Apple Cider Vinegar is topping Netflix’s list of trending shows in Ireland. The series is based on the “true-ish” story of the chaotic rise and fall of holistic super-influencer Belle Gibson.
Gibson claimed to have been diagnosed with malignant brain cancer. Her naturopathic approach to her diagnosis became the founding myth of a wellness business that grew to include an award-winning app and cookbook and earned her an audience of millions of devoted Instagram followers.
Then it emerged she had lied about giving proceeds of her book sales to charity and, in fact, had never been diagnosed with cancer.
Beyond the Aussie accents and coffee enemas, a dubious undercurrent extends beyond the lifeworld of the series – a wellness culture pedalling a reductive idea: nature good, science bad.
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Gibson’s story represents an extreme version of troubling wellness influencers – at least, we have to hope lying about brain cancer and pocketing income promised to charities are rare.
However, we don’t have to look far to see subtler versions of this ideology. We see a more benign echo in the popular fixation on processed food, targeting everything from bread containing emulsifiers to the very existence of baby formula. Influencers roam supermarket/pharmacy aisles, pointing at ingredient lists that include items with scientific sounding names with horror.
A similar vein runs through the ascendancy of the trad wife phenomenon, where women eschew the conveniences of modern technology (well, except for phones and social media) and generate a following posting “making my kids’ sandwiches” videos that include milling their own flour and coagulating cheese.
The influence of nature-worship is especially potent in corners of media directed at mothers. Espousing a view often referred to in rhetoric as “the appeal to nature”, proponents claim that natural things are good and unnatural things are bad, especially where pregnancies and children are concerned.
What do people such as Gibson even mean when they talk about nature? “Natural” is somewhat nebulous in isolation. On one reading, natural could imply anything that isn’t magical/supernatural. Even “ultra-processed” products can ultimately be reduced to parts that occurred somewhere in nature. “Natural” only seems to get clearer in contrast. JL Austin called words such as these “trouser words” – we only know what is intended once we know what is being opposed. The negative “wears the trousers”. By looking at the things they disavow (processed food, baby formula) it seems that by natural they mean something like “minimally interfered with” and “not made by scientists”.
The meaning of science is equally strained. As late as 1925, the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal, Nature, was still debating whether the term “scientist” was something they could get behind. Some of the concerns were quaint, for example, over the extent of the harmony between the ancient Greek and Latin derived parts of the word. More pragmatic concerns focused on the generality of the seeming applications.
The level of specialisation in professional science, even back then, meant that practitioners already understood themselves to be physicists, or botanists, or engineers, rather than bundled into the indefinite assembly of characters that “scientist” might fit.
What I take from this is that nature is irreducibly complex and science is gloriously various. As far back as the 1870s John Stuart Mill was sensitive to nature’s mixed blessings and the redundancy of the idea that what is natural is also what is good: “The course of Nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do.”
I love this quote because it captures how brutal nature can be, how adept at creating poisons and disasters. But the larger point he highlights so effectively is the tempting oversimplification inherent in the appeal to nature.
It would be convenient if things were arranged in such a binary that we could trust anything naturally occurring and feel safe rejecting the fruits of science, but sadly, the situation requires deeper, more specific thinking than that. Convincing people that scientific interventions are bad per se is a dangerous mission with potentially callous outcomes.
As with many calamities of the modern online age, some of this amounts to an overcorrection of a previous wrong. “Scientific Motherhood” is a term describing a trend that grew over the course of the early to late 20th century and encouraged the belief that women require expert scientific and medical advice to raise children in a healthy way.
It’s one dimension that explains the movement from breastfeeding to doctor-directed bottle feeding in many countries in the same period. In a science-obsessed ethos, quantitative, testable modes of parenting were promoted over instinctive, cultural ones.
Reclaiming the power of women’s bodies and the importance of intuition and shared knowledge is a vital correction. However, it seems it has been coupled in many spaces with an avowed distrust of all things scientific. Even analgesia in childbirth is demonised as scientific and medical “interventions” are discouraged at all costs.
When infants are born, the choice about how and what to feed them takes on a strangely political dimension and women are urged to avoid formula supplementation at all costs.
Decisions between options on the spectrum from highly scientifically engineered to minimally processed require specific, context-sensitive research. Presenting wellness as inhabiting one end of the spectrum alone is a sure way to lead people worried about their health into danger. It’s also a way to sell things. Even quests that begin in ideological purity can become derailed when sponsorship and product promotion enter the fold.
The pandemic illustrates the risks inherent in communicating complex science; it is partly as a result of this that anti-science views are increasingly entering the political mainstream. We should beware the appeal of simple answers to difficult questions.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin
