Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today, it's thing number 51, 100 years of the American wellness movement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rise from health influencer, if you want to call him that, to Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services raises concerns among public health experts, as we know, including 75 Nobel Prize winners who signed a letter opposing his nomination, but RFK is not the first to promote the so-called wellness regimen to the American public, not hardly.

According to Shayla Love, staff writer at The Atlantic. He "fits into a long history of Americans who have waged battle against conventional medicine." Often being both partly right, she says, and dangerously wrong. Let's explore that long history now with Shayla. Her recent piece for The Atlantic is titled America Can't Break Its Wellness Habit. Shayla, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Shayla Love: Hi, Brian, thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's first step even further back then, our timeline of the last hundred years to about 200 years ago, the Graham cracker was invented in the United States by one Stephen Graham, a Presbyterian minister who's also known as the father of vegetarianism, who was Stephen Graham and why do you begin your exploration of America's history of wellness enthusiasm with him?

Shayla Love: I mean, Sylvester Graham was a minister and we all know about Graham crackers. We can still buy them in the store, but he was one of the first really popular wellness figures who promised that you could solve public health issues through things, like diet or exercise or living correctly, and you didn't need to turn to medicine to do so. He really focused in on white flour, actually, which is something we still talk about today, the difference between processed food, white flour, and wheat flour.

He thought that the average diet, especially white bread, was tarnishing both American health but also their moral health. He also wanted Graham crackers to help us with our moral salvation.

Brian Lehrer: I think I misstated his first name. It was Sylvester, as you know. I think I said Stephen, but that was a revelation to me in your article. There was white bread in 1820.

Shayla Love: I think that our white bread is certainly more processed than his was, but he wanted a really coarse wheat, completely unprocessed, really high fiber. The reason I opened the piece with him is that wellness always combines the straightforward and the true with things that are a little out of bounds. Of course, the fiber is very good for you, and he was right that people were eating foods, that they really needed a lot more fiber. He took it a bit too far where he thought that if you ate only his foods, you could even stop people from masturbating, which he considered to be a moral sin.

Brian Lehrer: This gets us to the through line in your piece. One way to do these conversations is to do 100 years of timeline and then say what we really learned from this. Another way to do it is to say what the theme is and then give the different examples from different time periods. I said it in the intro. Your basic take here is that whether it's Sylvester Graham or RFK Jr. or a lot of other people who you describe along the way, they're often both partly right and dangerously wrong, right?

Shayla Love: Yes, that's definitely the case. This is why I think there's been a really strong desire to analyze every single one of RFK's positions and say if they're right or wrong. Is he correct about ultra processed food? Is he wrong about vaccines? The underlying motivation to wellness, to turn to wellness, is about this battle between conventional medicine and wellness and what wellness promises in the face of a distrust in conventional medicine.

Wellness will always have some things that are right about it, but the reason people turn to it is not necessarily because of what's right. It's because of that sense of certainty. It's an outlet for mistrust. There's this pseudo religious belief in the natural that wellness offers that medicine just can never provide.

Brian Lehrer: Moving into the early 20th century, we see Americans embracing treatments such as homeopathy, osteopathy, naturopathy, water cures, and chiropractors. Again, a lot of those words people will hear naturopathy, good in a way, to be a naturopath, to try to do things as naturally as possible. What were some of these practices--? What ailments did they intend to cure 100 years ago? In what ways did they cross the line into quackery?

Shayla Love: Well, it's amazing the similarities, but there's this period that started around 1850, for about 50 or 60 years, which was called irregular medicine by conventional doctors. They were intentionally not using the medical treatments of the day. They would turn to things, like water cures, which essentially was taking baths, or chiropractors, or osteopaths would do physical manipulations of the body. Homeopathy was using very small doses of treatments, very strongly diluted. They believed that these natural treatments were much safer and effective than the medical treatments of the day, which to be fair, the medical treatments of the day were kind of harsh.

