brand for both of us we part an IV at the same time the most recent controversy was Gwyneth doing a podcast boasting about her intermittent fasting diet or simultaneously receiving nutrients through an IV drip I love an IV I'm an early IV adopter glutathione I love to have in an IV kind of a random more fringy one phosphatidyl calling that's my favorite IV when I can find them they're quite hard to find and those make me feel so good there's a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to Wellness but you know trying to rationalize and convince somebody or a culture that's committed to misunderstanding you is a is a act in futility Dr will Cole he's one of gwyneth's Health besties a regular face for group followers who runs his own wildly successful Telehealth consultancy in one of the hottest trending areas of Wellness functional medicine that new age practice is often dismissed by conventional doctors but functional medicine proponents claim it uncovers the supposedly hidden causes that lead to people's chronic health issues in Generations past you know if we're interviewing a doctor it'd be some stuffy old guy with the stethoscope around his neck and here you are you know good looking young rooster with healthy skin a beautiful head of hair and a denim jacket you know this is the the changing face of Health I guess yeah I hope so I think that's good I think that speaks to the world changing and uh sort of a a breath of fresh air maybe and the conversations around health and wellness someone on my team said recently it would be like going to a dentist with bad teeth hopefully I can look the wellness part do you wake up feeling refreshed are you more exhausted when you wake up but when you become a celebrity Health figure your services do not come cheap an initial one-hour Telehealth consult with Dr Cole will set you back more than a thousand dollars but still many people can't get enough of this modern Wellness Guru what's up and welcome to the art of being well I am a leading functional medicine doctor and as the kids say he recently broke the internet as the host of that podcast where Gwyneth Paltrow revealed her controversial eating habits fast I usually eat something about 12. um and in the morning I'll have some things that won't Spike my blood sugar right so I I have coffee but I really like soup for lunch um I have bone broth for lunch a lot of the days you've done so much work with Cooper and with Gwyneth Paltrow and she and her business for a lot of people either sums up everything they love about Wellness or everything they absolutely hate about this industry why do you think she has become so polarizing here I think that this is an example of selective outrage where people are hyperventilating about bone broth and intermittent fasting yes intermittent fasting and bone broth could probably seem radical but I think it's our disconnection that it's How Far We've Fallen as a society when it comes to Optimal Health that that is considered radical oh yeah oh yeah please remind me Gwyneth when were our Paleolithic ancestors sticking cannulas in their arms and giving themselves phosphatidyl Coating in a bag oh yeah they weren't when you hear the word Wellness in 2023 what goes through your mind fad diets coffee enemas the carnivore diet and um useless IV drips when you can just eat food and drink water foreign where he's become a hit for calling BS on New Wellness Trends as we can see here these are some of the results from all of the individual studies showing that generally he's dismayed that so many people are being sucked into fads that he claims aren't supported by Medical Science and it is a tiny pediatric feeding tube that is going to feed me a perfect balance of nutrition for the next 10 days the fact that there are individuals willfully putting these devices in is frankly disgusting rent is literally depression why if you eat bread you will get depressed I had no idea bread was the seventh infinity stone altering reality and creating mental illness from nothing this always got to be something inaccessible to the vast majority of people always got to be something that's hundreds of dollars in your mind is the wellness industry motivated more by health or by profits not by Health at all profits absolutely it's almost trying to make up a problem to get you to believe that you have an issue and then you have your foot inside the wellness door everything you see is targeted towards you right and so if you've got an issue well amazingly they've got the solution it's amazing yeah exactly spot on so and you know the way that the algorithms work now online and with what you search for on Google and what you see on your Instagram feed or your Tick Tock feed you know once you spend a bit of time looking at one thing you all get marketed everything else surrounding the same topic whileness has become complicated um slightly self-obsessed in a way I find it actually becoming more constraining rather than liberating you have a hundred meals in your face at least just another day at the office Elise Lunen lived and breathed the wellness culture as goop's Chief content officer the backdrop to this photo a typically provocative marketing move for the brand goop describes itself as the tip of the wellness Spear and Gwyneth Paltrow said it simply wouldn't exist without a lease but in 