The wellness industry, depending on how its defined, is worth anything from many billions to trillions of dollars — $5.6 trillion, according to a recent report from industry group The Global Wellness Institute.
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And it’s been decades in the making. Its modern incarnation goes back to the late 1950s, said Stephanie Alice Baker, who researches health and wellness cultures at City University in the UK. American doctor Halbert L. Dunn started to popularize the idea that health was more than simply the absence of disease; instead “peak wellness” meant also finding purpose and meaning.
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The movement gained traction around the 1970s, then with the internet, came the entrepreneurs and influencers. Wellness has now come to mean almost anything, said Baker, but at its core it revolves around ideas of individualism, self-enlightenment and distrust of institutions — a near-perfect breeding ground for conspiracy theories to flourish.
“I don’t think the culture understood how dangerous the rhetoric in wellness spaces was until the pandemic,” said Derek Beres, co-host of the podcast Conspirituality, which explores the collision between wellness and conspiracy theories. One researcher, Marc-Andre Argentino, coined the term “pastel QAnon,” to describe the soft, pleasing aesthetic used by some influencers to spread their conspiratorial worldview.
This conspiracy thinking “usually bubbles up during times of cultural confusion or tragedy,” Beres told CNN. Covid-19 provided one of these inflection points, climate change is now providing another.
Influencers crave relevance, said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and “climate change is a big relevant issue that’s in the news all the time.”
It is a short ideological leap from vaccine conspiracies to climate conspiracies, Hood told CNN: If the establishment is wrong about health, the thinking goes, then they’re also lying to you about climate change.
Misinformation expert Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said many wellness influencers are now expected to present a basket of beliefs that the community wants to hear. “Being anti-climate change becomes part of being on that team” and a way to “turbocharge your audience,” he added.
