Books about the wellness industry and history
The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses, and Find Your True Well-Being by Christy Harrison
Harrison's previous book, Anti-Diet, made a big impression on me, so I was really excited to read her latest offering to the conversation about health and well-being. In this very readable but citation-heavy book, she discusses many different facets of the "wellness industry," from naturopathy, essential oils, and allergy-elimination diets, to western-co-opted Eastern/Indigenous spirituality practices, to the myth that our health is largely dictated by diet and exercise, and more.
She writes as someone who has multiple chronic illnesses (both physical and mental) who once sought alternative medicine because she had been dismissed so many times by mainstream doctors— a story that almost everyone she interviews in the book shares. She is very compassionate and clear-eyed about the fact that traditional doctors often fall short, and that there is a vast amount of improvement needed in mainstream medicine. However, she argues that much of what alternative medicine offers runs the gambit from ineffective to actually dangerous: triggering eating disorders (I experienced this myself), creating mental health issues, subjecting people to untested drugs and substances (health supplements are generally not tested for effectiveness or even safety by the FDA), draining people's finances, and leading people into harmful conspiracy theories.
This book would not convince someone who has found a deep sense of self in the wellness industry, but it was very helpful for me to start making sense of my own journey with wellness culture as I better understand my brief stint with an eating disorder (orthorexia) and untangle my internalized fatphobia and belief that good health is a result of virtue and that poor health means someone did something wrong. I highly recommend it.
Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History by Rozella Kennedy
I picked this up at the library because I liked the cover art: it's a series of profiles of 100 women of color who impacted North American history and culture. Some of the names, like Sojourner Truth and Marsha P. Johnson, were familiar to me, but most I had never heard of, and this book was a great introduction to them, making me interested to learn more about many of them. The writing wasn't always as thorough as I would've liked, and I wish the book had been organized in a clearer structure, but it worked well as an introduction to these remarkable women.
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
All What I've Been Reading posts
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