Cracks in the Illusion: The Unspoken Lies I Believed in the Wellness Industry | E074
In this final episode of Wildly Optimized Wellness, I reflect on the life-changing experience of surviving SCAD and how it has reshaped my beliefs about health, wellness, and the industry I’ve worked in for over a decade. After years of immersing myself in functional medicine, I’ve realized just how much misinformation and oversimplification exist in the wellness space—some of which I, too, have unknowingly contributed to. I dive into the illusions that the wellness industry sells, the importance of critical thinking, and why I’ve decided to take a step back, take a gap year, and reevaluate what’s next for me. This is a raw, honest, and deeply personal farewell—for now.
In This Episode
00:00 - Cracks in the Illusion: The Unspoken Lies I Believed in the Wellness Industry
01:11 - How SCAD Changed Everything
02:34 - Entering Functional Medicine
05:41 - Questioning Wellness Culture
08:29 - The First Wake-Up Call: Skin Cancer
10:40 - Misinformation in the $6.3 Trillion Wellness Industry
16:02 - Breaking Free from Affiliate Marketing
19:26 - Living in the Gray Area
21:17 - The End of Something Great
Resources Mentioned
Episode 073: Surviving SCAD & What Every Woman Needs to Know
Connect with Toréa
Website: https://www.torearodriguez.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/torearodriguez/
Threads:https://www.threads.net/@torearodriguez
Transcript
Toréa Rodriguez 00:00
Welcome to the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. I am your host, Toréa Rodriguez. And I’m joined by the lovely co host, Evie Takacs. Both of us are Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioners and we love working with women from all over the world, through our virtual programs, helping women not only feel better, but actually achieve that vibrant, no holds barred version of themselves, they’ve been missing for a long time, and how we actually get there. Well, that is what this show is all about. Now, please keep in mind that this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. And if you like what you hear today, we would love for you to hit that follow button, leave a review in Apple podcast, share with your friends, and keep coming back for more. Let’s start today’s adventure shall we?
Toréa Rodriguez 01:11
An experience like this? It changes you. You become acutely aware of what's important in life, things you used to deem important suddenly become completely low priority and totally easy to let go. You start to distinguish what's real from what's an illusion, and you start to question beliefs you once held about health and wellness. So last episode, I shared more in detail about my experience with spontaneous coronary artery dissection or SCAD, the dissection that I had resulted in a myocardial infarction, or commonly known as a heart attack, and if you didn't listen to that episode, I would say, Go back one and catch up today, however, is not about that experience, but rather it's about what has shifted in my thinking and in my life. As a result, I've been an active practitioner in the wellness industry since about 2013 and I entered this industry after seeking out a more natural approach to my Hashimotos, because back then, my endocrinologist told me that I had one remaining option, and his suggestion was to remove my thyroid entirely and radiate the rest of the tissue. And at the time, and still today, that felt entirely way too aggressive, and I just knew that there was a different way.
Toréa Rodriguez 02:34
So back then, I turned to functional medicine to find a more natural approach. Now it wasn't a night and day difference. It still took years to get my thyroid to be stable with medication. It still took ruling out scary things like thyroid cancer and I still take a medication to this day to keep the thyroid and my body happy and healthy and learning about the power of lifestyle modifications, diet, exercise, stress, sleep and all of that. Seeing improvements in my own situation, the wellness movement caught my interest, especially since my undergraduate degree was in biochemistry, and a lot of functional medicine is based on various biochemical models of the human body. So I leaned on my degree and found additional professional training so I could become a professional medicine practitioner. Now I have spent over a decade in the wellness world, functional medicine and everything that is sort of packaged up with it, and in that time, I've done extensive professional trainings, often taking courses above and beyond any certifications that I amassed during that stretch, I followed the science as much as I could, and I am hugely grateful that I was trained as an undergrad on how to read and interpret studies with a critical eye, how not to cherry pick studies and Clinical Trials to support certain claims. Yet, because the wellness industry is largely unregulated, there are a ton of programs that are lacking fundamental training in critical thinking, how to read research studies, how to understand what they're saying, which leads to a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of misrepresentation of data, and then that leads to a lot of misinformation. However, I'm going to be the first to say it. I am not perfect, and I will admit that there are some very interesting beliefs that I sort of acquired during this tenure in this industry, and there are some finger quote, facts that I have amplified without doing the diligence to find the evidence on those quote, unquote facts. And I absolutely have been complicit in parroting information that may not be 100% true, and for that, I deeply apologize.
