The wellness industry has a pill for everything — but how many actually work?
I like to stay fit, which means I spend a fair share of my life dodging supplement ads that follow me across the internet like demented pigeons. Open YouTube and a square-jawed influencer explains why his morning requires 17 capsules, three powders, and something harvested from a mountain reachable only by yak.
Every week brings a new miracle molecule. Last week it sold longevity. This week, telepathy. Next week, immortality.
This is the tragic comedy of wellness culture. We obsess over optimization while ignoring the obvious.
Then there is the cult of optimization, embodied by Bryan Johnson, the man who turned his own body into the priciest science project in operation. Johnson's regimen reportedly involves constant blood testing, endless biometric tracking, and enough pills to stock a pharmacy. He once had a liter of his teenage son's plasma pumped into his veins and shipped his own down to his 70-year-old father. The biomarkers showed nothing, so he stopped.
Yet even Johnson recently revealed that he has autoimmune gastritis, a chronic disease in which, as he put it, "my stomach is eating itself." After years of measuring almost everything measurable, biology still found a way to surprise him
Ordinary people may not have the means to go to the extremes Johnson does, but they have absorbed the same basic message: that health is something you buy rather than something you build.
Pill-pilled
You see it at any gym. A middle-aged accountant arrives with a supplement stack heavier than his dumbbells. A retiree keeps a cupboard that resembles a chemistry bench. Someone winded by a single staircase swallows enough capsules each morning to rattle when he walks.
Our ancestors built civilizations and survived brutal winters without starting each day on a fistful of tablets. Plenty of them died young, taken by infection or a tooth gone septic. But many of the chronic diseases now filling supplement advertisements were far less common than they are today. Their greatest threats came from outside the body. Ours are increasingly self-inflicted.
But some supplements still earn their place. A recent review of the evidence offers a useful reminder that health runs far simpler than the industry selling it wants us to believe.
The point isn't that supplements never work. It's that they work best when they correct an actual deficiency.
The review focuses on older adults, the group most likely to develop genuine nutritional shortfalls. Appetite fades with age. Medications interfere with absorption. Bad teeth turn eating into a chore, and illness complicates the rest.
In those cases, targeted supplementation helps.
B is for boring
Vitamin B12 is the clearest example. Deficiency becomes more common with age and can lead to fatigue, nerve damage, and even anemia. Vitamin D matters for people who rarely see the sun or face a higher risk of fractures. Folate has its uses. Calcium and magnesium help when the diet falls short. Omega-3 supplementation may also benefit some people, particularly those who consume little oily fish.
Notice the pattern. The supplements that earn their keep are the incredibly boring ones.
Nobody films a breathless video about correcting a documented B12 deficiency. No fjord-gazing influencer hawks a luxury magnesium subscription against a slow-motion sunrise. Common sense doesn't trend.
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Meat is medicine
The most striking finding in the review involves protein.
For all the noise about exotic compounds and futuristic blends, many older adults simply don’t eat enough of it. That gap accelerates muscle loss and costs them their independence. A chicken breast and a good steak may do more for healthy aging than an entire shelf of capsules.
This is the tragic comedy of wellness culture. We obsess over optimization while ignoring the obvious.
Supplements promise something modern people desperately want: the feeling that health can be outsourced to a purchase rather than earned through habit.
No mystery
The body isn't nearly as mysterious as the wellness industry pretends. Sleep still does the heavy lifting. Resistance training still preserves muscle. A sensible diet still outperforms most supplement stacks. Protein still matters more than almost anyone admits.
These points are rather dull. They flatline on a podcast and resist packaging into a $90 tub. Nobody gets rich selling a balanced breakfast. No influencer films a viral hit called "The Shocking Secret of Eating Enough Protein."
The supplement market thrives because basics bore us and shortcuts seduce us. People would rather believe longevity hides inside a capsule pulled from a rare plant than accept that the answer involves lifting heavy things, eating enough protein, and getting to bed at a sensible hour.
So the market keeps ballooning on the promise that health can be bought instead of built.
Dig in
Sometimes a supplement is the right call. A confirmed deficiency deserves treatment. Certain medical conditions demand it. But the evidence keeps arriving at a conclusion that borders on anticlimactic.
For most people without a documented deficiency, more pills don't buy better health.
The foundations stay stubbornly old-fashioned, which is exactly why nobody can sell them back to you at a markup.
