Health is Wealth?

In the blackness of a hospital ward, lit only by brief flashes from various whirring machines, the brightness of your phone burns the backs of your eyes. Blinking only when you catch glimpses of rogue hairs on the pillow where your scrolling hand rests, a lycra-doned, hair-slicked, rose-cheeked influencer on the other side of the screen holds a fifteen-millilitre juice shot in one hand, and a couple of goji berries in the other, promising to give you your life back. 

This was the reality for followers of Belle Gibson — an Australian wellness scammer who falsely claimed to have cured her own brain cancer, and a plethora of other fictional health issues, through diet. Last month, Netflix released the six-part docudrama Apple Cider Vinegar, which chronicles Gibson’s deception and insidious impact. Force-feeding her viewer's misinformation, Gibson caused some of society’s most vulnerable individuals — cancer patients — to forgo life-saving treatments, including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, for fad diets and pseudo-scientific practices.

Gerson therapy — which was also promoted by fellow Australian wellness influencer Jessica Ainscough, who is the inspiration for the character Milla Blake in the Netflix series — is one of the absurd dietary practices that Gibson encouraged. This scientifically unfounded regime, which is specifically targeted towards advanced cancer patients and based upon the falsity that cancer is caused by disrupted metabolism, consists of a diet of thirteen freshly juiced fruit and vegetable drinks, and five coffee enemas, per day. Not only does this method have no scientific evidence to support its claims, but it has been deemed ‘very harmful’ by Cancer Research UK and ultimately led to Ainscough’s, and her mother’s, death from epithelioid sarcoma and breast cancer in 2015 and 2013, respectively.

With the advent of social media, the popularity of alternative medicine practices and unconventional remedies has dramatically increased, perpetuated by so-called ‘health and wellness’ gurus. This is particularly harmful to people already suffering from life-threatening conditions, with cancer patients who forgo conventional treatment for alternative medicine two and a half times more likely to die, according to data analyses published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2017.

Influencers, and the toxic online communities they lead, propagate a culture which promotes certain foods and dietary practices that are perceived as being healthy, like drinking celery juice, and demonises others based on misconstrued information —  like criticising people for not separating the egg white from the yolk on the basis that it contains additional cholesterol. However, scientific scrutiny of these promotions tells a contradictory story. While juicing celery removes all the healthy plant fibre, essentially reducing it to green water, whole eggs (that is, including the yolk) provide all nine essential amino acids, as well as choline (a nutrient important for brain health and muscle control) and vitamin D, which supports bone health. 

Ignoring any real scientific evidence, cultural health trends have changed over the years to fit society’s toxic beauty standards – particularly those that are imposed on women and young girls — from the grapefruit diet which was popularised in the 1970s as a method to lose weight, to the ketogenic diet of recent years.  

These toxic trends are pervasive and have a festering online presence. It was only last year that Steven Bartlett, Dragon’s Den entrepreneur, had a guest on his Diary of a CEO podcast who claimed that a ketogenic diet could be used to treat cancer and deemed chemotherapy and radiotherapy ‘medieval cures’. A subsequent BBC investigation highlighted Bartlett’s dissemination of dangerous health misinformation to a vast number of listeners, with his podcast being ranked number one in the UK in 2024.

The basis of how online health trends develop and grow in popularity is a combination of insecurity, pressure, and expectation. It is this buzzword-fuelled promotion of seemingly tangible cures which convinces us to tap the ad for bovine colostrum, raw milk, or lion’s mane. In the case of cancer patients, however, including those who suffered under the influence of Belle Gibson, the main factor in their departure from Western medicine is one thing and one thing only — hope. When your hair has fallen out and the very marrow of your bones ache, promises of all-natural cures or ‘You Haven’t Tried This Yet!’ schemes offer a flicker of light in a space of insurmountable darkness. While they are presented as quick-fix elixirs, these magical potions will leave you with, at the very least, an awfully sour taste in your mouth.

Illustration by Janya Malkani