“I got in an accident that involved some sea urchins,” Natalie Joy Gale, a PhD student in McGill’s Department of History and Classical Studies, said in an interview with The Tribune.
Gale recalls wiping out in an ‘urchin-y’ area of reef while surfing in Puerto Rico, resulting in several sea urchin spines puncturing the skin on her hands and feet. After the incident, she turned to the internet for answers, making use of the suggested home remedies she found online. That same evening, still in severe pain, Gale came across a paper that warned of the dangers of sea urchin spines should they remain embedded for too long. The following morning, she woke up feeling unwell and decided to seek help from the local emergency room. The doctors removed as many of the spines as they could, although they could not remove them entirely due to the risk of infection.
Keeping that paper in mind, Gale visited more doctors when she returned to Montreal and eventually got the care that she needed.
With the seemingly limitless amount of health information available on the internet, it is no surprise that around half of Canadians reported accessing these sources in 2024—albeit likely for information unrelated to sea urchins. Online resources—whether from social media or established medical websites—can make it easier to figure out what you may be experiencing, what treatments are out there, and whether a trip to a family physician or the emergency room is warranted. But beyond the information intended to address more immediate health concerns lies a whole world of wellness content which aims to promote a holistic, healthy lifestyle.
Upon first glance, some of the wellness content found on social media seems fairly innocuous. Chia seed pudding with colourful splashes of fruit and a drizzle of honey. A monochromatic workout set. An early wake-up to catch the sunrise and get to the gym. A general vibe of put-togetherness.
A glimpse beneath the aesthetic surface, however, reveals something more sinister. Instructions on how to get “snatched.” Claims that purchasing one product will fix your health problems. Mysterious health remedies lacking any scientific backing. Moreover, much of this content seems to suggest that the responsibility of maintaining one’s health should be left almost entirely to the individual, and that the social determinants of health—factors beyond genetics and lifestyle that shape health outcomes, such as socioeconomic status, race, and gender—are to be ignored.
Take wellness influencer Reagan Spencer’s thoughts on the matter, for example, in her video captioned, ‘The truth most people don’t want to hear’:
“You make time for what’s important to you, and if you’re not making time for it, then it’s obviously not that important. You can make excuses all day about why you can’t eat healthy, why you can’t get x amount of steps in, or why you can’t get to the gym. But when something truly matters to you, you find a way.”
In her view, any difficulty you experience in maintaining your health is a moral failing, a lack of willpower, and/or a priority issue above all else: You simply don’t want it badly enough.
In an email to The Tribune, Jonathan Jarry, scientist and science communicator at McGill’s Office for Science and Society, explained how an individual’s actions are unfairly framed as the sole determining factors for one’s health in online wellness content.
“When you get sick, you are blamed for it. You didn’t eat right enough, you didn’t exercise enough, you didn’t buy the right supplements, you didn’t pay for enough sessions at your local infrared sauna,” Jarry said. “This blame is misplaced, and it causes anxiety, and I think it’s an insidious consequence of believing that health can simply be bought at the right price.”
Crucially, in championing these “simple” fixes, wellness influencers act as though health exists outside of social or economic conditions, despite the fact that racialized and lower-income communities are disproportionately neglected by the healthcare system, and experience poorer health outcomes and lower life expectancy overall. Wellness influencers’ disregard of these systemic injustices is made all the more problematic when considering the size of their audiences; Spencer herself has over 450,000 followers on TikTok, meaning this merely individualistic narrative is disseminated on a large scale.
“Good modern medicine, including public health, recognizes that health is not just a choice. Sure, there are decisions you can make to reduce your risk of becoming ill, but so much of [your health] is outside anyone’s control,” Jarry explained. “It has to do with who your parents are and the genetic material they gave you. It has to do with where you grew up and in what social class. It has to do with how much money you earn now. The wellness movement, however, has always thrived by denying this reality and selling you solutions under the guise of self-empowerment.”
A healthy body is a thin body (allegedly)
Beyond the fact that wellness influencers are frequently attempting to sell you a product, they are also often giving instructions on how to lose weight. Of the wellness industry’s $6.8 trillion USD valuation in 2024—which encompasses economic activity in sectors that allow people to incorporate wellness into their lives—$1.3 trillion USD comes from personal care and beauty, while another $1.1 trillion USD is tied to healthy eating, nutrition, and weight loss. For reference, the wellness sector’s total valuation is around 16 times larger than that of the global sports economy.
Moreover, the beauty and health industries at large are increasingly intersecting. Influencer Jada Moylan paints a clear picture of this overlap on her TikTok page, whose bio reads, “Here to get hotter and healthier.”
In her recent posts, Moylan frames lifestyle practices that are objectively good for you, such as weightlifting and eating well, almost solely in relation to how they will make you look. Rather than simply sharing a workout routine and encouraging people to exercise just for the sake of strength, these posts revolve around being thin and toned while avoiding bulkiness. This framing coincides with the semi-recent comeback of “thinspo” content in broader social media contexts—although its presence has arguably been continuous.
“The idea that a healthy body is a body that adheres and conforms to the ideals that the dominant society has established, which always reflect certain ideas about class, certain ideas about race and certain ideas about thinness, I think that it’s all kind of interlocking,” Gale said.
Indeed, there is a significant relationship between socio-economic status and weight, with rates of obesity and socioeconomic status being inversely correlated in developed countries, and positively correlated in developing countries. Concurrently, the means by which Moylan claims one can achieve this look completely obscures problems in the modern food market.
