Philosopher, professor, and podcaster Ellie Anderson, PhD joins us to discuss the realities of living in a “post-truth” era – where conspiracy theories, fake news, and anti-science rhetoric are everywhere.
Ellie also shares her personal experience with dubious diagnoses and the “divine feminine,” why studying phenomenology helps her understand lived experience, and how wellness culture permeates so many industries.
Behind the paywall, Christy and Ellie explore the definition of “post-truth,” why so many Americans endorse conspiracy theories, and what they think of the hype around RFK Jr, GLP-1s, supplements, and more.
The first half of this episode is available to everyone. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Ellie Anderson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College. She specializes in philosophy of love, selfhood, existentialism, and feminist theory. Her recent academic publications include “Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships Between Women and Men” (Hypatia, 2023), “A Phenomenological Approach to Sexual Consent” (Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2022), and “Beauvoir on Non-Monogamy in Loving Relationships” (2024). Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Slate. You can find her on Substack and as the co-host of the popular Overthink podcast and YouTube channel. She is also the host of Crash Course Political Theory on YouTube. Instagram: @ellieanderphd
Resources and References
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Ellie’s podcast, Overthink
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: First, I’d love to just go back in time and hear a bit about your background and history with wellness and diet culture because I think you have a lot of interesting experience with that.
Ellie Anderson: It’s funny because I’m a philosopher by trade. I teach philosophy at the college level and have for a number of years and so my day to day life is taken up by helping students figure out the truth and analyzing arguments, assessing them, and so on and so forth. And then at the same time, I have also been really interested in wellness for a very long time in ways that sometimes is related to my philosophical pursuits and in other ways is sometimes at odds with it. And part of the reason I say that is because one of the areas that I specialize in philosophically is our relations to ourselves. So I’m super interested in self care, self love, kind of how we understand ourselves as well and I think all of that is very related to wellness culture.
Personally speaking. I grew up in Southern California at a sort of interesting intersection between hippie health conscious wellness culture on the one hand and a sort of liberal Christian approach on the other. And so although my family wasn’t explicitly anti-medicine, it was very common for people in my family to talk about how we were all so naturally healthy because we thought positive and that’s why my grandfather didn’t die until he was almost a hundred. And we very rarely took medicine. We did go to the doctor for our annual checkups, we got our vaccines and such, but we basically didn’t have a lot of pain medication, stuff like that because my parents were sort of like, you’re okay.
And so I think as I got older, I had this strange narrative like, oh, yeah, I’m a fundamentally healthy person because I think positively, and that is not really a setup for success once you actually have some health challenges. So I started getting interested in wellness from a nutrition perspective in my late 20s after having been a longtime yoga and meditation practitioner. And I was having some digestive issues in particular. Let’s say things were moving a little too fast out. And I went to the doctor and I asked her what she thought the problem might be, and she was like, oh, it’s, it’s probably just stress. And so then, of course, I mean, I know you’re very familiar with this kind of narrative given your work, and many of your listeners are as well.
I was like, oh my gosh, what am I doing wrong? I do meditation almost daily. I practice yoga. I obviously have the stressors that many people have in their daily lives, including getting underpaid and having some stress about the future. At that time, being in my late 20s, not having a permanent job and I just come out of my PhD recently, but in the grand scheme of things, I was doing fine. And so I started obsessively listening to all of these mindbodygreen podcast episodes and making all of these dietary changes, and it wasn’t really helping. And I went back to my doctor, and she was like, I think you have fibromyalgia, which is a very serious diagnosis. And I was like, wait, so you went from telling me that I just have stress to then telling me I have fibromyalgia.
But because fibromyalgia is also a kind of contested illness that women are often diagnosed with, when doctors are kind of like, I think this might be all in your head, they were sort of both ways of dismissing what I was dealing with. And then I eventually realized that I’m lactose intolerant and was also, basically giving myself way too much fiber by making what I thought were very healthful smoothies in the morning. And that’s why I was having digestive issues. And so I switched to eating oatmeal in the morning and minimized consumption of dairy, and then I was fine.
Christy Harrison: It’s so wild when that happens, right? Reading mindbodygreen and getting really obsessive about what you’re eating probably added to the extra fiber that you were taking in and made the problem that much worse, because I see that so often.
Ellie Anderson: Yeah. And I know you’ve written a lot about food restrictions and sort of the dangers of that kind of restrictive approach. I’m really happy that I largely cut out dairy. I still eat it from time to time, but I do have an intolerance. And so that was helpful for me to know. I think listening to all those mindbodygreen podcast episodes did also lead me down a direction of, like, oh, my gosh, what can I eat? I need to cut out these food groups. I need to implement all of these really expensive supplements. So then I was spending hundreds of dollars on a pretty low salary on these supplements from my local health food store. And I think it really hit breaking point for me when I listened to a podcast episode about how maybe even avocados are bad for you.
