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Health Check: What is Wellness and does it make you healthy?

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A woman drinking a green smoothie after yoga

2020/09/09 GMT

What is Wellness and does it make you healthy?

BBC World Service - Health Check, What is Wellness and does it make you healthy?

Where does the idea of Wellness come from? And who stands to gain from it?

Who benefits from the $4 trillion Wellness industry?  And how can consumers tell myths from facts when Wellness influencers on Instagram claim a supplement has changed their life?

The idea of Wellness – of being 'better than well' - fuels tens of millions of Instagram posts, supporting the careers of Influencers in a $4 trillion industry.  

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word Wellness back to the 1650s and it was included in the World Health Organization’s mission statement. But who’s really benefitting from the increasing appetite for spa days and turmeric lattes?  

In 1979 the CBS Sixty Minutes television programme featured the benefits claimed by visitors to Dr John Travis’s Wellness Center in California. 

Dr Jen Gunter – a gynaecologist who’s active on Twitter – has taken on the might of Wellness websites like Goop – created by the actor Gwyneth Paltrow. Misleading health claims about jade eggs designed to be inserted into the vagina to 'harness the energy of the moon' were removed and customers offered a refund.   

We hear from the social historian Ayesha Nathoo about how stress in the family was blamed on mothers who failed to relax. 

The renowned epidemiologist Michael Marmot’s studies busted the myth that in business, the managers were the most stressed. He revealed the role that social class and education play in our life expectancy. 

The Berkley Wellness Letter has been promoting healthy lifestyles since 1984 – checking claims about nutrition and supplements long before fact-check labels were tagged onto the President’s tweets.

Presenter: Claudia Hammond
Producer: Paula McGrath

(Picture: A woman drinking a smoothie after exercise. Photo credit: Oscar Wong/Getty Images.)

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