Jenée Desmond-Harris, Slate Magazine's Dear Prudence advice columnist, joins us to discuss her history with wellness culture, how infertility can make people desperate enough to try dubious wellness treatments, the harmful wellness messages she’s gotten while navigating her son’s sensitive stomach as a breastfeeding parent, how social media influences our relationships with food and body, and lots more.
Jenée Desmond-Harris is a Slate staff writer and editor. She writes the Dear Prudence advice column and previously worked at the New York Times, Vox, and the Root. Find her work at slate.com.
Resources and References
Jenée’s Dear Prudence advice column for Slate
My upcoming book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Transcript
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to provide a faithful rendering of this episode, some transcription errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available here.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast exploring the diet culture, disinformation, dubious diagnoses, and disordered eating that are so pervasive in contemporary wellness culture--and how to avoid falling into these traps so that you can find your own true well-being.
I’m your host Christy Harrison and I’m a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist and author of the books Anti-Diet, which is available now, and The Wellness Trap, which comes out on April 25th. You can learn more and pre-order the book at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap.
Hey there! Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I’m Christy, and my guest today is Jenée Desmond-Harris, Slate Magazine's Dear Prudence advice columnist. Jenée and I have known each other for several years and have worked together on various writing projects, so I knew we’d have a lot to talk about and we really did, including her history with wellness culture, how infertility can make people, including the two of us, desperate enough to try dubious wellness treatments or things we’re not sure are really going to work. The harmful wellness messages she’s gotten while navigating her son’s sensitive stomach as a breastfeeding parent, how social media influences our relationships with food and body and lots more.
I’m really looking forward to sharing the interview with you in just a moment. Before I do, a few quick announcements. This podcast is brought to you by my upcoming book, The Wellness Trap, break free from diet culture, disinformation, and dubious diagnoses, and find your true well-being, which is available for preorder now. The book explores the connections between diet culture and wellness culture, how the wellness space became rife with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, why many popular alternative and integrative and functional medicine diagnoses can be misleading and harmful, and what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true well-being whateve that may look like for you.
Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and pre-order the book for its April 25th release. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. And once pre-ordered, you can get a special bonus Q&A with me about the book by uploading your proof of purchase at christyharrison.com/bookbonus.
If you like this show and you want to help support it, I’d be so grateful if you'd subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you’re listening to this. And you can also get it as a newsletter in your inbox every other week, where you can either listen to the audio or read a full transcript, or both! Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up for that. That’s rethinkingwellness.substack.com.
Now without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Jenée Desmond-Harris.
Christy Harrison: So tell us a little bit about yourself and your relationship with wellness culture.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So I am someone who I have to admit has often fallen victim to wellness trends in the past. I was raised in Northern California by a mom who was a little bit of a former hippie. I remember growing up she had a book by Louise Hay, which was all about sort of the emotional reasons, her physical symptoms. So I definitely received proper healthcare and everything, but for example, if I had a sore throat, my mom would ask me based on Louise Hay’s wisdom, what is it that you want to say that you’re not saying? Because that can be an emotional cause of a sore throat. So I was sort of just in a culture where a lot of thinking that was just part of day-to-day life and not an alternative to traditional healthcare, but something that surrounded me. And I never really fell victim to wellness culture when it came to diet. And I think that’s because for most of my life I was in a relatively thin body and my weight was just not something that was really on my mind or anyone else’s mind. I wasn’t treated poorly because of it. Nobody ever brought it up. It just wasn’t something I was thinking about day to day. So I was very lucky in that sense and I think that sort of protected me against a lot of the more dangerous diet culture trends where I really went down the rabbit hole, had to do with my skin. I had pretty bad acne growing up, and as I got into my twenties I had melasma, which is a pigmentation of the skin that a lot of women get during pregnancy, but I got before and it’s likely hormone related, and these things just both cause a lot of shame and embarrassment for me, honestly, a lot of desperation. And I wasn’t able to get a lot of great answers from dermatologists and traditional doctors. So my skin was really what sent me into wellness trends from a million different supplements to cleanses and detox diets. I think at one point I thought I had adrenal fatigue or candida and took all kinds of remedies. I once stopped drinking coffee for three months to try to clear my skin up. So that was the area where I really got into a lot of this stuff that’s not backed by research.
Christy Harrison: How did you come across that? Was it internet research on your own? Did you have people recommending that stuff to you?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Oh, definitely furious internet research. I’m a huge researcher. I used to be an attorney. I love to just dive really deep into something and I think anxiety can give you so much energy to do that even more so. Yeah, I just spent a lot of nights on my laptop looking at what often ended up being message boards, blog comments, really, really unofficial information about how people had solved these problems. When it came to the acne, I ended up just finally going on Accutane, which is a very strong medication you can get from a dermatologist that completely worked when it came to the melasma. There are some really strong prescription creams that ultimately worked pretty well. And I just think of all the time I spent trying not to eat nightshades or like I said, avoiding caffeine or putting apple cider vinegar on my face. I have a lot of regret about that.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I really identify with that. I feel like we have some similar backgrounds in our way into wellness culture too, because mine was largely through, I mean, I definitely got caught up in the diet culture stuff as well, but it was largely through looking for answers for chronic illnesses and conditions that I had and falling down those rabbit holes of research and discovering those message boards and kind of following the thread, Ooh, this person said this thing might be a test I should get, or this would be a supplement I should try. Let me experiment with that. And yeah, it just sucked up so much of my life. I feel like I definitely have some regret and yet also a lot of compassion for myself and everyone who’s gone through this kind of thing in terms of why we do this, because there really isn’t that we’re not getting what we need from the healthcare system in some way. And so that’s what opens the door for this sort of behavior.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Especially when something’s causing you a lot of pain, whether it’s physical or emotional, and the doctors are saying, yeah, it’s tough, but you kind of got to live with it or it’s not that big of a deal. I think it just creates a gap which can lead you to do your own research with too much anxiety to be clear-eyed about what’s legitimate and what’s not, or even sometimes so much anxiety that you don’t care what’s legitimate and what’s not, because you have the attitude of it couldn’t hurt. Or even if it does hurt a little, it’s better than what I’m dealing with now.