“Eat simple, boring meals, eat high protein, eat whole foods, limit sugar, limit alcohol, limit processed foods,” she suggests, among other tips, when describing how to achieve your dream body.
Moylan is correct in pointing out that these practices are largely good for you, but when examining what food is readily available to the public, it becomes clear why people cannot simply switch to a whole foods diet. In the United States, around 75 per cent of the food supply is thought to be ultra-processed. This includes products such as energy drinks and hot dogs, as well as staples like sliced bread and yogurt. They have been specifically engineered to be nearly irresistible to the human palate, and furthermore, they are energy-dense, easy to prepare, and above all, more affordable.
These ideas that health should be a means through which to realize patriarchal beauty standards, and that anyone can take up a healthier lifestyle at will, only further isolate people in an already broken healthcare system, pointing the blame at us and ignoring the systemic issues which leave us stranded in the first place. Moreover, the abundance of content that focuses on weight loss is ironically making people unhealthier, indeed contributing to increased body image issues and eating disorders.
Moylan’s team did not respond to The Tribune’s request for comment.
Pseudoscience and misinformation
In the same breath as telling you that you aren’t reaching your health goals simply because it’s not important enough to you, and that you should be exercising and eating well for the sake of getting your body “bikini-ready,” wellness influencers make unsubstantiated claims about how well their health regimen really works. There are countless scientifically dubious yet financially lucrative health products they promote, ranging from mouth taping, coffee enemas, or dietary supplements—none of which are subject to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations.
In a TikTok with nearly 400,000 likes, self-proclaimed “beauty guru” Tatyana Lafata takes us through her daily supplement routine for “glass skin, a happy gut and long healthy hair.” Once again, we see the overlap of beauty and health, and this time, it can be attributed in part to a daily spoonful of edible sea moss.
“It has 92 out of 102 minerals on this Earth. A serving of sea moss every day will change your health. Skin, hair, brain function, mental clarity, anxiety, appetite, everything. This will cure it,” she says.
First of all, it is not clear which 102 minerals Lafata is talking about: There are over 5000 minerals on our planet, and humans only require about 30 of these to survive. Second, while we cannot say that she hasn’t seen benefits from taking sea moss, it is completely irresponsible to make such a lofty statement about how it could benefit others.
A symptom of deeper issues
Despite their questionable claims, it should come as no surprise that wellness influencers are successful. Not only is there legitimately useful information to be distilled from these murky waters—even though it is tied up with notions of beauty and pseudoscience—but there is a general sentiment of dissatisfaction with the healthcare system across both Canada and the United States. This is especially relevant for women and BIPOC individuals who are routinely dismissed in healthcare spaces. Social media allows people to access information quickly, avoiding the long wait times that patients experience in clinics today.
Moreover, along with the already-heightened sense of institutional mistrust, we have people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, adding fuel to the misinformation fire—a man whose government has gutted research programs across the country and rolled back vaccine mandates that were long understood to be safe and effective.
Jarry touched on some of the factors that are correlated with the birth of RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which itself is tied to the wellness industry.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was a radicalizing event across multiple lines. It brought to the surface basic inequalities that had always been there but that some of us were ignorant of; but it also reenergized a somewhat waning anti-vaccine movement,” Jarry wrote. “The fact that mRNA vaccines were being rolled out for the first time was a big reason for the distrust, and I think that anti-vaccine influencers like Kennedy managed to sway people who were otherwise pro-vaccine into becoming more hesitant of them.”
Media literacy: A step in the right direction
Knowing that both government officials and wellness influencers are spreading health misinformation, it is crucial that we learn, as consumers, to evaluate the legitimacy of what we encounter online, so as to avoid completely disregarding the internet as a useful tool for gaining health information.
In an interview with The Tribune, McGill science communication specialist and faculty lecturer Diane Dechief suggested how students in particular can work together to critically examine information they find on the internet.
“It’s really important for students to realize they can be part of this good communication system too [by] asking people how they found out about this information and maybe pointing them towards places to verify it or like better information,” Dechief said. “So I feel like there’s a bit of a citizenship responsibility as well as the units that provide us with healthcare […] to make things ready to be drawn on in these ways, […] I do think people are turning away from social media in a lot of cases and looking more toward what’s the good information and what’s the good evidence, and to kind of carry that forward a bit better.”
Dechief leaves us with questions to ask ourselves when we come across health information online to evaluate its legitimacy.
“What is the source? […] Are they from a major publisher or not? […] Are there real editors attached to it? […] What are the vested interests? Who’s paying for this? Is this publicly funded or not?”
Ultimately, we cannot reduce systemic injustices to individually manageable problems. We must call on policymakers to address the death of media literacy education seen today, as well as the general public sentiment against science and the scientific method. We must ask for stronger fact-checking on our social media platforms that profit from misinformation.
And finally, we must remember that, while we do have some control over our health, maintaining our wellbeing will always be at odds with the values of a neoliberal society, which encourages us to forgo our bodily needs for the sake of growth and productivity. To truly feel better, we must first challenge the overarching systems that frame us as mere individuals in the first place.
If you are a McGill student looking for health and scientific resources, please consult the Eating Disorder Centre (EDCSSMU), the Student Wellness Hub, or one of McGill’s many wonderful librarians.