★ “A sharply pointed look at the vast wellness industry and ‘the burden of being healthy and attractive’ it places on consumers. ‘Medicine is increasingly a retail prospect.’ Health journalist Larocca realizes as much when visiting a New York doctor whose clinic now ‘looks like somewhere you’d go with a group of girlfriends for brunch.’ Underscore girlfriends, for Larocca focuses on the health and wellness experiences of women—not just ‘today’s ideal woman…hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen,’ but also the harried workaday woman who aspires to feeling better psychically and physically. It’s a $5.6 trillion industry, Larocca notes, and a vast portion of the till comes from catering to the idea that everyone can become that ideal woman. Some of that desired ‘wellness’ is attended to by the medical industry, which is increasingly bespoke for those who can afford it: Larocca depicts one members-only clinic with a mere five-minute waiting period, 18 times less than the average ER; such concierge medicine speaks to, in one of her nice, bemused turns of phrase, ‘something else, something more, some sort of extra health.’ Some of that wellness is also the province of specialty groceries. Does anyone remember a time before kale? As it turns out, it’s only been a dozen years or so since kale became groovy. On the matter of grooviness, Larocca is excellent on the New Age aspect of the wellness business, with its mantras and microbiome-supporting organic coffee and mindfulness, which, a longtime practitioner laments, ‘is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique.’ And of course, much of that wellness centers on pharmaceuticals, on prescription diet drugs along with CBD, microdosing, ayahuasca, and all the rest. Larocca takes on the wellness biz with a healthy dose of skepticism, and the result is both eye-opening and good fun.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

★

★ "The present-day vogue for wellness is merely the latest attempt to convince women to buy products to correct for imagined deficiencies, according to this trenchant debut critique. Fashion reporter Larocca suggests that beauty product manufacturers responded to the rise of body positivity in the 2000s by promoting the concept of “glow,” rather than thinness, as the central marker of beauty, creating the illusion of inclusivity while insisting that looking good requires topical ointments and body brushes. Surveying the dubious science behind many wellness practices, she recounts getting a colonic (an enema “on steroids”) from a doctor who claimed that foods with opposite ionic charges “pile up... like sludge” inside the body without clinical intervention. Larocca also covers the more harmful aspects of the wellness space, positing that such trends as intermittent fasting and elimination diets promote disordered eating by implicitly equating skinniness with health. The nuanced analysis notes that while wellness culture’s appeal stems in part from legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s insidious influence on mainstream medicine, the supplements hawked by alternative medicine practitioners are usually subject to the same corrupting profit motives. Penetrating and thought-provoking, this will cause readers to think twice before reaching for the latest purported cure-all."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)