Christy Harrison: Right? There’s no sense of proportion with it. It’s not like this could be way worse. There’s not a sense that something could take you further away from the relief you’re looking for. Often it’s just like, well, it’s just a supplement, or it’s just a home remedy or whatever. How bad could it be?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So my next foray into wellness culture, I guess probably came up around infertility and trying to have a baby. I had a couple of miscarriages in my late thirties and my doctor eventually told me, you should probably go ahead and try IVF. So I did that and after two rounds did end up successfully having a baby who’s now eight months old. But throughout that journey, and I would say starting with the part of the journey that was before I got pregnant, I always had really bad menstrual cramps and nobody cared. It seemed like nobody, I never had a doctor who took seriously my complaints until I was getting treatment for infertility. And there were questions raised about whether I had endometriosis that was getting in the way of me keeping a successful pregnancy. And it turned out I did and had surgery to have it removed.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: But experiences like that where I realized that the doctors who I turned to in the past were not necessarily as dedicated to finding answers as I would’ve liked them to be, I think again, created a gap where I found myself going onto these Facebook groups and going onto the internet looking for kind of like, well, what else are they missing? If they miss this before I tried to get pregnant? What are they missing now that I’m going through IVF? What are they missing now that I’m pregnant? And when I read your book, I really think I am the audience for it because I consider myself a smart person. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I had to confront the fact that I fell for a lot of this stuff, again, out of desperation and out of this intense need and want to have a child and the mistrust that have been created by sort of less than stellar care by traditional doctors.
Christy Harrison: Oh my gosh, that resonates so much with me. I just have so much empathy for you and what you went through. And I also went through infertility and IVF and having to grapple with these recommendations that I was getting from people thinking, well, this can’t hurt. Maybe it’s going to set me back some money, but I might as well try it. Because for me, with a history of disordered eating too, I was like, I can’t go on any sort of diet. I can’t do some intense supplement regimen. This is something that might send me down a really bad path and set back my recovery. So how can I create boundaries for myself, but also feeling really desperate for having a child and wanting to know the answers, wanting to know what’s actually going to help, what’s necessary. Even with IVF, which is, I mean, in my experience, it’s so expensive and you get better care. I mean, I got better care I felt, I feel like, than I did, than I have with any other doctor in terms of how frequently they check in, how closely they monitor you. There’s like a nurse assigned to me to call me with my results. They didn’t just report it in the portal. They talked me through the results every time, and there was a lot of really great care that happened. And yet there was still, I feel like this disconnect of, I don’t know if they quite get my history and how to best support me through this because there were a lot of recommendations coming my way that I was like this. I mean, thankfully I was able to say, I don’t want to be on any diet. I need to protect my recovery. And they honored that, which was amazing. But there were still little moments where I was just like, oh, this feels like it could, it’s like a trap door opening up that I don’t want to step into.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I mean, I think I was lucky at my clinic that their guidance around weight was, you know, don’t want to be too thin or too heavy. It was very vague and they never even really talked about it. But I have a friend who went to get IVF and was told, you can’t do it unless you have a certain BMI. And that’s really alarming to me because you can do it. Like there’s nothing that says that it won’t work if you’re at a certain weight or have a particular BMI, it’s just that they don’t want to do it. And so for her to receive that as medical information as if she wasn’t going to be safe because of her size or it wasn’t going to be possible, just made me realize how much we’re being told that may or may not really be based in factor based in science and could send someone down a really dangerous path.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think of so many people that I’ve encountered and worked with who’ve had fertility challenges largely because, I mean, we can’t know a hundred percent for sure, but in many cases there was a history of dieting or history of disordered eating. People were unable to get pregnant and then they started to heal their relationship with food, eat more, gain weight, and suddenly were able to get pregnant. And there is a lot of literature on that that people needing to have adequate fat stores and energy coming in for the body to be able to support a pregnancy. So to get that blanket assumption that you can’t get pregnant or you shouldn’t be doing IVF at a higher weight just is so problematic for so many reasons.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: And then there’s also all the conflict information about exercise. You‘ll hear that you need to stay active and make sure you’re exercising, make sure you stay in shape to increase the chances it would work. And then on the other hand, you’re hearing make sure you rest and don’t do anything too strenuous or it’s more strenuous than you have before. It’s kind of up to you to judge what that means and to interpret it and apply it. And it just, it’s so anxiety inducing for me to not have clear information and to realize that the bottom line is kind of use your own judgment because we’re not sure.
Christy Harrison: Right? It is so difficult to not have that clear guidance and to feel like you’re just, because for me too, when I don’t have that sort of like, okay, here’s the standard of care, here’s what we’re going to do, and someone kind of delivering that message in a calm and confident way. I’m like, okay, well, I better go to Google. I better go to PubMed. I better dive deep into the research because I’m in charge. I’m the only one that’s going to be able to take care of myself through this because I don’t feel like other people have my back.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: And I remember when I started IVF, I was just honestly really resentful that I had to do it. I didn’t want to be there. I was very busy with work and I said to myself, I’m not going to give myself a Google Medical degree. I’m simply going to trust what the doctors say and I’m not going to spend my evenings researching things and I’m not going to join all the Facebook groups and drive myself nuts. And I ended up doing it because I just didn’t feel like I had enough information from my official sources. I was hearing about different protocols that were used and nobody explained to me why I was on the particular medication protocol I was on for IVF. There’s like natural cycles and medicated cycles. My doctor didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about which one I did. I didn’t know if acupuncture was something that was officially going to help or that people just said would help. So despite my best intentions, I ended up joining probably three or four IVF related Facebook groups and was just in there just taking in unedited, unfiltered, unofficial information pretty much all day for several months just because I had the realization that like you said, nobody else was going to care as much as I would and I had to come fully equipped with all the information I could get, even if it was just the random anecdotal experience of other people across the country.
Christy Harrison: What did you do with all that information? What happened in your mind when you absorbed it all?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So a lot of it I would sort of crosscheck with what my clinic was doing, and I do think I was at a very good clinic that was up on a lot of the research at times. I would bring something up to my doctor, and this was what was most unsettling is that I think there was, was it like DHA or DHEA? There’s one of these supplements that’s controversial that my doctor had me on a pretty high dose of, and I’d read in these groups that it wasn’t great and it could actually do damage to your eggs. And I brought it up to my doctor and she was just like, oh, okay, take 25 milligrams instead of 75 milligrams, which just I was glad to be listened to, but I was also in distress that I had to raise that concern and that she didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about it. And there’s so many areas like this and infertility where it’s just, I assume it’s probably a medical and scientific gray area, but I wish things were kind of labeled as such. I wish that when you received your instructions, they said, we’re doing this because we know this works. We’re doing this set of things because in our anecdotal experience at this clinic, it works and this set of things we really don’t know. You decide what feels best to you. I just wish there was more transparency.
Christy Harrison: I know, God, that would be so nice. That seems like such a far cry from anything I’ve heard from doctors before and I actually read something that makes me think, oh, maybe this is why they do it. Because the confidence with which a doctor delivers information is in itself a placebo effect. It can have placebo effects on patients. If the doctor is, they could be saying the exact same thing, but if they’re saying it in a confident way and it’s sort of authoritative manner versus if they’re saying it in a, well, here’s something that might work, you might try this, but who knows you’re going to actually have a better result if you have the doctor that’s delivering it in the authoritative way. Apparently that’s known in medical schools too and taught in medical schools.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I feel like that was probably, I feel like they reached that conclusion before the existence of all the Facebook groups, because to me, if I know that this random woman from Ohio and this random woman from Tennessee that their doctors or specialists have told them one thing and then my doctor gives me authoritative information as if this thing doesn’t exist, I’m not questioning my doctor. I want to hear, okay, our views differ on this. We’re not a hundred percent sure, but here’s why we come out this way. I think delivering information is super authoritatively would work better if we didn’t have so many different sources of information that could potentially conflict.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s such a great point. I think when we’re in this space of not feeling listened to and not feeling like we’re getting all the information, if someone’s delivering information to authoritatively, it’s like, okay, well I feel dismissed now, or what are they trying to hide? Or they just don’t have time for me, so they’re trying to move me on and yeah, it feels pretty bad actually.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Exactly. And going back to what you said about how you felt that you finally got really good attentive care when you were going through IVF, I felt the same, and tell me if I sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say this because I’m now very questioning all of my thoughts and reflections. I wonder if it’s because when you’re working with a fertility clinic, they really do have an incentive to get you a healthy baby because that goes into their stats and their results and how they’re judged as a clinic, whereas your random OB who you’re seeing, I mean they want to provide you care, and I believe they do try their best, but they don’t have that same incentive of how can we get this person to have a child that your fertility clinic does? So they may not be checking every box in the same way.
Christy Harrison: I think that’s really astute. I agree, and I don’t think that’s a conspiracy theory because with a regular OB or a general practitioner too, you could have so many different outcomes that don’t really have any bearing on their rating or quality level and I guess with a hospital or something, they’re looking at those metrics, but at the level, the individual provider, it’s not, they’re probably not thinking about that stuff in the same way versus a fertility clinic, they kind of only are there to do one thing, right? They’re there to get you a baby. And so if they can’t do that, have the pregnancy be healthy and the baby be delivered without incident or whatever, then they’re not doing their job. And probably individual providers are much more invested in that outcome than a typical individual provider at a hospital or private practice or something.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So I could go to my typical OB and say, I get really bad cramps. I actually end up curled up in a ball under my desk about two days a month and they can say, oh, you know what? Try alternating Advil and Motrin. It really helps. But when I tell my reproductive endocrinologist at the IVF clinic that it’s, oh, we’re sending you to a specialist for endometriosis because it sounds like you might have it, you need this special test and if you do have it, it could interfere with you getting pregnant. So let’s treat it, but no one ever cared to treat it when the issue was just my discomfort.
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Christy Harrison: I had a similar thing, it wasn’t quite as severe, but I had fibroids and that was one thing that was likely standing in the way of getting pregnant, and I had them had an ultrasound years before and someone was like, oh, you’ve got some fibroids. It’s no big deal. Just monitor them and if you start having real problems, let us know or whatever. But then of course, I moved, I, I got a different doctor, different health insurance plan. There’s no continuity of care these days. I feel like at least in individual health plans I’ve been, or even when you’re with an employer because you change employers and you get a different health plan and then different doctors or whatever. So I didn’t really follow up on it and then several years went by and I kind of forgot about it and then I was like, oh, I’m having these heavy uncomfortable periods. Weird trying to get pregnant wasn’t happening. And then within a few visits to the fertility clinic, they were like, okay, we’ve got you scheduled with this surgeon. Who’s the best surgeon in your area? And we’re going to remove the fibroids and it’s going to be great.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Same thing happened to me with endometriosis. Call this guy, he’s the best in the country. Make sure you get in to see him and come back once this is taken care of and then you’ll have a much better chance of getting pregnant. But I would’ve loved to take care of that 10 years ago.