Toréa Rodriguez 04:59
And for that. I'm scrubbing everything that I've done to make sure that when those things have occurred, that I'm taking that stuff down. Because you see, when you have a life threatening event in your life, you start to get really clear on what's important. You also start to notice where there are contradicting dissonance in your beliefs, and maybe not everyone, but for somebody who operates a practice and has programs that are largely looking at beliefs and mindset and emotion and energetics, there's a lot of awareness of the chatter that goes along in between my ears. So with the SCAD heart attack, the very first thing I started asking myself was, how could somebody who eats really well, doesn't drink alcohol, doesn't smoke, exercises like a banshee, spends a lot of time outdoors, takes her supplements, uses her red light therapy device, How in the fuck, does this person have a heart attack? But really, that's wasn't the real question. The real question was this underlying belief that is purported largely silently by the wellness industry. And the other day, I saw somebody comment on something on social media, and the main post was something about misinformation, but the comment was really great, and the comment said people don't want factual information. They want to feel that they are in complete control and that there is a magic formula to prevent anything bad. And the wellness industry kind of infers this lie that if we all do wellness things well enough, hard enough, if we eat clean enough with the right devices and supplements, that we have this magic formula to ensure that we will live forever. So I'm looking at you folks in the longevity sector, and that we will never have disease. It's one of those unspoken rules, sort of like all families have these unspoken rules when we grow up, no one speaks it, but we all pick it up as truth. My unspoken family rule was, you never take the limelight away from the narcissist parent. I digress, but you get the idea right? And the reality is that our bodies get disease as we age, biochemical processes become less efficient, our tissues become less resilient.
Toréa Rodriguez 07:31
This is a regular part of biology. Death is inevitable, but disease makes people uncomfortable. Death makes people uncomfortable. People would rather do anything under their control to prevent being uncomfortable. It's easier to fall into believing these unspoken beliefs than facing them. And these unspoken beliefs shape all sorts of other beliefs that we have, and in this case about health wellness, the medical industry, etc. So Admittedly, I picked up beliefs about quote, unquote, Big Pharma and big agriculture and big food, and I picked up beliefs about my own ability to avoid certain modalities that my health and longevity were ultimately under my complete and total control, with the help of all the cool gadgets and devices and supplements.
Toréa Rodriguez 08:29
Wait, maladies, not modalities. Haha, nice try subconscious. But anyway, somewhere along the way, I adopted the assumption that I could completely avoid certain illnesses or disease states. But then cracks in that illusion started to appear. So in 2022 I got diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, skin cancer. This was the first crack in the foundation of beliefs that I had built up about the control that I had over my health and I worked through a lot of shame that came up around my own wellness in that time, my cancer treatment included excision and most surgeries, but it also included a topical immunomodulating drugs that had some major side effects for me, one of which was losing a significant amount of hair after the immunotherapy. And I worked through a lot of what I call thought nonsense, because I don't believe those thoughts now to be true anymore, but a lot of thought nonsense around how I could have possibly allowed the cancer to grow on my skin. You know, these beliefs about vanity and beauty and beliefs around my hair and whether or not I was cheating by using hair extensions for the time that it took to grow my hair back. You know, how could I have possibly let the skin cancer grow? Did I have it wrong about balancing some exposure with and with sunscreen, you know, and what people think about when they see that I've lost so much hair, or if they find out that I use hair extensions, will people think that I'm cheating? Or Am I cheating? Like, should I just raw dog it and feel weird about my hair for 18 months? Or should I do something that helps me feel more me and more comfortable? And yes, I used hair extensions for about 18 months while the fullness returned to my hair. But the cracks in the belief foundation started, and with the heart attack, they continued. I realize now that not all people in the wellness industry are motivated to help others out of sheer kindness.
