Xand van Tulleken names 3 wellness trends to avoid — SkimNews
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- Xand van Tulleken published 'Make Me Well: A quest to understand the confusing world of wellness,' arguing the industry blurs the line between health (treating measurable conditions) and wellness (optimizing how you feel) while influencers escape advertising restrictions
- Vitamin supplements do not benefit healthy people, van Tulleken says, citing 2010s trials showing multivitamins cut no major-cause mortality and specific antioxidant doses raising mortality by 4 to 16 percent, possibly by shielding cancer cells
- At-home tests can make people less healthy, he argues, pointing to a large Finnish prostate-cancer blood trial in which only about one-third of positive screens were cancer on biopsy, leading to needless anxiety and invasive follow-ups
- Wearable glucose monitors used for 'wellness' can worsen cardiovascular risk by nudging users away from normal blood-sugar-spiking foods (fruit, legumes, whole grains) toward more cheese and meat
- Van Tulleken ran a self-experiment sending identical blood, stool and dietary data to one personalised nutrition app via two subscriptions and received conflicting blood-sugar and microbiome results, calling the output 'nonsense'
- Menopause research is drastically underfunded — $57 million a year in the US, with no recorded UK spend — even as consumers spend billions on menopause supplements, a gap van Tulleken blames partly on medicine's failure of women and minority groups
Why it matters: Van Tulleken's critique carries weight because he acknowledges that medical access failures (short appointments, under-researched conditions like menopause, $57M vs billions in supplement spending) actively push consumers toward the unregulated wellness market — meaning the 'quackery' problem can't be solved by shaming buyers alone when the medical system isn't meeting demand.
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