Christy Harrison: Oh my God, how much time and pain would’ve been saved if you had been able to do that. But the healthcare system, I think just isn’t really set up to treat those sorts of issues. I think it’s very, there’s just so little time and I think providers want to help and they, they’re doing their best, but they also don’t have the kind of time. I feel like the kind of time that you’re afforded when you’re able to spend the kind of money that you have to for IVF is so vastly different than a typical 15 minute appointment if that with your regular ob.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Absolutely, and I even see connections to the experience I’ve had since my son has been born with just the idea of discomfort or pain sort of being pushed aside or minimized, and I think it’s the case for women and also for babies. I think I have a pretty good doctor and I respect a lot of what she does, but in the beginning of my son’s life, he was really, really uncomfortable a lot of the time. I guess what some people would call colic, but I now understand that colic is not a diagnosis, it’s just a set of symptoms. It just means the baby’s crying and we don’t know why, and there just wasn’t a lot of energy in the same way. There wasn’t a lot of energy to figuring out why I had such terrible cramps. There wasn’t a lot of energy put toward figuring out what was causing him pain and discomfort because he was gaining weight, he wasn’t experiencing failure to thrive. Everything looked fine and he was growing. It didn’t seem like there was a place for interrogating, how can we help this baby just feel good and have a better day every day in the same way? There wasn’t when I was struggling with cramps, and I think that’s another area of the healthcare system that creates a gap that can again, send women and moms to the internet looking for answers. And once again, I was on the Facebook groups and figured out that he was intolerant to dairy and soy, and my doctor, to her credit was the first one who kind of casually brought up, oh, maybe it’s dairy, but it was the internet that I had to go to find out all the different places that soy exists, how it’s labeled in different ingredients, how to find recipes to avoid it, how to avoid taking medications that could travel through my breast milk and affect his digestive system. Again, I didn’t want to be there. It’s not how I want to suspend my maternity leave was online going down rabbit holes, but the information and just sort of the energy that I got from my pediatrician’s office I felt was really inadequate for trying to help my baby not be in pain every day.
Christy Harrison: I’m so sorry. You went through that and he went through that, and what a frustrating experience to have to do all that work and research yourself when theoretically physicians are there to help us deal with that stuff.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I’ve sort of changed my thinking to say his pediatrician is there to diagnose, prevent, and treat really serious disease, but when it comes to just thriving and just feeling good day to day, that might be a gaff and that just might be something that I have to figure out.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, well, I think that is where the wellness industry comes in because the difference between health and wellness or healthcare and wellness care is wellness is conceived of as thriving or optimizing or getting to this place of feeling really good versus healthcare is dedicated to treating disease and maybe preventing it as well in some cases, but definitely to treating things that are really acute and serious when they come up.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Totally. And again, I think it’s a gap where you can get really bad advice and a lot of these groups where people had babies that were really struggling with digestive issues, there are a lot of suggestions to disregard the advice for safe sleep and just let your baby sleep in a swing or let your baby sleep propped up in the stroller, and I think that can be really dangerous, but I understand how it happens if your doctor is saying to you, this is just it. I guess your baby is just going to cry for the first three months of their life and you’re saying this is unacceptable. You’re going to go look elsewhere for solutions and try to figure that out.
Christy Harrison: How have you navigated that, all the conflicting advice that’s come at you with regard to this?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So I still am in a Facebook group because I legitimately find some good products and recipes there, but when it comes to all the advice from moms, particularly about sleep, I have unfollowed all of the sleep accounts. I just felt like it was an assault and that a lot of them, I’m sure care very much about women and babies, but I think a lot of them are preying on people who are sleep deprived and desperate and vulnerable and want to be doing the right thing and are selling these services in a way that you and I have talked about this, it reminds me a lot about sort of the diet gurus and trainers on social media who want to sell you a workshop or a coaching package that’s actually not at all based in science or research and is just something that someone who’s like up at night, stressed out, desperate and ashamed is going to look to for a solution.
Christy Harrison: I feel like there’s so much of that. There’s so little regulation on who can call themselves a sleep coach. There’s these certifications, which I’m just as an outsider in that industry, I have no idea what certifications are real and what are not, and you see a bunch of different ones and people who just seem to maybe make up their own titles and it’s just complete wild west, so unregulated when you’re desperate for answers, of course you’re going to pay. I have a family member who ended up paying a lot of money for a sleep coach and has shared some of the resources and stuff with me, and I looked through the resources and just with my background as a dietician, I’m like, oh my God, the food recommendations in here are not necessarily dangerous, but just not very well advised and certainly not things that work for my daughter. You can just get into such weird territory with that stuff.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yeah, it’s so tricky because I’m so glad that we have access to so much more information than we did when our mothers had us. I can’t imagine just having to call my mom and ask her every single question about what food is safe for starting solids or what symptoms are concerning when it comes to illness, but there is a point where I think there’s too much information, and I’ve had to be disciplined, as I said, someone who enjoys going down a rabbit hole. I’ve had to be disciplined about actively unfollowing a lot of it because much of it is conflicted, much of it you encounter when you’re in a really vulnerable space, maybe you’re up late scrolling your phone while doing a feeding or something, and even though I do consider myself a level-headed smart person, I know that I’ve probably never been more vulnerable than I have been this year and more susceptible to misinformation, conspiracies and everything else. So I’ve really had to try to be disciplined around what I consume.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s really, really good advice. I feel the same way. I wrote this whole book and like when I was pregnant and then edited it after I came back from maternity leave, largely about miss and disinformation and avoiding wellness misinformation, keeping yourself free from the wellness traps. And yet I feel so vulnerable to it myself too. I’m so glad that I have this radar now. One of the things that I came across in my research that was the most helpful was this idea that if something is evoking strong emotions in you, pause, step back, crosscheck it with other sources, and try to recognize what is this strong emotion trying to pull me to do? Is this attached to a sales pitch? Is it evoking strong emotions because it’s a piece of real news that is upsetting and harmful reports of police violence or something like, okay, that’s one thing that’s real, or is it something that’s preying on my sensitivity without any real backing, without any real solid information behind it?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: It’s funny because that’s the information I’ve given my mom about not falling for scams like financial scams. So when they email and say, your cable’s about to be turned off unless you wire money to this person, I always say anything that feels like something scary is about to happen and it’s really urgent, just take 24 hours and think about it. And so that’s good advice for us to give ourselves probably when it comes to some of this wellness stuff.
Christy Harrison: Totally. But it requires so much there. We have to do so much sort of self-parenting, I guess, in a way, or self-care or something to get through that phase because I remember that desperation and I mean, I think of the sleep issues as behind us, but then even just last night, we were up much of the night and just had a fussy night. My daughter wasn’t feeling well and needed to feed more and stuff. When you’re in that space of it’s just like three, four in the morning and you’re trying to figure out what’s going to make this baby stop crying, it’s hard to calm your own nervous system and breathe through it and be the parent to yourself so that you can get to the other side without feeling like, okay, I’ll give you thousands of dollars or whatever it is for this consultation that is probably not going to do anything.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I’m just realizing I went through it again too. Just recently with a Dr. Rash on my son, he was so red and itchy and he was so miserable, and I think it was the wellness culture just deeply ingrained in me that I did not want to use hydrocortisone cream. I wanted a natural remedy. I just felt like something inside me was just saying, he’s so little, he shouldn’t have strong medication. So for weeks, I was ordering everything off of every Instagram ad. I can’t tell you how many natural oatmeal and honey based eczema creams I have. And finally, his dermatologist appointment, which took a while to get came around and they were like, we’re going to prescribe 2.5% hydrocortisone. We used it and he was fixed in a day, and I had to look back and think, why didn’t I take that advice from my doctor the first time? And why was I looking for something natural or alternative instead? It’s really hard to grapple with.
Christy Harrison: It is. And I’m so curious too where that comes from because I also have felt those poles, and I have a very sciencey sort of side of me that is very rooted in, I know conventional medicines and over-the-counter medicines are safe and tested, and they’re much more regulated than anything you could get from the supplement industry. I think that’s another thing that the research for this book really hammered home to me was just the supplement industry is the wild west and is very unregulated, and at least we have more regulations over pharmaceuticals and over the counter meds. But then there’s always that little whisper that’s like, you want something just a little more natural, a little gentler, this is a baby. What are we doing here? And it’s so hard to navigate that. And there have been things that I’ve found that were more natural, that seemed to work well. For example, we had some rash issues too. When she first started eating solid foods, she would get food on her face and my mind being so conditioned by wellness culture would jump to like, oh God, is she allergic to something? Is she developing eczema because of something in her food? And fortunately our pediatrician was like, oh, it’s the pH of the food can be very acidic or even very basic and irritate the skin. It’s nothing more than that. It’s not that she’s allergic to any food, it’s just the acidity or the basicness of the food is irritating to this very delicate skin. And we found some creams that were helpful as barriers for that just to put on before she eats and then wipe off afterwards. And then she’s been fine.
Jenée Desmond-Harris:We just got that advice too. I’m coating him from the shoulders up in Aquaphor.
Christy Harrison: Yes.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Before he eats.
Christy Harrison: And it’s funny because I feel like that leads so many people down a rabbit hole too, of seeing a rash after eating. There’s this strong tendency in diet and wellness culture to just be like, well, what was, what food was it that caused her to break out or to have this rash or whatever? And it’s like, it’s not exactly what you think, right?
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Absolutely. And one thing I’ve noticed in the various Facebook groups is there’s this trend of people sort of getting around seeming anti-medicine or wellness by prefacing their questions by saying, this is not medical advice. I’m not seeking medical advice. But then the question is, what caused this rash? Or look at my baby’s poop. Do you think he’s having an allergy to something? And it’s like, no, you actually are seeking medical advice. It doesn’t change it just because you added that disclaimer. That is medical advice.
Christy Harrison: That is really interesting. I have to say, I’ve stayed off the Facebook groups. I’ve had a whole journey with social media too, of getting off as many platforms as possible. I actually just left Twitter a few weeks ago. It was a big moment in my life clicking that deactivate account button.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I need to be right behind you.
Christy Harrison: It’s so tough. I mean, I’ve loved connecting with people on there. You and I first connected on there. I think it’s become such a cesspool. I’ve researched some of these groups and just lurked on Instagram accounts and Facebook accounts and stuff for researching the book. And I definitely see a lot of that. It’s almost, it’s coming, I feel like from influencers that are like, this is not medical advice, but I’m just asking questions. The whole anti-vax movement, just asking questions, framing of things, is sort of trickling down into how everyday people are framing their questions too, I think.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: That’s such a good insight. Yeah, that’s exactly it.
