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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

I can't manage to read this entire thing, not just because it is long, but because it is so sneering. Study after study after study indicates that diet, exercise and lifestyle have measurable impacts on morbidity and a long list of serious, often deadly, conditions. But if you actually try to advocate that people attend to their health first and foremost by eating right, exercising and making good lifestyle choices, you are some crazy weirdo?

I don't think it is any mystery at all that it is happening alongside so many people not having access to proper insurance, doctors, etc. If you can't afford to go to a doctor, then reading something for free on the internet and tweaking your diet in hopes of not needing a doctor makes all kinds of sense.

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  But if you actually try to advocate that people attend to 
  their health first and foremost by eating right, 
  exercising and making good lifestyle choices, you are some
  crazy weirdo?

I don't think that's what the article was sneering at.

It was sneering at the idea of fearmongering about what people eat, but then trying to sell them on a whole bunch of unregulated supplements and quack remedies.

There is an awful lot of "something free on the internet" that is just complete bullshit designed to sell you something.

The writing is a bit sneering and sarcastic, but I think it's pretty clear this is entirely about the new-agey-too-expensive-shady-pseudo-science kind of wellness and not about eating right and excercising. And this is not at all about people who can't afford insurance - the tagline is "Why are so many privileged people feeling so sick? Luckily, there’s no shortage of cures.".

I was responding in part to this:

There’s something grotesque about this industry’s emerging at the moment when the most basic health care is still being denied to so many in America and is at risk of being snatched away from millions more.

If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken. And that quote (above) is basically where I stopped reading.

The title on HN now has Wellness in quotes. But it is not actually in quotes on the article itself. I think it is important to make a clearer distinction between actual wellness programs that do genuine good and the stuff that tries to market itself that way and is more questionable.

For personal reasons, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. But I think this is an important distinction to make.

>If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken. And that quote (above) is basically where I stopped reading.

Do people think that telling others they "stopped reading" an article before it was over makes their opinion on its contents more valid than having actually read it all AND calmly?

>If you think only rich people are going to read Goop and buy crap off of it, I think you are mistaken.

Maybe not "only", but mostly rich people will. Including middle/upper middle class people who can afford all they need, even if not technically rich.

For certain, very few single black mothers working their arses off in minimal wage to make ends meet will go to check the Good catalogue...

For certain, very few single black mothers working their arses off in minimal wage to make ends meet will go to check the Good catalogue...

Do you have some kind of data or evidence on that? Or is that just racist, classist assumption?

While true, almost everything peddled on Goop is snake oil and pseudoscience. It deserves to be sneered at.

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