SCW Spotlite: Issue 75

3 Days of Healing, Hope, and ‘Snake Oil’ With the Wellness Elite

by Lisa Miller (reporting from West Palm Beach, FL) – The New York Times

On the weekend between Halloween and Election Day, more than 2,000 people gathered within the capacious, dim meeting rooms in the Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida to learn and teach about improving one’s health. They flew in from Boston and Vancouver, Dallas and New York City, Boulder and the Bay Area. Some brought their mothers. A few, their dogs. They wore amulets and Oura rings, dressed in stretch pants or long, flowing dresses that evoked beach parties and summertime. I was there, too, curious about why health and wellness were, in these final months of 2024, suddenly receiving the Lollapalooza treatment.

On multiple stages over three days were meditation and yoga teachers, celebrity fitness trainers, nutritionists, scientists and musicians. But the real draw of this first-time conference — named Eudemonia after the Greek word for “well-being” — was the opportunity for fans and followers to see in person the megawatt influencers who have been their parasocial health guides.

The mash-up of what the producers called “talent” reflected the strange bedfellows within the wide wellness world. Self-made gurus shared stages with university professors, and the line between salesman and scholar could be indistinct. Adriene Mishler, who brought solace into millions of living rooms during quarantine with her YouTube channel, Yoga with Adriene, was there, teaching a class. Andrew Huberman, the neuroscientist with a self-improvement podcast, was lecturing. The meditator Dan Harris held a session on anxiety, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, the physician and Pulitzer Prize winner, talked about the application of artificial intelligence to potential cancer treatments.

The longevity artists (and tech-and-finance-world veterans) Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey were also present. Johnson was promoting his lifestyle mantra, “Don’t Die,” along with an app and a line of supplements; Asprey, who has declared his intention to live to 180, raised alarms about “junk lighting,” the chemicals in skin-care products and the toxins in plastics. (At dinner one night, wearing blue-light-filtering glasses, he refused food, placing a sealable plastic bag bursting with supplement pills on his empty plate instead.)

The attendees were joined by the belief that the conventional health care system had largely failed to heal the sick, and that by heeding the teachers on their phones they’d do a better job healing themselves. Each attendee followed a different wellness routine; some focused on the fundamentals of nutrition, sleep and exercise, while others traveled deep into a universe of unproven therapies and medicines that offered promises of longer life, more frequent nighttime erections, optimized motivation, improved skin elasticity and a quickened metabolism. More than two thirds of the attendees paid $1,500 for a three-day badge, a price that didn’t include airfare or accommodation.

“I’m aging in reverse!” Denise Stooksberry told me joyfully when I encountered her at the toga launch party on Halloween night. She introduced me to her husband, Steve, who looked relaxed in his golden toga and bronze, leaf-patterned crown. Two years ago, she consulted a plastic surgeon in Dallas about liposuction to address the 35 pounds she had gained during menopause. But the surgeon sent her home with the suggestion that she follow the intermittent fasting regimen prescribed by the health influencer and physician Jason Fung. If in six months she hadn’t lost weight, he would do the surgery.

Fung led Denise down an Instagram path, to about 275 influencers and doctors. They included Mark Hyman — a doctor who recommends extensive blood testing to identify hidden deficiencies (and whose venture Function was a major sponsor of the conference) — and Gabrielle Lyon, a physician who champions muscle health. (Both were speakers at Eudemonia.) Denise is “a big fangirl” of Hyman, she said, and issued a teasing warning to her husband. If Hyman “ever breaks up with his wife, I’m like: ‘Babe. I love you. But.’”

She threw out all the processed food in her house, mostly stopped drinking, and started eating whole foods and lots of protein. She began monitoring her sleep. She encouraged Steve to toss the artificial sweeteners he loved — and though they had long ago established their marriage as a judgment-free zone, she was pleased when he did. They both started going to the gym. She took the blood test advertised on Hyman’s podcast, which established her “biological age” as 43. She is 59. Eventually, she fired the family physician and hired a functional medicine doctor, who would spend time with her trying to prevent disease through nutrition and other lifestyle interventions.

Denise and Steve maintain a cheerful and loving banter, and have turned their health metrics into a friendly competition, which she always wins. Steve still drinks alcohol and, to his wife’s horror, recently bought ravioli. For Father’s Day, Denise bought her husband a Hyman blood test. He is 57 chronologically, 54 biologically.

Recently, Denise made a decision to start living as if she were actually 43, and that has given her a feeling of hope and control at a moment — in her life, in the world — of upheaval. She cited war, the election, the epidemics of anxiety and depression among young people, but also her own aging. She used to think she would retire at 70 and have 10 years to enjoy her life, and “that would be about it.” That gave her “kind of a hopeless feeling.” But now that she truly believes she can be vital and healthy until she’s 100, her outlook has changed.