Christy Harrison: And it’s interesting because with influencers, it’s sort of meant to get around content moderation sort of algorithms or make sure people don’t label you as anti-vax and just dismiss your content out of hand or people getting banned by manual review processes or whatever. But with individual people, I’m sort of like, how does this work actually? Why are people drawn to framing things in that way? Because it’s not like you’re going to get kicked off necessarily if you’re looking for medical advice. I guess maybe you’re trying to protect other people from getting kicked off or giving you medical advice, but it’s this interesting sort of moment where people are acting almost as influencers themselves on social media.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: It sort of reminds me of how everyone used to have on their Twitter viewers on my own do not reflect those of my employer. And it’s like, okay, thanks for saying that, but that’s not going to stop you from getting fired if you say something really outrageous. Mm-hmm. Going back to our weird sort of reluctance to use some traditional medicines and to want something a little bit more natural. I do think part of that, and I’m not sure how to deal with that, is that the official medical advice can change. Sometimes it can be a little bit hard to trust. For example, I took Tylenol during my pregnancy, and then after my son was born, I saw these headlines about, and you’ll edit this out if I’m spreading misinformation. I’m pretty sure it’s true that people were questioning, the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy, and the headlines were just like Tylenol during pregnancy. Bad. If you look a little deeper, it was, there’s research that suggests that maybe very heavy use may cause autism and in ADHD.
Christy Harrison: Or is linked to anyway is linked. We don’t know cause and effect.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: That sort of shook me a little bit. It’s hard to hear that this thing that was supposed to be a hundred percent safe when I was pregnant a few months ago is now less than a hundred percent safe. So it makes you wonder, well, what else am I being told? It’s a hundred percent safe that a year from now studies might come out and kind of pull back on that a little bit. Even the guidance around drinking while breastfeeding, pumping and dumping, where that has become more liberal recently, it’s now fine. You don’t have to pump and dump. You can go ahead and have a glass of wine and still breastfeed. That’s great. But just the fact that things seem so fluid I think can cause a little bit of uncertainty and anxiety in people who are wondering, if I follow this rule now, is it still going to be the rule two years from now?
Christy Harrison: And I think that’s the problem with science. Science is great, and it’s a process for getting as close as possible to the truth as we know it at the time. But then more studies come out and maybe contradict previous studies or maybe more studies come out that are framed in a certain way, or the PR people at the university or institution where the study was done are pumping out press releases that frame the discourse in a certain way that isn’t really true based on the data. It’s a messy process. I think with that Tylenol stuff too, it’s like, yeah, if you look more deeply at the data, there’s this potential link, but at what level of use? It’s like people who are using a lot of Tylenol and what else might be going on for them that could be causing that? Is it they’re having fevers or viruses that maybe that’s the thing that’s really linked to autism? We don’t really know. But that sort of nuance doesn’t get portrayed in the media about these studies. And in some cases it’ll be years before there’s definitive research again showing, okay, Tylenol is actually safe, or maybe use less of it or whatever it might be.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: And then everything sort of ends up with everyone just do what’s right for you and your family, which is also very unsatisfying. That’s too much responsibility.
Christy Harrison: Totally. And then it just opens us back up to all the misinformation, right? It’s like, do what feels right. Okay, well, how do I know it feels right or what are the options? Let me Google around or ask other people in Facebook groups or whatever and find out. I think too, a lot of us, we want to do the right thing, especially with pregnancy and raising kids. There’s such pressure on moms especially, but parents in general, I think to do the right thing and take care of our kids and we want to do the best job we can. And so it’s like, well, if a little bit of this thing is going to be helpful, then a lot of it’s probably really going to be helpful. And then suddenly you’re just in this increasingly sort of restricted conscripted reality where you’re like, you’re doing all the things because if a little bit is good, then all of these things must be better.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: And conversely, if huge amounts of this thing are bad, then I should avoid it all together because none would be totally better. And that reminds me of the conversation around BPAs and other so-called endocrine disruptors, which I have to admit, I’m still not a hundred percent sure how legit all of this is, but when I was trying to conceive when I was pregnant, I avoided, I was using all the clean skincare products and clean household products and avoiding microwaving things in plastic. I know some of the women who I was in touch with wouldn’t even use a plastic fork. And again, I think that’s a place where there’s probably some legitimacy to the fact that you don’t want to be inhaling Clorox and Lysol all day, but you probably also don’t need to organize your entire life around not being around your Tupperware, but there’s no clear guidance on what the reasonable middle ground is. So a lot of people just say, we know tons of this stuff is bad, so let me absolutely completely avoid it.
Christy Harrison: And then it becomes, I think for some people that’s okay, and that’s like a choice they can make without putting themselves out too much. But I think for a lot of people, it becomes very quickly this slippery slope and this thing that starts to take over your life and cause a lot of anxiety like, oh my God, I’m out and I forgot my metal fork and there’s only plastic, or I have to use this disposable cup or bottled water or something. And then it’s this sort of moral dilemma of what am I going to do? Someone I talked to for the book was telling me about how she got into making her own household products and down this whole rabbit hole of clean beauty, clean household, clean whatever, and would feel extremely guilty and terrible about herself if she ran out of her homemade laundry detergent and had to buy some from the store because it was just a time crunch or whatever, and it was like, what am I, I’m killing myself by using these chemicals. I think that’s where it gets to be this really harmful situation where the wellness culture mandates for people to do everything “clean” becomes really psychologically harmful.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: And especially when it comes to IVF, I’ve read so many accounts of women who say, I just can’t do it. It’s taking a toll on my mental health. I’m going to step back and just stop trying for a while. Not because IVF itself is hard, but because I’m so tired of being on the keto diet of avoiding all BPAs of taking 12 supplements a day, it’s just too much and it’s taking too heavy a toll on my life, so I’m going to step back from the process when you actually don’t have to do all of that to do IVF, and the hormones are so powerful when I look at the cocktail of drugs that you know have to inject into yourself. I just always thought there’s very little that could probably compete with these in terms of what my eggs are going to do. So yeah, I just think it’s unfortunate that, again, because of a lot of these conversations on social media, people feel pressured to take the wellness side of it to such an extreme that it becomes exhausting, it becomes demoralizing. It takes a toll on your mental health, and you might even back off from the entire process, which is pretty effective and medically sound.
Christy Harrison: Right. That’s such a good point and so sad that people feel like it has to entail all those things because the process itself is already hard. There’s like the psychological difficulty of just getting your head around, I have infertility and I need treatment for it, which is heavy. And then to inject yourself with drugs that they’re hormones and they have hormonal effects. I mean, I had terrible acne worse than when I was a teenager, when I was on the IVF drugs to the point that I still have scars on my cheeks. I had cystic acne that was incredibly painful, and it was painful to inject the thing. I actually had to have my husband do it cause I couldn’t me too bear to do it myself, and thank God he was willing to do it and was there. All of that is already so hard. So adding on the pressure to eat a certain way or take supplements that are hard on you and expensive and all that stuff, it just feels like too much.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Right? Yeah. It’s so understandable because if you can afford one round or if your insurance covers three rounds, a lot of people say, well, I just want to know that if it fails, I did everything I could, and I totally understand that perspective. I hear that conversation a lot around drinking coffee. Tons of coffee I believe is not supposed to be great for fertility, and extreme amounts of coffee may be linked to miscarriages, and so many women will not touch a sip of coffee throughout their entire fertility journey because they say, I don’t want to beat myself up if something goes wrong. I don’t want to think it was the coffee, and it almost certainly would not have been the coffee, but I get it if you’re spending your life savings for this one shot and something could potentially have a small negative effect in some cases to just deprive yourself of it completely.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I very much identify with that. And I also think, how sad is it that the sort of rhetoric is always goes back to blaming women or to blaming people in general for their behaviors instead of thinking, okay, well maybe this particular treatment didn’t work for you, or maybe there’s an underlying condition that has nothing to do with your behaviors that we haven’t found yet.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Or maybe the embryologist sucked and had a bad day.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, exactly. So many things that could be thinking about that to the embryo transfer. I ended up getting laser acupuncture, which they sold as an add-on me too. Really? Yeah. They say it’s backed up by science. I did a quick little PubMed search and found a couple randomized controlled trials, small trials, one, including a fertility center that’s related to the one I went to. And I’m like, okay, well, I guess there’s some science behind it, but I really don’t know. And went into it probably not having much of a placebo effect because I was kind of like, I don’t know. I’m skeptical, but I guess I’ll do this because why not, right? I mean, its extra money, but I’m already in for a penny and for a pound, we’ve already spent so much money that what’s this extra little amount? I’m just going to do it. I mean, who knows what effect it had, but the embryo transfer worked. I got pregnant, I had a baby, so then I’m like, oh, fuck. If I have another kid, if I do go through this again, am I going to have to just get the fricking laser acupuncture again because it worked the first time, and so now I don’t want to roll the dice.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I did acupuncture for several months during my treatments, and I went there every thinking, I have no idea if this is working. I have no idea what it’s doing. I do feel better afterward, but I would probably also feel better if I were just to lie down and close my eyes and not look at my phone or computer for 35 minutes. And then again, I had it on the day of, and when I saw that acupuncturist come into the very official clinic in a white coat, I was like, oh, this must be official because they look like a doctor and it’s happening in the clinic, and certainly they wouldn’t be doing it here if it wasn’t really, really legit. That’s how it made me feel emotionally, and I will get it again if I do have another transfer, the wiser part of my mind knows that I’m sure there’s not solid data to back it up.
Christy Harrison: Right? Because with acupuncture, there’s really no way of blinding people, either the practitioner or the patient to what’s happening. There are randomized controlled double-blind trials of acupuncture where they use real acupuncture needles or sham acupuncture needles or where they use real acupuncture points or fake acupuncture points, or they just randomly insert the needles. That’s how they can sort of get around it. But interestingly, in those studies that look at real points versus fake points or sham needles versus real needles, most of the research shows there’s not much difference, if at all. Some people interpret that as acupuncture is no better than a placebo, and then some interpret it as well, maybe it has some effect. Maybe it has some effect over and above a placebo effect, or maybe just the whole process is a placebo effect in and of itself and helps people feel better and more relaxed, and that’s the thing that we should be aiming for regardless of whether acupuncture works or not.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Did you keep your feet warm after your transfer?
Christy Harrison: I had warm socks that someone had given me that they said, IVF got this. It was very cute. So I wore those just, I don’t know. Cause I thought they were cute, but I didn’t specifically think about that.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: That. I did, even though I was, again, I had no idea if this was at all legit, but I was like, at this point, I’ve paid all the money and been through all the treatments. I’m going to keep my feet warm. And I’m a person who hates to sleep with socks on. It absolutely is uncomfortable to me, but I did it because the information is floating around out there on the internet that somehow or another, keeping your feet warm has something to do with your uterus.
Christy Harrison: Oh my God, it’s so wild. It’s so wild. The things that we just absorb and then can’t get rid of.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Right.