You could get bloodletting, there were drugs that would make you vomit. They were called heroic treatments and they were all about just purging poisons from the body. You had these two options to choose between something that was torturous or a very natural treatment that you could go to instead. They were wildly popular. As today, Benedict Lust, who is the father of American naturopathy, he was also very against vaccines because they considered vaccines to be part of conventional medicine.

In 1920, he even nominated someone as the Constitutional Liberty League's candidate for president, and they went on a campaign for the American Drug list platform, which sounds a lot like RFK Jr.'s comments about vaccines today.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I'm so glad you went into in your article and just now what the practices of so-called mainstream medicine were at that time. The bloodletting, the inducing vomiting, things like that, hardly the age of modern medicine that we think of today that really has extended life for so much, for so much on average in this country and around the world where there's access to modern medicine in addition to the shortcomings that it genuinely has.

You described 1928 as the beginning of our golden age of medicine, as you put it. What inventions brought us into this golden age? Talk about also the social factors, society factors, which made Americans less susceptible to faux science at that time.

Shayla Love: I mean, you have this pendulum swing between the irregular medicine and then conventional medicine actually starting to really work against infectious disease. First antibiotic is discovered in 1928. We have the polio vaccine coming out. We also have germ theory becoming widely accepted as the cause of infectious disease. The things that killed most people, which were infectious diseases, suddenly we had real medical treatments for that worked, namely being antibiotics and different vaccinations.

The problem is that with all of those, the golden age of medicine is when suddenly these conventional treatments become more effective. The chronic diseases that we still struggle with today, which are more like heart disease, diabetes, things that you can't cure with antibiotics, those come into the foreground more often, and then you have this resurgence of wellness in the '60s and '70s with alternative medicine once again emerging at the limitations of conventional medicine. It always seems to be this back and forth between some shortcoming and then wellness emerges to meet that need.

Brian Lehrer: The corporatization of conventional medicine, including pharmaceutical companies and other things that the kind of counterculture of the 1960s and '70s keyed on, right?

Shayla Love: Absolutely, absolutely. RFK Jr. touches on real frustration and disappointment that people have with conventional medicine, especially the corporatization and the industry conflicts of interest, those are all real issues. It's just that wellness tends to sometimes be the wrong answer to the right question.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, let me jump back to 1906 for a moment because you pegged that as the birth year of the DFA, the Food and Drug Administration, with that, the contemporary American public health apparatus. What led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906?

Shayla Love: Around the turn of the century, we have unregulated health products basically everywhere, from both regular medicine, doctors and conventional physicians too. There's also kind of a period of social reform where Upton Sinclair's The Jungle comes out and people see that there's really unsafe food handling practices. You can buy any product that promises a cure, but who knows what's inside of it? It might be morphine or alcohol or nothing. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 required safe practices for manufacturing food, drugs and medications.

They required labels that included a product's dangerous ingredients. This is the beginning of the federal government starting to say you can't just do whatever you want to in the food world, but also, in the medicine world. Around this time, there's also a lot of medical licensing laws being passed. You can't just say you're a doctor and treat anyone. You can only treat patients if you have a medical license. All of the irregular doctors really struggled with this and they pushed back against it a lot.

Benedict Lust was fined hundreds of dollars because he would give a treatment to someone without a medical license. They had medical detectives who would go and pretend to be patients to find irregular doctors for practicing without a license.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're in our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 years of 100 things. This is thing number 51 in this segment, 100 years of the American Wellness Movement with Shayla Love, staff writer at The Atlantic, who has an article that is 100 year, even a 200 year timeline of the movement called America Can't Break Its Wellness Habit. We can take a few phone calls. I'm not exactly sure where you enter.

Listeners, I don't want this just to become a debate over RFK, pro or con, but any oral histories for yourself or anyone in your family about your experiences with pros and/or cons of so-called wellness or alternative medicine. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text as we try not to fall into the binary of pure either or, as Shayla's theme is, as we've been talking about in this article, that alternative practitioners so often get things partly right, but also, sometimes dangerously wrong. In fact, in the contemporary context, there is what we call complementary medicine, right?