2020 she caused a stir when she quit vowing to never do another cleansed diet and launching what she described as a rebellion against much of the wellness industry why did you step back from your role ultimately I don't I don't want to think about marketing or advertising or business or margins I want to write I want to make a podcast I want to think about the world outside of business constraints I do think that for those of us who are in good health and obsession with our health is not good for us and there's a difference between being preventative and being vigilant about our care and making ourselves sick with concern women are very ashamed of feelings that we think are not nice Elise has now become a prominent voice calling for the health industry to cleanse itself of some of its toxic habits she still believes there are plenty of positives in Wellness but instead is encouraging people to focus on what she calls wholeness rather than sweating on the small stuff I don't want to be my own doctor I really don't because I will give myself five to six diseases by lunchtime Dr Google is a pretty scary doctor Dr Google's terrifying and you you know like my dad's a physician I sometimes wear an Apple Watch and I kind of had to stop and I had a sleep tracking ring that I definitely had to stop using because I was compulsively checking my stats and you know I kept texting my dad well it says that my you know respiratory rate changed uh what does it mean that my HRV is fill in the blank and he was like stop like honey stop it means nothing one of the biggest problems with the wellness industry is that because of people's obsession with looking for health advice online the moderate voices are often drowned out by those with some of the most extreme viewpoints you're a doctor I am when was the last time you ate a vegetable uh uh probably about five and a half years ago why plants are trying to kill you Dr Anthony chafee is a picture of good health a ball of muscle who makes chin UPS look like Child's Play but remember when you were young your mum would say you won't grow up to be big and strong unless you eat your vegetables [Music] well this Wellness Warrior is on a crusade to disprove that theory has a prominent online promoter of the controversial carnivore diet you're a doctor I am when was the last time you ate a vegetable ah uh probably about five and a half years ago humans are apex predators top of the food chain what other apex predator eats salad there are things in meat that you have to have that you cannot get from Plants but there is nothing in plants or fungus that you have to have that you cannot get from meat so you have to eat meat and you certainly don't have to eat plants and I would argue that you don't want to eat plants for Optimal Health [Music] it's worth pointing out straight away that this is a very heavily contested Theory and he's been repeatedly slammed by fact Checkers but that hasn't stopped hundreds of thousands of people following the perth-based doctor's teachings about the increasingly popular carnivore diet it is exactly what it sounds like animal products only and no bread fruit or heaven forbid a vegetable take yesterday for example what did you have for breakfast not only once yesterday I found a place by the hotel that had ribs and a stack of burger patties with bacon and that's all I ate yesterday how many ribs how many how many burger patties I had a full rack of uh pork ribs and then the stack of patties was three patties uh they had cheese and uh and six slices of bacon not my full slice of just little pieces like traditional medicine doctors would say that's not just unhealthy that's dangerous yes absolutely but those same practitioners and those that that same advice has gotten us fatter and sicker than we've ever been in human history you in heaven right now yeah absolutely yeah so this is like going into a candy store for me you sure I don't want some salad go and look at that goodness yes we sat down to a meal together at Mid restaurant machellaria and Anthony tucked into another one and a half kilos of beef and lamb while I complimented my meal with the supposedly toxic salad that's pretty healthy I'm told is it Dr Chaffee is convinced that plants are a potentially deadly food source after being taught that by his university Professor two decades ago but now in the age of people searching for Health Solutions online he's found a huge following eating up his teachings so I remember thinking my head I was like but but vegetables are still good for you though right like overall and I professor of cancer biology just looked at us and and gave us a funny look and he said I don't eat salad I don't need vegetables I don't let my kids eat vegetables plants are trying to kill you and so in my head I said right okay I'm just gonna stop eating vegetables maybe a lot of people watching me snap thinking this bloke has lost the plot yeah oh yeah your Viewpoint is very much the minority absolutely how can so many Health experts be wrong well uh people were wrong about a lot of things you know the most of these the experts thought the world was flat at one point right that changed brussels sprouts had 136 known carcinogens plants are trying to kill you well they're doing a pretty lousy job of killing us aren't they Dr Anthony finish kale lettuce celery cabbage Dr