After years of being told health demands endless powders and concoctions, the answer turns out to be almost insultingly plain.
The miracle formula was never in the bottle. It was on the dinner plate all along, quietly waiting while the wellness industry invented another miracle.
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) has a new solution for urban poverty: government-run grocery stores.
The plan, announced as part of his first 100 days in office, would spend roughly $70 million creating city-owned supermarkets across New York, beginning with a flagship location in East Harlem. The stores would operate through private contractors under city oversight, with subsidized staples — cheaper eggs, cheaper bread, cheaper basics — guaranteed by government rather than market competition.
Fast food, the supposed cheap fallback of the food-deprived, has out-inflated inflation itself and is now closer to a sit-down dinner than a quick bite.
Mamdani justifies this spending by invoking a persistent, infrequently examined assumption of liberal policymakers: that cities in America are riddled with blighted urban zones where fresh produce and healthy groceries remain frustratingly out of reach.
These are called "food deserts."
Hunger games
Never mind that a quick look around the proposed East Harlem site reveals multiple grocery stores within walking distance, including produce markets sitting blocks from where the city plans to spend tens of millions constructing another one.
Yet the language persists. Reading recent coverage of America's "food deserts," you would be forgiven for thinking we have all woken up in the back half of "The Road," scavenging tin cans in ash-choked ruins while a feral child clutches our pant leg.
ABC News informs us that 17 million Americans live in a federally designated food desert, a term so bleak it sounds like it should come with a Pulitzer and a black-and-white photo of a barefoot kid staring into the middle distance.
Tara Colton of New Jersey's Economic Development Authority calls food deserts a product of structural racism, neighborhood redlining, and disinvestment — three abstractions stacked into one sentence, which is the literary equivalent of a turducken. Malcolm Gladwell is taking notes.
To be clear, there are real people in these stories who deserve real help. Take Knoxville, for instance, where an elderly disabled woman with a walker needs three to four hours to buy groceries. There are many like her. No car, no one to call when the fridge needs to be restocked.
But is that really a food problem, or is it a loneliness problem in disguise? A what-happened-to-neighbors problem? Whatever it is, it isn't fixed by the nearest Kroger relocating two blocks closer, but by a person with transportation and 20 free minutes.
Couch-bound
Which brings us to the definition itself, because the definition is where this whole conversation instantly falls apart. Per the USDA, a food desert is a low-income area where residents live more than one mile from a supermarket in a city or 20 in the country.
The rural number is its own conversation. The urban one deserves a closer look. One mile. That is the apocalyptic threshold, the line past which we reach for the language of famine and structural decay. One mile is the distance between your couch and the place you were going to walk to anyway before you decided to "treat yourself" to DoorDash. There are CrossFit gyms charging $200 a month to make people walk farther than that carrying objects on purpose.
Then there is the part the hellscape correspondents won't touch. A Big Mac combo now averages $9 nationally. A large pizza that feeds two or three people runs $15 to $20 before tip and delivery fee and the mysterious "service charge" that has crept onto every receipt in America. A medium fries alone is $4 now, a price point that used to get you the whole meal. Fast food, the supposed cheap fallback of the food-deprived, has out-inflated inflation itself and is now closer to a sit-down dinner than a quick bite.
Shop right
Meanwhile, in the so-called desert, a bag of dried lentils is $1.79. A pound of rice is a dollar. A dozen eggs, even after the great egg panic, is around $4 and gives you a week of breakfasts. Frozen vegetables, the great equalizer of American nutrition, run $2 or $3 at any Dollar Tree, which, surprise, exists in basically every "food desert" I've ever set foot in. A whole rotisserie chicken at Walmart is $5.97 and feeds a family for two days. A can of black beans is a dollar. An onion is 50 cents.
So when an able-bodied 28-year-old with a working car and a smartphone tells me he can't eat healthy because he lives in a food desert, what he means is he doesn't want to. He wants the Crunchwrap Supreme combo for $9. He wants the door to open and the food to be hot and the wrapper to crinkle.
That's a preference, not a famine. Calling it a crisis is an insult to people who actually are in one — like, say, the woman with the walker — because it lumps her struggle in with some slob's Tuesday-night laziness and gives both the same vocabulary.
Fertile ground
Either way, the term "food desert" seems deliberately designed to invoke panic. Maybe so taxpayers will look the other way when, say, New Jersey passes a $240 million Food Desert Relief Act and starts paying restaurants to deliver hot meals.