Shayla Love: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: And I know some great practitioners like this, who really try to look at all the alternative stuff that's out there, not dismiss it as a lot of mainstream MDs might and try to evaluate what's really been proven or indicate indicated with anecdotal evidence or anything else, preferably some kind of real studies that these things are effective, but they're not throwing conventional medicine like vaccines overboard.

Shayla Love: Yes, and I think this is the real problem at the wellness and medicine up to fight one another. I think they offer really different things. The difference between public health, conventional medicine, and wellness is that maybe they all help each other, but they can't stand in and replace one another. The guy who came up with the term wellness is a word from 1959 and he was the chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics. His name was Halbert Dunn, and he came up with the word wellness when he was writing about how doctors themselves were dissatisfied the ability of medicine to care for people's spirit.

He was one of the people who really launched this interest in alternative medicine, holistic medicine, lifestyle medicine, whatever you want to call it. I've always found his writing on this to be really refreshing because he doesn't want to throw medicine away, but he recognizes the limits of medicine as well as the limits of wellness to do it all.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I just recently had a very mainstream MD suggest that I start taking a particular supplement for a particular thing. He says, "The studies on this are not out there. There haven't been studies yet." It made sense to him given what the substance was and what he knows about the mechanism of the condition. He was trying to help me with that it makes logical sense that that substance has a mechanism that interacts with that. You know what I mean?

Shayla Love: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Just to say that that there are very mainstream doctors who will incorporate these things when they think that they're justified. Let's take a phone call. Marina in Greenpoint, you're on WNYC. Hello, Marina.

Marina: Thank you so much for taking my call, and I have so much to say about this. Also, it connects to my artistic path in bringing artistic practice into medicine in order to restore the connection between mind, body and emotion, and spirit and imagination. I wanted to share a specific experience that I had around COVID, and to be transparent, I live with a lifelong chronic condition for which I need to take medicine without which I'm dead. I need to take insulin. There, I had a really bad COVID infection, and my first one, because I'm COVID conscious and try my best to not be infected.

I had horrible fatigue after. It wasn't receding, it wasn't lifting. I was really concerned about long COVID risk. I found an excellent functional medicine doctor who was a surgeon, an abdominal surgeon, and who went into the functional medicine field in order, as he said, to prevent people coming to the crisis point at which he saw as a surgeon. You kind of saw the way his path as a practitioner coming into the prevention side through functional medicine. Then I found this herbal medicine recommended by one of the people who founded the field of functional medicine, who has a long COVID prevention and treatment protocol freely available on their website.

I took it. It was the thing that was recommended for something called viral persistence, which is one of the things that can trigger the virus, continues to stay in your body and can trigger long COVID and many complications. It worked. I felt the difference actually within hours of taking it. It's a purely herbal supplement. As I was communicating with a company that produces this ends up, they are anti-vaxxers and are pretty much deeply into the whole conspiracy world around the pandemic.

It's this incredibly complex space, where the medicine I am N of one of how it absolutely helped me, and the company is so problematic and steeped in these really, really damaging conspiracy worlds. I'll just say that I think actually part of the reason why there's such part of the reason of that militancy, I can say, or ideological extremism in the wellness industry is because also the biomedical model so deeply resists of "conventional medicine" resists the integration of mind, body, emotion and spirit.

Brian Lehrer: Right. And Marina, I'm going to leave it there for time, but that was a good note to end on. Shayla, what a great example of what we've been talking about throughout this conversation, where the really helpful can mix with the really dangerous.

Shayla Love: Yes, and I do think that's why understanding the psychological drive or the need that wellness fills, that's outside of, is it true? Is it not true? It's really important to understanding it because that's how you can reconcile these things coexisting with each other. This pull towards the natural and this idea that the term natural or non-biomedical takes on a sort of pseudo religious status in the sense that it provides us with comfort, ritual, community, and certainty. These drives will always be there with wellness, which is why it can emerge both into beautiful things, but also into things that really go out of bounds of what we know to be true.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, the caller mentioned that she's insulin dependent, if I got that right, for diabetes. Your article says that RFK Jr. has said doctors should recommend gym memberships and good food to diabetic patients. Is this a conversation we're going to be having at the policy level in 2025? Like, no insulin or Ozempic?

Shayla Love: Well, I think he's been a bit mixed about that I've heard-- I do know about him that he really pushes diet and lifestyle as almost like cure alls. Again, this is where we can look to the past and see tons of these examples of this. There was a very famous popular health figure who's the progenitor of bodybuilding, named Bernarr Macfadden. He thought that the 1918 pandemic was caused by poor diet. There was another very popular wellness influencer who's a nutritionist named Horace Fletcher, who thought that the problem, you could cure starvation by having people chew their food more because they would get more nutrients out of it.

Benedict Lust back, the naturopathy guy, he created this retreat called Yungborn, which he thought would cure people of their addictions and all of their health problems. Again, you see this sort of overemphasis on lifestyle as a total cure all. Of course, lifestyle and diet is very important. Yes, something like diabetes, you sometimes also need a medicine, too.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, listeners might be interested in the fact that you do. Peg, "In your article, the year in which the term wellness was coined and by whom?" Want to tell them?

Shayla Love: Oh, yes, yes. This was the man, Halbert Dunn, the chief of the National Office of Vital Statistics and this was in 1959. This was, as I said, right before the alternative medicine, holistic medicine in the '70s, really blew up. I just really think it's great that he didn't think that wellness was a replacement for medicine, but he saw them as two practices that can help each other and keep each other in check. I think people's frustration with the biomedical model, as the caller said, are very valid. There are real problems with the way we make medicine and deliver medicine.

The answer is not to replace it entirely with wellness or to replace wellness entirely with medicine. Dunn, the creator of the word wellness, was very astute in pointing out the complementarity of the two practices.

Brian Lehrer: To finish, one last piece of the timeline that brings us almost to the present. Listener writes, "Who guest does not exclude the proven preventative wellness concepts recently also promoted by Michelle Obama?" Where does Michelle Obama--? It's not in your article, but she was out there promoting various pieces of healthy behavior at very least. Where does Michelle Obama fit into this narrative, if you think at all?

Shayla Love: I think that what's interesting right now about RFK Jr. is that things that actually conventional medicine have been saying, or people on the left have been saying, which is that people need to exercise more, eat better, or eat less sugar or stopping pharmaceutical drug advertisements. These have been conversations that have been going on for a long time. The conspiracy type theory, the conspiracy type thinking that this is just something that's been suppressed and not talked about is also really untrue. Many of these ideas have been around in very conventional medicine for a long time.

Michelle Obama is a great example of another person who tried to, on a public health level, institute lifestyle differences as a way to improve public health. I think that means that at the core, people do want to be healthy and it is a struggle to figure out how to do it on a population level. Michelle Obama is just another person who did very similar attempts on a policy level to make that happen.

Brian Lehrer: You kind of just referred to this at the beginning of that answer. The crossover between the right and the left, in this case there is what people sometimes refer to as the crunchy to MAGA pipeline. You've heard that?

Shayla Love: Oh, yes. I have heard about this, and I write quite a bit about psychedelic research as well. This is also something I've written about at The Atlantic, that psychedelic assisted therapy went from something seen as a left-- something on the left, psychedelics is actually embraced a lot by RFK Jr. and many people on the right as well. You have these wellness and health topics that do the horseshoe theory where you have people on both sides really advocating for them.

Brian Lehrer: That's different than the people who say, "RFK Jr., he must be hallucinating." No, that's a whole other thing.

Shayla Love: Yes. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Shayla Love, staff writer at The Atlantic. Her latest piece is titled America Can't Break Its Wellness Habit. It's 100 year plus history of the American Wellness Movement, and that's our latest episode in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Number 51, 100 Years of the American Wellness Movement. Shayla, thanks a lot for being our guide.

Shayla Love: Thanks so much.

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