chafee is another online Health sprooker who's been taken to task by Dr IDs The self-styled Tick-Tock Health Watchdog you don't need a gym membership you can just run along here Dr Ed says while Wellness Trends might be new and exciting the simple fact is that what'll actually keep you healthy is fairly ho-hum and that's kind of the problem what is the secret to Good Health the secret is actually not so secret simply following General lifestyle principles that have been well established for decades five times a week of 13 minutes of moderate intensity activity making sure you're consuming sufficient amount of plant-based Foods reducing our intake of red meat and also having lots of whole grains these things aren't a secret and it's pretty boring it is boring it's boring but you know I'm not going to click on that Instagram ad exactly and that's why those things don't gain the reach that the other Trends and fads do and that's part of the problem people think it's a secret it's no secret [Music] need living proof that too much focus on your health can be harmful been made Sophie Smith as a teenager her Devotion to Fitness and diet became dangerous a condition known as orthorexia it was a terrible secret that she was able to keep from family and friends the only outward sign her shrinking weight clearly seen here standing next to her identical twin I was listening to all these external messages to tell me what to do to be healthy so lots of you know influences or um yeah people online can you explain what what the actual problem became and how this manifests into something bigger so for me it became very obsessive I'd feel super anxious really guilty I was depriving myself I guess of a lot of things you know of a lot of not just foods but experiences like having you know birthday cake or having a good time at Christmas because of all the like you know lovely delicious foods like those times would be really stressful for me which is very much yeah what I discovered I guess through my recovery was yeah that I'd really kind of swung in this direction of being so obsessive um around food and exercise and weight to the point where it was yeah really detrimental I guess to my health it was a long and painful road to rehabilitate so these days it's quite an achievement for Sophie to be able to browse a convenience store looking for a snack a mission that previously would have had her fretting over the health implications drummed into her by online zealots [Music] foreign control of the narrative working as an advocate trying to expose The Perils of our health obsession what I see is a lot of people you know not intending on getting an eating disorder of course but their intention initially is a bit of a health kick but those things can very quickly you know become a very slippery slope into an eating disorder Sophie's definitely not the only one saying the industry needs a health check in fact it's led to a better Court dispute playing out right now involving one of Australia's most successful Wellness influences I'm here for both of us there are plenty of people within the industry that think can someone shut this bloke up all the time all the time I mean there's people trying to shut me down right now in class now on the New South Wales South Coast isn't quite where you'd expect a Wellness Revolution to be born and the boss here Jimmy savai isn't exactly Gwyneth Paltrow either I'm a Bogan from nowra and that's just who I am and no advertising No Big Marketing agencies could could polish it up [Music] the craft is up of his own the vitamin company life botanics it's found a niche in the market by undercutting its rivals on price claiming competitors waste money on glitzy marketing spin to lure you in I'd like to think of ourselves as the Audi of the industry no no we just give you the product like you give you one key example and one moment in time where I thought you know we've got to start making these products and that was when my sister-in-law came over to my house and she was looking at a vitamin brand that was in the Market at the moment heavily influenced people in bikinis dancing around with these products and they were like 50 bucks for a pack of these magic supplements and I looked at them I looked at the ingredients and I said this only cost like five six bucks to make so at most 10 15 bucks to retail and I looked at it and I thought well this is absolutely garbage and looked at it and thought well we just make our own how do businesses get away with markups this big I think what they do is they they play on people's vulnerabilities sometimes and you know being in that sort of situation myself sometimes when your backs against the wall you pay anything you know for health for for to look better I think where people find it hard to justify that is for themselves is that they'll pay almost anything to feel better about themselves and I think it's unfair do you think there are plenty of people within the industry that think can someone shut this bloke up all the time all the time I mean there's people trying to shut me down right now I mean they want to shut me up because at the end of the day they want to keep making all of that money one person who definitely wants Jimmy to shut up is Jessica seeple the extraordinarily successful founder of sydney-based vitamin brand JS Health skin science