Toréa Rodriguez 10:40
There is a fuck ton of money in the wellness industry that drives the perpetuation of false information, false statements, and this unspoken idea of, if you do all the things, you won't have anything bad happen. The global wellness economy in 2023 was valued at $6.3 trillion and this is projected to grow approximately to 7.3 trillion in 2025 and with that largely unregulated sort of anything goes, it's really wild. And in 2020 during the pandemic, we saw a major divide amongst wellness professionals about what they believe to be real when it comes to health and wellness, and then this last fall, with the recent US election, we saw that trend of division even more. There's more division, more misinformation floating around, and more and more money being made in the wellness industry.
Toréa Rodriguez 11:44
Let's be real folks, even in areas that are regulated in the industry, they are largely unenforced. So how people practice, what kinds of credentials they have, whether or not non medical professionals are divvying out medical advice. Supplements are largely unregulated and often backed by cherry picked studies as quote, unquote proof the marketing game is strong in wellness and of course, it's because there's a lot of money to be had, and I'm part of it. My style of coaching lands smack dab in the middle of this sea of misinformation and money grabbing.
Toréa Rodriguez 12:23
And so after the heart attack, the volume of this awareness became really, really loud in my world. Once I started to see how riddled this industry is with misinformation, it was really impossible for me to unsee it. My immediate reaction was, you know what? I'm just going to shut it all down and walk away, because I don't want to be a part of it. But I also know that the clients that I work with have better lives, and they've achieved great outcomes, and it's amazing to see people grow and become better versions of themselves, physically, mentally, emotionally. And I love working with clients. But I'll be honest, I don't love the wellness industry right now. I just really don't. I don't love that. We've created these certificate Mills, and in aviation, we used to call them raiding mills. Those were places that did, like bare minimum training, to train pilots to fly aircraft and have hundreds of lives at stake under their control. It's another topic for another time, but there's so many certificate Mills going on in the wellness industry, so many places have popped up that have academies and certification programs that just about anybody can get these certificates, myself included, let's be totally honest about it, but it gives somebody the ability to put a lot of designations and letters after their name to build up this level of authority. But none of these are the same as getting a master's degree or a PhD in fields of science.
Toréa Rodriguez 13:55
None of them, including mine, and this is not to say that all of these places are doling out incorrect information. However, it does leave practitioners in a really vulnerable spot if they don't have underlying education in science, medicine, nutrition, etc, it leaves them susceptible to amplifying misinformation. And sadly, the side effect of this practice has produced 1000s of people who are selling supplements and protocols and products who when they are challenged for proof for their latest thing that they're selling, they'll turn to PubMed, or they might honestly just Google, they'll look for evidence, and sadly, a lot of these people, not all mind you, but a lot of these people read headlines or abstracts of these studies, but they don't understand the science, or, more importantly, they don't understand the validity of the study or how it can or cannot be used to support their claim. And the number of times that I've seen people throw around studies as proof, only to discover that it was a write up of a single anecdotal case, or a super small sample size, or an in vitro study, which means it was done in a petri dish, not in an actual organism, or it was a mouse study. This happens a lot, and it's very rare to see professional citing clinical trial trial outcomes, because for a lot of this stuff, we don't have clinical trials, testing supplements and protocols and all these different things, so we just don't have the data. So all we have are these minimalized studies, and that's what gets prevented or presented as proof. And by the way, a murine study or a mice study, murine means studies done on rats and mice, any animal model, cannot be directly applied to human physiology and biochemistry, because it's not a one to one match. Those things are slightly different.
Toréa Rodriguez 16:02
And unfortunately, when there is money involved, things like affiliate codes, discounts, kickbacks, commission, what have you, it takes a fuck ton of integrity to also do the diligence of verifying the evidence for that product. And I am not claiming to be better than anyone else here, in full transparency, I've had discount codes for my clients. I've had them on this podcast, and I'm just as susceptible to being lazy about the due diligence because there was an affiliate program, or because it looked credible enough, or because, anecdotally, it worked for me or for my clients, which, as a side note, I want you to know that I am in the process of auditing all the episodes of this podcast to remove any affiliate links and any link that gives a commission, and remove any discount codes that were involved. And I'm doing the same for all of my programs. I'm no longer offering affiliate links codes of any kind. For me, it just feels like a slippery slope that I prefer not to be on. And to be honest, for me anyway, I know it's not true for other people, but for me, it was never a significant source of income. And my opinion, the damages of clouding my own judgment with an affiliate code for me to make a few bucks every few months is not as important as sharing factual information. And I really want to emphasize this, not all people in big wellness are solely out to drive for dollars. There are a lot of really well respected, great people doing really great work. And there are a lot of great people using evidence based approaches.