Christy Harrison: One last thing I wanted to make sure we touch on is the stuff about leaky gut and your son’s sensitivities. Because you mentioned to me that you had come across the idea somewhere maybe in these Facebook groups that your son sensitivities probably had less to do with his system than with your leaky gut, and I’m just curious how you came across that information and then how you’ve dealt with that idea since then.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yeah, so definitely eliminating dairy and soy from my diet absolutely helped my son. So I believe that he does have milk, protein, and soy intolerance, even though there’s not a test for it. My doctor thinks he has, it seems pretty obvious based on the relationship between what I eat and his gastrointestinal issues. So like I said, I’m in these Facebook groups where moms share the brand of cream cheese that you can use that’s safe, and you know how to make cookies that you can eat and be safe for your dairy and soy free baby. All pretty legitimate stuff. But in these groups, I also came across the idea that it's not that babies have something wrong with them and their guts, it’s that the mothers have something wrong with their guts, specifically something called leaky gut that makes it so proteins pass through in a certain way that’s problematic to the baby and then upset the baby when they get to them. This is really tough to hear because I think whenever something is wrong with your child, you wonder, did I do something in pregnancy? Did I do something after he was born? Did I do something just by passing certain genes down? And the theory almost weirdly resonated with me because I did used to have a lot of stomach trouble back in the days and I thought maybe I do have leaky gut. And I really had to pull myself back from that because one, it doesn’t matter. We know what his symptoms are and how to solve them. And two, I really don’t think that this is a legitimate theory. So this is something where I heard it, I said, you know what? My doctor didn’t bring it up. If it is the case, it doesn’t matter because we already are where we are and I’m, I’m not going to go down a rabbit hole trying to fix my alleged so-called leaky gut.
Christy Harrison: I’m so glad to hear that you were able to push that out and not get pulled down the rabbit hole. Cause I know leaky gut is such a rabbit hole for so many people and it was such a bug bear to me just in hearing clients be diagnosed with it or think they have it, that I researched it for the book and was able to come up with the evidence on it and show that it’s not actually a real thing or leaky gut syndrome, the thing that gets blamed for all manner of illnesses, including apparently illnesses in your child if you’re breastfeeding, that that’s not actually what’s going on. And that science is so early stage on intestinal permeability and its relationship with disease and it may potentially just be a symptom of disease and not a cause of any sort of symptoms or conditions that it seems like that’s one area that misinformation is just running rampant on the internet and with certain providers to, unfortunately, integrative and functional medicine providers, I’ve heard of people with MDs, but who are sympathetic to alternative and complimentary medicine practices will sometimes diagnose people with leaky gut syndrome and tell them to go on all these supplements and change their diet and cut all these things out. And it’s just so problematic for people’s relationships with food. And I’ve seen so many people get driven into really disordered eating and thinking around food.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yeah, I think I was lucky that I legitimately just did not feel like I had the energy or intellectual bandwidth to look into that as I had returned to work and was a new mom. But I think that’s been one sort of blessing about being so busy is that I just don’t have it in me to try to become an expert or try to uncover all these things. So I pretty much dismissed it. And then at the perfect moment I read your book and thought, okay, good. This is something I can completely forget about.
Christy Harrison: That’s amazing. I’m glad it came at the right time.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yeah.
Christy Harrison: Helped you just lay that to rest and I hope anyone listening can lay that to rest too, that there just really is not evidence to show that that’s the case. And I feel like it is that game of telephone that you mentioned, the fact that some researchers are uncovering than a intestinal permeability is maybe a factor in certain diseases or a symptom and we don’t really know, but that it shows up in certain autoimmune conditions and in celiac disease then gets translated into, okay, everyone has to avoid these 10 different foods or whatever to avoid having “leaky gut”. And if your kid’s having issues, it’s because of your leaky gut and any manner of other things. And it’s just like, okay, let’s pause and not get carried away with this idea. This is very early-stage research that I don’t think needs to be translated into any sort of clinical practice or self-help practice just yet.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Or self-shaming.
Christy Harrison: Or self-shaming, which is so easy to do, I think, as a parent anyway. Like you said, there’s just this impulse to look for, what was it that I did, and take responsibility for things that maybe aren’t your responsibility. Yeah. Well, this has been so great. I really love talking with you and I’m so glad to have someone to riff with about IVF stuff because it’s the first time I’m really talking about it in any sort of public way.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yeah. It’s just so interesting to know that when I was listening to Food Psych every week, we were sort of on a similar journey and neither of us was talking about it publicly. So it’s been really great to connect and sort of try to connect the dots there.
Christy Harrison: And I’m glad we’re sharing this now and hopefully some other people who are going through it will find this beneficial.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I hope so.
Christy Harrison: Tell us where people can find you and learn more about your work and connect with you online or off.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: So I write the Dear Prudence advice column for Slate Magazine, which you can find at slate.com. And I’m still on Twitter, even though who knows, I might follow in your footsteps and not be there in a couple of months. And that is @JDesmondHarris.
Christy Harrison: Amazing. We’ll put links to that in the show notes as well. I love your Prudence column. It’s fantastic. I’ve been reading Dear Prudence on and off for years, but I feel like you bring a new energy to that I really like.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: Oh, thank you so much. I love doing it.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it’s really fun.
So that’s our show. Thanks so much to Jenée Desmond-Harris for being here. And thanks to you for listening. If you liked this conversation, I’d be so grateful if you’d take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast wherever you’re listening right now. You can also go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to get new episodes delivered to your inbox every other week.
If you have any questions for me about wellness and diet culture, you can send them my way at christyharrison.com/questions for a chance to have them answered in an upcoming newsletter, or perhaps even an episode of this podcast sometime in the future.
If you’re looking for help healing your own relationship with food and breaking free from diet and wellness culture, I’d love for you to check out my online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals. You can learn more and sign up at christyharrison.com/course. That’s christyharrison.com/course.
Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer. Administrative support from Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Album art by Tara Jacoby and theme song written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
I'm still working out the sign off for this new podcast, so if you have any ideas, write to me with them. You can write in at admin@christyarrison.com. I had thought about, and I did this in the first episode, until next time, I hope you’re well, but not wellness-y well.
I don't know if that works, but I don't really know. I don't really have a better one, so until next time, there's that. Take care.