But there are no ash plumes. No one is barbecuing cats or plucking ducks from ponds. Well, very few are.
Battlefield Farm, a Knoxville nonprofit, understands this. It doesn't tweet about food apartheid. Instead, it grows actual collards and drives them to actual people in an actual van. The company is planning a low-cost grocery store.
That's the thing about real problems. They tend to have real, boring solutions, and they tend to require us to acknowledge reality before we can do anything about them.
The 53 million Americans the USDA classifies as having "limited" food access are not all starving in a wasteland. Most of them are within walking, biking, or one-bus distance of a place that sells apples and carrots. Most of them know this, and a lot of them are cooking meals right now. The ones who genuinely cannot get there need rides, ramps, and delivery — not a fatalistic op-ed painting America like a Ken Burns documentary nobody asked for.
How to bake your own bread — no gadgets, recipes, or kneading required
Do you know how easy it is to bake your own bread?
I didn't, and now I do. And I want to share this knowledge with you.
Want homemade sandwich bread? Just replace the water with milk or half and half and add melted butter and a tablespoon of sugar.
Once you know, it will be harder to go back to the chemical-infused grain product the big, industrialized food manufacturers tell us is "bread."
Especially since the real thing — what everyone understood as "bread" for all of human history until about 100 years ago — is cheaper, more nutritious, and doesn't taste like Styrofoam.
Sourdough ... for the rest of us
And don't worry — we're not going to ruin the fun by approaching it like neurotic, fussy "homesteading" influencers obsessed with buying shiny new equipment to make old-fashioned techniques “authentic.”
You’re not going to need a kitchen scale or a digital probe thermometer. You’re going to make something delicious and wholesome just the way your great-grandmother did, and she didn’t use any of these modern techno crutches.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about sourdough. I didn’t want to use the word before clearing the conceptual brush, because it’s contaminated with “lifestyle” associations. People imagine a complex “artisan” process that can only be achieved by some irritating guy from Minneapolis who talks in upspeak on YouTube.
A few months ago I wrote about cooking from scratch, by hand, without relying on gadgetry and GPS-style “turn by turn” directions. In that piece, I said I was going to learn to bake bread from a natural sourdough starter all by hand, with no scales, no metric-graduated beakers, and no obsessive feeding schedule.
I’ve done it. And it turned out as I thought it would. My hands now know what the right dough consistency feels like. My eyes can tell if the loaf has risen for long enough that it can be baked. The only tools I have relied on were cup measures and a glance at the clock so I know about how long the dough has been fermenting (rising). I don’t need directions or scales or thermometers because I own the knowledge in my hands and mind through direct practice.
The duds? Only about two or three loaves. My problem? Using a starter that was too weak; I hadn’t let it fully develop in the beginning culture stage before I started baking with it. Once I sorted that out, I ended up with this hearty specimen:
You’re going to make a loaf that good, and you’ll have it down by memory in one month.
Then you’ll branch out into other kinds of bread. Want homemade sandwich bread? Just replace the water with milk or half and half and add melted butter and a tablespoon of sugar. That’s all I did. Here’s the result from my first try:
Then I wanted something fancier, something like the loaves I’ve been paying $9 for at a local bakery that does it the old-fashioned way with nothing but flour, water, culture, and salt. I just added olive oil and rosemary and put fancy salt on top:
Want to do it yourself?
As I mentioned, I'm not going to give you a recipe. At least, not in the modern-day sense of a set of precisely calibrated steps and measurements designed to produce the exact same outcome every time.
Instead I'm going to give you a basic outline that forces you to absorb the process physically and by instinct, rather than just memorizing turn-by-turn directions. If you’re not afraid of plunging your hands directly into the dough and making practice loaves until you get it right, you’ll be baking like this in a few weeks.
For the starter
You’re not going to buy a starter from any of those online marketplaces. You’re going to make your own. The yeast comes from the rye flour and from the air.
Ingredients
- Stone-ground whole rye flour. Yes, whole, and yes, rye, even if you don’t plan to make rye loaves. Rye is packed with natural yeast and bacteria that make starters get off the ground quicker than white flour.
- Water
- A jar
Method:
Take about a cup of whole rye flour and add enough room-temperature water to make a thick paste. And I do mean "paste" — something with the consistency of the stuff you remember using in school for papier-mâché volcanoes.
But don’t get neurotic. If it’s thinner or thicker than my paste, it’s still going to work.
Mix it well in the jar. Then take a rubber band and put it around the outside of the jar at the level where the starter is now. This is so you can see rise over time. Cover that jar loosely with a towel, cheesecloth, or a loose lid and put it in the oven with the light on. Leave it for 24 hours. Then discard half of it and add the same amount of rye flour and water back in, mix, and leave for another day.
You’re going to do this for at least seven days. After the first few days, you’ll see some bubbles. It’s not ready yet. Keep discarding and feeding. You may even notice it smells a little off the first few days. That’s normal.
By day seven (or a bit longer), you’ll notice that the starter smells sour, in a pleasant way, and yeasty. That’s what you want. At that point, you should also be seeing it double in size between feedings. If it’s not doing that, keep going with daily feedings.
Now you’ve got a stable starter. Stick it in the fridge. You can keep using rye to feed it for baking, or you can feed it white flour and convert it. I just use whatever flour I have handy because I don’t mind my loaves having mixed grains.
Your first loaf
So far we have used rye flour and water. Now to add our two final ingredients: white bread flour and salt.
Again, that's white bread flour, not all-purpose. Bread flour has a higher protein ratio, which you need for building structure and rise.
First, take your starter out of the fridge and feed it flour and water. Put it in your oven with the light on. This gives it the perfect 80 degrees F temperature that it likes. Colder than that and it takes forever. Significantly hotter than that, and you may kill the yeast.
Wait for it to double in size, three to four hours.
Take it out and mix about a half-cup of starter into about a cup and a half of room-temperature water. Put the jar of starter back in the fridge. You only need to keep about a tablespoon of it — that will inoculate all the flour the next time you feed it for baking.
In a large bowl, put in about four and a half cups of bread flour and two teaspoons of salt. Mix the salt through the flour. Now add your wet mixture of water and starter. Stir or use your hands to mix until it all comes together and there are no more dry flour spots. It will be rough and shaggy.
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Knead? No need
Guess what? You’re not going to knead. The reason most people knead is because we have used commercial yeast since it became available in the 1860s. Commercial yeast rises in just hours, too short a time for the yeast to build the bread structure, so you have to do it by hand to develop the gluten.
Not so with sourdough, using this method. Time is going to do everything kneading does and more.
Cover the dough and put it in a cold room or cellar if you have one. Somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees F. Let it sit 18-24 hours.
This is cold fermentation, which gives you the tang of sourdough, and it makes the bread more nutritious and long-lasting before it goes stale. If you don’t have a cold room, let your dough ferment for a few hours on the counter, then put it in the refrigerator overnight.
At the end of fermentation, you are ready to bake. Preheat a Dutch oven in your oven at 450 degrees for 45 minutes. Shape your dough into a ball or loaf, and put it in the Dutch oven. Cover, put back in the oven, and bake for 30 minutes, still at 450.
Remove the lid, turn the oven down to 400, then bake for about 10 to 15 more minutes to get a golden crust.
You have made bread that is miles above the plastic grotesquerie sold at grocery stores, for almost no money and for very little effort. No scales; no precise measuring. This is how your ancestors and all humans made bread for thousands of years before the late 19th century.
If your first few loaves aren’t great, keep going.
Don’t forget to slather it in butter.
'Sugar-free' scam: How scapegoating a pantry staple is ruining our health
Sugar has had a terrible few decades in public relations. Which is rich, considering sugar never hired a publicist or lobbied for its inclusion in 37 varieties of salad dressing.
Sugar was simply sitting there, being a carbohydrate, when an entire industry decided it made a more convenient villain than portion size, impulse control, or the more uncomfortable question of why a gas station sells a beverage the size of a toddler.
Fat was the villain in 1990. Americans loaded up on SnackWell's cookies and ate them by the sleeve.
Somewhere between the obesity panic of the 2000s and the clean-eating obsession of the 2010s, sucrose transformed from a pantry staple into a health and wellness villain on par with cigarettes and sloth.
Sugar, sugar
The human body runs on glucose. Your brain needs it. Your muscles prefer it. Sugarcane has been sweetening drinks in South Asia since roughly 350 A.D., and somehow humanity survived long enough to argue about it on social media.
The problem was never the molecule but the amount — 22 teaspoons a day, the American average, poured mostly into beverages people didn’t even register as meals. A single large fountain soda contains 17. A flavored coffee drink from any chain you can name contains more than that and comes with a cheerful barista who will spell your name wrong on the cup while handing you what is essentially a dessert with a lid.
That is a dosage problem. It got rebranded as a chemistry problem, and that rebranding sold a lot of diet soda.
Gut check
I learned this the hard way, via my own stomach. For about two years I swapped sugar for artificial sweeteners with the confidence of someone who had done exactly one Google search. Sucralose (commonly sold as Splenda) in my coffee. Stevia in everything else. The occasional sugar-free chocolate that tasted like sweetened cardboard, which I ate anyway, because suffering voluntarily is how adults signal virtue.
I was, by all the metrics I had invented for myself, being responsible. Then I started feeling bloated roughly 40 minutes after every meal — a persistent, uncomfortable fullness that no amount of walking around the block seemed to fix. And then came a specific, percussive kind of digestive discomfort that I will describe only as "audible." My fiancée noticed. I blamed the dog.
I cut the sweeteners on a Friday. By Sunday, the situation had resolved itself completely. The bowel-induced thunder had passed, the barometric pressure had normalized, and my fiancée stopped sleeping with the window open.
Metabolic mayhem
It turns out that I was ahead of the research for once in my life. A recent study examining the biological effects of common artificial sweeteners — sucralose and stevia, specifically — found that even quantities comparable to everyday human consumption altered gut microbiome composition in measurable ways.
The gut houses roughly 39 trillion microorganisms, meaning it contains more bacterial cells than human cells, a fact that raises serious questions about who, exactly, is running things. It regulates metabolism, modulates immune response, produces neurotransmitters, and sends chemical signals to the brain, influencing mood and appetite. The body is less a person than a committee, and the committee has opinions about your sweetener choices.
Disrupt the ecosystem, and you get disrupted systems downstream. The researchers found that beneficial compounds helping maintain metabolic health declined in subjects exposed to these sweeteners. In plain terms, the body became measurably worse at handling sugar, and it had not consumed any sugar to arrive there. The sweetener had taught the body a new dysfunction without any of the calories required to earn it.
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Sweet surrender
The findings on sucralose were particularly persistent. Researchers observed that its effects on gut bacteria and gene activity carried across multiple generations in animal studies. Offspring who had never consumed sucralose showed early signs of impaired glucose regulation — their bodies struggling with sugar metabolism as an inherited consequence of a parent's diet.
This is epigeneticism: the transmission of acquired biological traits through changes in gene expression rather than DNA sequence. Stevia's impacts were detectable but short-lived, fading rather than compounding. Neither result fits the marketing promise of a neutral, calorie-free pleasure. Both suggest that the quest to outsmart biology with chemistry has, predictably, run into biology itself.
Americans consume artificial sweeteners at scale. They are in diet drinks, protein bars, flavored yogurts, chewing gum, children's vitamins, and roughly half the products shelved in the "healthy" aisle of any grocery store. Meanwhile, rates of obesity, insulin resistance, and metabolic disorders remain stubbornly high — exactly the conditions these products were engineered to help prevent. The sweeteners are not the sole explanation. But the idea that they carry zero metabolic consequences is no longer a position the evidence supports, and it was probably never as solid as the packaging implied.
The M-word
None of this requires burning your Splenda packets in the back yard, but the broader pattern is familiar enough to be dispiriting. Fat was the villain in 1990. Americans loaded up on SnackWell's cookies — fat-free, proudly labeled, stuffed with sugar — and ate them by the sleeve because the math seemed to check out. Sugar became the villain in 2010. Americans loaded up on artificially sweetened alternatives and called it progress.
The villain rotates on a roughly 20-year cycle. The processed food industry introduces the replacement, funds the science that endorses it, and collects the revenue while researchers spend the next decade figuring out what went wrong. Then a new villain is identified, a new replacement is launched, and somewhere a marketing team opens a bottle of champagne that probably contains aspartame.
The answer to every panic in that cycle was always moderation, a word so aggressively boring that it apparently requires a global dietary crisis every 10 years to get anyone's attention. It also means reframing what sugar actually is: not a poison to be eliminated but a pleasure to be savored, like good whiskey or compliments from your father. Save it for a nice piece of cake, a well-made dessert, the occasional spoon of honey stirred into morning tea with the uncomplicated satisfaction of someone who has stopped reading the label.
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