Two years ago, the Stooksberrys sold their home in Fort Worth and bought a high-rise apartment in downtown Dallas. They watch the sunrise over coffee together and are talking about living in Portugal, say, or Thailand, for months at a time.

“I sometimes feel like I’m in a cult,” Denise joked.

The next day Steve was reflecting on this, the way their health rituals and beliefs can resemble religion. “There’s science behind it, but there’s also faith,” he said.

‘Everything Your Body Asked For’

Eudemonia is the latest iteration of a venture by a group of friends who in 2009 started producing events called Wanderlust. These were yoga and meditation parties with live music and a rave-like vibe, often held in parks and at ski resorts — “less serious,” said Tony Li, 51, a longtime Wanderlust devotee who attended Eudemonia. But after Sean Hoess, the chief executive, sold the Wanderlust brand in 2022, he reignited conversations with the marketing organization representing Palm Beach County, which has been actively promoting itself as a wellness destination.

According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the U.S. wellness market has grown to $480 billion in 2024, a humongous market that is increasing, the company estimates, 5 to 10 percent a year. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, patient frustration with the medical-health system was already at a boiling point: Long wait times, ever-shorter physician visits and inscrutable and arbitrary billing and insurance practices propelled people out of their doctors’ waiting rooms and onto the internet.

And in some sense, the pandemic boosted people’s appetite for wellness. When the government’s approach to quarantine and vaccines became a political fault line, with some Americans rebelling against federal and state restrictions and others declaring them insufficient, the wellness world seemed to fill the gap. It soothed anxieties by allowing personal health consumers to attend to their fitness, diet, sleep and mental health in isolation.

I received a swag bag along with my press pass at Eudemonia (The New York Times paid full fare), finding in it a trove of supplements and powders promising “optimized digestion,” “essential amino acids” and “everything your body asked for.” (This seemed a lot to expect.) The packages were sleek and refined, in deep blues, grays and greens, with fonts evoking high-end tech gadgets. And like expensive beauty products, the jars and the envelopes hinted at something precious inside, something rare that in the absence of government or medical concern might substitute for care. The products in my bag cost $50 to $70 for a month’s supply.

Wellness products and influencers often seduce consumers with claims about the science behind their offerings. But, as Dariush Mozaffarian, who is a cardiologist and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, observed, these claims can be contradictory. As a panelist at Eudemonia, he heard wellness influencers upholding their products and interventions as proved by science while also rejecting the findings of scientific and medical experts and scientific studies — as if “expertise is a bad thing,” Mozaffarian told me.

I saw this myself. At one Eudemonia panel on biohacking, Asprey dismissed “all science” as a “bullshit narrative” (“I’m going to get misquoted on this,” he began, defensively), while his fellow panelist Christian Drapeau, who makes a plant-based pill that purports to promote stem-cell growth, told audience members that how they felt in their bodies was a better barometer for health than large-scale studies.

Hoess promised that the panel on GLP-1 agonists, a class of drugs including Ozempic, would be “salty,” and it was. He was the moderator, and Mozaffarian, the only physician present, was cast as the representative of the idea that Ozempic might sometimes be necessary, together with lifestyle modifications, to treat people with severe obesity. His main opponent was Calley Means, an entrepreneur and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surrogate with a company that sells supplements and aims to make them eligible for reimbursement through employer health savings accounts.

At issue was whether lifestyle improvements might reasonably tackle America’s obesity epidemic. A universe of studies proves that diets don’t work to help maintain weight loss, one panelist said. Hearing this, Means attacked, shouting his opinion about the biases of researchers who consider Americans “too lazy not to poison ourselves” with unhealthy, addictive food. Throughout the panel, Means yelled and interrupted, until Hoess jumped in. “So I am the moderator,” he said, as the audience laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to say anything,” Mozaffarian finally said when he raised his mic, before trying to elucidate his point of view.

To me, in a separate conversation, Mozaffarian said he thought the panel had gone fine. “I think extreme presentation is less effective,” he said. But he also warned of the danger of widespread mistrust in the scientific method and the expertise of scientists. Bias and ethical conflicts of interest exist in science as everywhere else, he conceded, and “nobody knows the truth with a capital T, the true biologic truth of something — we’re all trying to estimate it.”

Skepticism of information sources is healthy, but wholesale disregard of scientific discovery is not, and “trust your body” is insufficient as a sole metric of meaningful health decisions, Mozaffarian told me. What if people said, “Trust your body on how you feel wearing a seatbelt, or how you feel wearing sunblock?” he asked. “Or trust your body on how you feel when you smoke or drink alcohol. You know, those are not effective recommendations.”

‘Ecstasy, Exorcism, Connection’

I met Siggi Clavien in the lobby of the convention center hotel entirely by accident. He had just flown in from London to promote his invention, De-liver-ance, an herbal elixir that “tastes like mesquite and peppermint and honey and herbs,” and, he claims, reverses fatty liver disease and increases mental focus. Clavien is a burly man who wears yellow-tinted aviators and rings on each finger. He was meeting with Amy Stanton, the publicist of Eudemonia, to consider a working relationship. I sat down, and Clavien launched into his pitch, first offering me a free liver scan — I declined — and then dropping the names of the famous and wealthy people who use his product.

“Have you heard of this gentleman called Arki Busson?” he asked, referring to the French financier and erstwhile partner of Elle Macpherson and Uma Thurman. “Very famous, like, playboy hedge fund guy,” he said. “Cured his fatty liver disease. Three months.” He continued: “A lot of people that know about it take it now. It’s supercool.” (Reached by phone, Busson confirmed Clavien’s report. The tonic has been “transformative,” he said.)

The vials work as a hangover cure as well, Clavien continued. “I just flew in on Virgin last night, and I got a little carried away in Upper Class, so I took several during the flight,” he said. “I was fine by the time I landed, got to Customs, totally sober, took my host out to dinner, had a lovely bottle of red wine, and we all took one before bed. Perfect.” When I saw Clavien the next day in the expo hall, a bustling marketplace where all the convention’s sponsoring brands were displaying their wares — light therapies, vibrating floor panels, skin-care products, cannabis-infused beverages, electric off-road vehicles — he greeted me warmly.

Eva Krchova, 35, was working the expo floor, too, and struggling with the part of her industry that she called “snake oil.” A former elite steeplechase runner from the Czech Republic who now lives in Boulder, Colo., she said she believed in the immersive live events and light therapies she was promoting and loved the wellness community but she did not want to be one of those who preyed on vulnerable people. She said she saw the allure of claims to eternal life, which are as old as religion itself. But “people do spend a lot of money in this industry,” she said. “Because it’s hype. And it’s a business. And it’s marketing.”

But if wellness is a new religion, then snake oil will inevitably be part of it, and Robin Carhart-Harris believes that it is. Carhart-Harris, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, was at Eudemonia to talk about his research on psychedelics, and I saw him participating in a panel with musicians (also regular users of hallucinogens) about the links between psychedelic experiences and creativity. “Religion is falling away and leaving a gap,” he said, and when he spoke of study subjects under the effects of psilocybin and MDMA he used words commonly used to describe religious experiences: “ecstasy,” “exorcism,” “connection.”

In a conversation later, Carhart-Harris spoke about the widespread “psychological anguish in the West,” and the possibility that the use of psychedelics specifically, but also of other wellness offerings, might reflect the human quest for the “special, divine, extra, transcendent” aspects of existence. Humans require this kind of connection and, in seeking it, they have always encountered gurus or messiahs who promise to deliver healing or miracles through what he called “medicine, or sacred medicine.” Carhart-Harris, a scientist, skeptic and reluctant atheist, draws a line between seeking spiritual experience and believing in the supernatural.

Azeezah Goodwin, who is 34, doesn’t want to live forever. Working as an attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, she felt, she said, “like she was on this yuppie modern treadmill.” She was going to Barry’s Bootcamp and Tracy Anderson for workouts because she felt it was the right thing to do and she would read The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and, “no offense, The New York Times” so that when she bumped into the senior partner in the office she could chat intelligently about the news of the day. On weekends she did what she calls “the brunch circuit”: “Just go get drunk at brunch and, yeah — repeat.” “I was just so miserable,” she said.

So, during the pandemic, she moved to Miami, a city she already loved, intent on prioritizing human connection. She had come to Eudemonia to do what she called “heart-led” networking — not finding the most powerful person in the room, but seeing who seemed cool. She has left law and is writing a Substack and creating a local Miami wellness bulletin. She is training to be a Pilates instructor and spends time outdoors. She reads less news, a surprising delight to her.

“It’s kind of nice to be a little more focused on things that are grounded,” she said. In the evenings, especially with other people, she’ll have a cocktail. Or she’ll have dessert. The point of a good life isn’t how many years you get, she told me. “I think this is so cheesy, but it’s kind of like ‘Rent.’ How do you measure a life? And it’s really about love.”