Toréa Rodriguez 17:49
I really do believe that there is space where science can help inform wellness modalities, the waters are just very muddy right now. There's so much breaking down with our journalism and reporting of news. Social media platforms are disintegrating, and now we've got politics being inserted into every facet of life. Right now it is extremely difficult to separate fact from fiction when there are billionaires trying to control the flow of information to further enhance their fiefdoms. The most critical thing anyone can do right now is to develop their critical thinking skills and not allow themselves to be influenced by what we see on the internet. So do me a favor and learn how to use critical thinking skills actively. Try to prove your own beliefs wrong, get curious about other people's perspectives, ask a fuck ton of questions, and seek out nuance, because the world is not black and white, and we can't apply black and white thinking to absolutely everything. Whew. I didn't quite expect this episode to go this way, but this is the current state that we find ourselves in, at least here in America, that's what it's like right now. Anyway, like I said at the beginning, you know, having an experience like Scott or any other life threatening, like life pivoting experience, it really changes you, and I'm still figuring out what that looks like for me. I've got some major health milestones to get to. I've got additional investigation that's yet to be completed.
Toréa Rodriguez 19:26
So where does that leave me? Well, I would say I am solidly in multiple shades of gray. I'm in the luminal space. I'm in the in between, because truth always lies in the intersection, and you know, big wellness isn't all bad, and Big Pharma isn't all bad, and Big Ag isn't all bad, but I've had to make some decisions on whether or not to adopt medications like Tor zeppeide that will, in the long run, help me live a longer life and reduce my risk of recurrence of scat. And will people in the wellness industry judge me for it 1,000% they absolutely will. And you know what? I don't care, because they've not had to explore the nuances of what my particular situation is. But dancing in the middle requires critical thinking. It requires curiosity and asking questions. It requires exploring nuance, and this is where the answers lie for each of us.
Toréa Rodriguez 20:30
It is very likely that this is the last episode of The widely optimized wellness podcast there. I said it all things in life have a beginning and an end, and some of the shifts that I have personally gone through in the last six months have allowed me to realize that I need to create some space to figure out what's next for me. I'll either return to the wellness industry in a different capacity, or I might pursue something else entirely, I'm not sure, but what's clear is that I'm giving myself a gap year. I still feel like a podcast is in my future, but it more than likely won't be this one. This one has served its purpose, and so it's time to give it an ending. And so this is it.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:17
I need some time to focus on navigating my own medical situation, and if it wasn't enough to just have my own medical challenges, we also learned that an immediate family member is also navigating their own life threatening medical diagnosis. It's not my story to tell, but I want to be able to be there to provide support as we navigate this difficult time. So it's crystal clear to me that I need this gap year to do those things. So with that, I won't be offering any programs or any in person experiences in 2025 I won't be working with clients in any capacity, and I won't be producing this podcast. This is the last episode from the beginnings when Evie cantopos was my co host, and the years that I produced the episode solo, it has been a ton of fun getting to have these conversations, and I hope that they are useful for people as long as they are out there. And thank you, dear listeners, for riding along with me in this part of my life and work, I appreciate you a ton. If you are curious about what I'm up to during or after my gap year, then my newsletter and website, Tor rodriguez.com will be the place for that information. Jury's out as to whether or not I'm going to use social media this year, and with that, okay, friends, stay well, stay curious and see you outside.
Toréa Rodriguez 22:49
Hey, thanks for joining me for this episode of the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your wellness, you can check out my website torerodriguez.com. Want to have a peek into what it's like to work with me? Check out the Wellness Curiosity Collective or any of my other programs or retreats. And if you found something helpful in today's episode, don't forget to leave a review hit that follow button or share it with a friend because they're gonna love that you thought of them. Until next time, See You Outside.
