“Wellness has wormed its way into every aspect
of our lives,” writes Stockholm University associ-
ate professor Carl Cederström in The Wellness
Syndrome. At first, this might seem like a good
thing. After all, instead of relying on our overbur-
dened medical system, we’re taking a proactive
approach to bettering ourselves. We’re booking
yoga classes and seaweed body wraps like never
before, lacing our meals with the latest superfoods,
tracking our sleep, detoxing our livers and trying
to make a habit of doing all of the above as mind-
fully as possible. You’d think we’d be healthier than
ever, except that we’re not. In fact, some of the big-
gest threats to our health — cancer, heart disease,
obesity, anxiety, depression — are on the rise.
At best, our collective unhealthiness suggests
that wellness simply doesn’t work, or at least not
in the way we’ve been promised. But could our
relentless pursuit of wellness actually be making
us unwell? There are a growing number of skep-
tics, Cederström among them, who have some
pretty serious misgivings about the movement as
a whole. I tracked him down in Italy where he was
vacationing (not a wellness vacation, he was quick
to point out, just a regular family holiday). One of
his biggest beefs with wellness is that it’s now an
ideology, a standard by which we’re all judged.
“Wellness is not just something we choose,” he
says. “It is a moral obligation.”
Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in
Hea lth a nd Law Policy a nd resea rch director of the
Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta,
is also worried about the path wellness has taken.
“Wellness started as a great idea,” he says. “It
meant considering more than just measurable
physical health and was designed to include, as
noted in the World Health Organization’s 1948
constitution, ‘complete physical, mental and social
well-being.’” But, Caulfield says, somewhere along
the way that lofty ideal got lost. “It has been over-
taken by pseudoscience and become synonymous
with wiggling concepts like ‘holisticness’ and ‘root
causes,’” he says. Even worse, it has become a mar-keting tool. “As a result of aggressive marketing
and alternative medicine branding strategies,
wellness now requires the adoption of a range of
science-free practices, such as supplementation,
detoxification and the embrace of super foods.” So,
when exactly did wellness go wrong?HEALTH VS. WELLNESS
It’s hard to believe that “wellness” wasn’t even a
thing just a few decades ago. People have peddled
magic cure-alls since the beginning of time, but
wellness as a movement is a relatively new phe-
nomenon that, according to Cederström, really
took off in the ’70s with the rise of self-help cul-Being healthy is great and all, but being well, ah, that’s a whole
lot sexier. It’s a concept so broad and inherently ambiguous that it can be bent, moulded and shaped to
encompass what you do every day, where you travel and even the home you buy (who wouldn’t want to stay
in a hotel that offers cryotherapy and gravity colonics, or own a house that adjusts to your Circadian
rhythm?).“Wellness is now linked to
the idea that you can refashion
yourself and be successful
simply by signing up for a
gym membership,
a self-improvement course,
a diet plan, or a yoga retreat.”
- Carl Cederström
WELLNESS WINS
ISTOCK42 AUGUST | SEPTEMBER 2019 best health besthealthmag.ca