Activated charcoal, sound baths, coffee enemas, adaptogens – wellness trends continue to rise and rise, and many of them are totally (wholemeal) crackers.
While it’s easy to make fun of the more bizarre notions floated by self-styled wellness gurus, there’s no escaping the fact that the wellness industry is serious, multimillion-dollar business. How much of it is harmless nonsense, how much is actually helpful and how much is exploitative and dangerous? And to what extent does the rise in the wellness industry reflect real deficiencies in traditional medicine, especially in the treatment of women?
We’ll ask these questions of Nick Toscano – one of the journalists who exposed Belle Gibson’s cancer hoax – as well as nutritional scientist and dietician Tim Crowe, writer Clem Bastow and host Jacinta Parsons.
Leave your spirulina smoothie at the door and your chi-invigorating, Paltrow-endorsed jade vagina eggs … in a sterile container at home, as our panel subject the wellness industry to some healthy (and vital!) scrutiny.
Featuring
Nick Toscano
Nick Toscano is a multi-award-winning journalist based in Melbourne, who specialises in federal politics, business workplace relations, and the labour movement for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
He has been awarded the Grant Hattam Quill for Investigative Journalism, and has twice received the highest honour in Australian journalism, the Walkley Award, for exposing the country’s biggest-ever underpayment scandal.
Toscano has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne and a Masters in Journalism from RMIT.
Tim Crowe
Tim is a career nutrition research scientist and educator, dietitian, and regular media and social media communicator.
Clem Bastow
Clem Bastow's debut nonfiction book Late Bloomer was published in July 2021. Her writing appears regularly in The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Big Issue. She co-wrote ...
Jacinta Parsons
Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, writer and public speaker who currently hosts the Afternoon program on ABC Local Radio Melbourne. She released her debut memoir, Unseen: The Secret Life of Chronic Illness in 2020 and ...