elevated by Nature formulated for everyone it's time to live your own skin the 34 year old entrepreneurs Empire is now estimated at close to half a billion dollars having cultivated a huge following online with a beautifully curated social media presence there's nothing pretty about the spat she's now involved in with Jimmy Searby she's taken issue with the owner of Life botanics doing price comparisons between their products to help promote his own vitamins and disputes his claim that his products are identical we had a very sophisticated way of advertising we took a picture of their product and took a picture of our product said have a look at the back of theirs have a look at the back of ours if you like this he'll love ours half the price and that really upset the apple really upset the apple cart so they said we're going to launch action in the federal court [Music] heading into court uh first time really don't know what to expect never sat in the courtroom before never never been in front of a judge are you channeling your Daryl I am 100 you know like I even watched the I watched it with the family on the weekend and we traveled with Jimmy for one of the Court hearings where he's accused of making misleading and deceptive claims the dispute is ongoing which is why Jessica seeple decided not to speak with us but win or lose Jimmy is Hell Benton continuing to hold a mirror up to the Glamorous side of the industry it really bugs me is that a lot of these businesses um affluent businesses what they try to just promote a different type of lifestyle and what we're doing is we're just cutting through all that and saying to people hey you know you don't need to pay 60 for a pack of supplements you know you can pay 20 bucks and you get the same exact same product directly from the manufacturer somebody would say this is just your marketing spin like you know everyone's got their own sales pitch yours is on the price point competitor well I don't know if it's much about marketing spin but it is my marketing angle is the fact that we don't charge your brand tax but at the end of the day we're talking about people's health and nutrition yeah we're talking about um health and nutrition for vulnerable people and for me it's important to make sure that people know the truth Jimmy's far from the only person in Wellness circles to raise concerns that the industry promotes this idea that you always have issues that need fixing at exorbitant costs and many believe it stems from a kind of elitism do you think that's kind of the problem with Wellness at the moment that it is perceived of just being for rich white people yeah I do think it's a problem and look I think rich white people should get healthy too Dr will Cole concedes that the modern Wellness movement often promotes a kind of Health that is completely unattainable for the average person it's not enough for us to be just you know a white guy or a white girl and say well of a certain socio-economic background and say well that's what Wellness is for the access and tools and empowerment and education there's a disparity there that's why we have podcasts that's why we have group Telehealth models to make them more accessible and more affordable because it is an issue um but we have a long way to go [Music] for a treat I'm learning I've got a lot to work on can you give me a joke a switch oh my God so right now your brain is working both sides dad you go with this one did you do the the okay and the piece fast as you can back forth so this makes me feel better about myself now the person that runs the joint struggles with it too this is absolutely I also need to learn to do better for the health Retreats manager Shona Phillips an important message for guests is that there is no one cure-all for achieving your Wellness goals then we're going to inhale slowly through the left after all but in an era where we've never had more so-called experts telling us what to do blocking out all the noise is actually a pretty good place to start did you have many people here that have come in and tried you know a fad diet or you know a drastic lifestyle change and said no I think I just need to go back to the basics absolutely I think I can speak for most of our guests have tried different things to find some balance in their lives and there is no quick fix it's a long game so they are just discovering that every day that little change makes a big difference hello I'm Tom Steinfeld thank you for watching it's 60 Minutes Australia subscribe to our Channel now for brand new stories and exclusive Clips every week and don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 minutes which are on nine now.com and the nine Now app

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 202,505

Keywords: 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes Australia, Liz Hayes, Tara Brown, Tom Steinfort, 60Mins, Amelia Adams, news, world news, news australia, investigative journalism, 60 minutes australia youtube, 60 minutes youtube, 60 minutes episodes, 60 minutes australia episodes, 60 minutes australia, 60 minutes, wellness, health, new age, carnivore diet, diet, diets, clean eating, food, nutrition, vitamins, gwyneth paltrow goop, eating disorder, sound mind, sound body, wellness retreat

Id: 2l25ixKvYtk

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023