Christy Harrison: Oh, my God.
Ellie Anderson: Because my ancestors from Scandinavia maybe weren’t used to eating avocados hundreds of years ago, and so my digestive system might not be prepared for it. And then I was just like, you know what? The one food I thought was at least okay, maybe isn’t. I think I just need to stop worrying so much about all of this.
Christy Harrison: That’s great that you had that sort of insight because I feel like people can just get down these ridiculous paths. And I did this myself too, of like cutting out more and more stuff, taking more and more supplements and thinking that it’s this really grave problem, that something really, really horrible is going on, and then actually realizing, for me, I have IBS, something that flares up on and off with stress or changes in routine or whatever. But it was totally brought on and exacerbated by the disordered eating and that was the primary trigger and the primary driver of it for years. And I just didn’t realize and was doing things that just made it worse, including stressing out about what I ate so much.
Ellie Anderson: Absolutely. There’s so much to be said about certain implementation of supplements. I don’t need to tell you that, you know, but I’ve had some hormonal challenges that I’ve been able to mitigate through stuff like that. I think the real focus on it and obviously that can lead to things like orthorexia or other forms of disordered eating, I luckily don’t think that I was experiencing that, but it was taking up an immense amount of time, energy and money. And so I think there’s also a sense in which even when this kind of interest in wellness culture isn’t manifesting in disordered eating, it is still having negative effects on one’s life, in terms of the amount of cognitive labor and worry that it’s causing.
Maybe if we really want to broadly construe orthorexia, we could include that but I think even, in sort of a very mild formation of it, it’s coming from a desire to understand ourselves and to be and do better. And I think that those are reasonable things for us to want. But there’s kind of a desire to get to the bottom of something when maybe there is no bottom there. Once you figure out that you have IBS or lactose intolerance and it’s like, well, I can do what I can to mitigate that, but the desire to then optimize and sort of figure out the perfect diet for yourself and so on and so forth, I think can obviously lead to a lot of harm and is part of this overall pressure that we have to self optimize.
Christy Harrison: Totally and also, to find the root cause. That was something that I got really obsessed with. It’s not enough to know that the diagnosis exists or what it’s called, or IBS is a syndrome and so I definitely felt like, well, there has to be something underlying it. It’s not just happening for no reason. Syndrome is just a collection of symptoms, and it’s not something that’s, actually caused by some biological difference. It’s a functional issue. It’s an issue of how my body functions and responds to things. And so what is it responding to? What is the culprit? And is it gluten? Is it dairy? Is it these other inputs in my life that I can change?
Ellie Anderson: Yeah. It’s really interesting that you mention the desire to find the root cause here, because that’s something I think about a lot. On the one hand, the human desire to find the root cause of something is beautiful. It’s part of our reasoning skills. We want to figure out why something is the way it is because we think that’s the way to solve it if it’s a problem. We need and we want that diagnosis of the root cause.
At the same time, however, that is what can lead us down this sort of endless rabbit hole. And it can set us up for conspiracy theories, too, because then if there is an easy explanation that we can grab for, even if it’s not grounded in science, that’s a lot more appealing than the word of a doctor who’s gonna say it could be this, it could be this, it could be this. And we don’t really know what it ultimately “is.”
Christy Harrison: Right. Such a good point. When you have doctors like the one you had, who was just sort of throwing out random suggestions and didn’t seem very sure of what it could be or jumped from, “It’s just stress,” minimizing it, sort of downplaying it, to, “It’s fibromyalgia,” which also is putting you in this box, like you said. And the sort of contested illness, like, oh, we don’t know what’s going on, but it must be this psychosomatic manifestation, which is what a lot of doctors still, unfortunately, think fibromyalgia is. That’s not helpful either. That’s not giving us what we want in terms of our curiosity about what actually is causing our problems.
Ellie Anderson: Yeah. And I think it also is further alienating us from ourselves. Because I think a lot of people come to wellness culture from the desire to connect with themselves. We live in an extraordinarily alienating culture. We’re often looking at screens for hours a day, or we’re sort of out in the world in some capacity or another, not really connecting with ourselves. And, and certainly the medical system doesn’t really encourage us to be more connected with ourselves. The doctors who just have a few minutes with each patient, they don’t have time to help you figure out what’s going on or to reconnect. And so this desire to figure out what’s going on I think can be really wholesome because it is a desire to overcome self alienation, but because the tools that we have are themselves alienating tools.
For instance, diagnosis is a great thing, but diagnosis is sort of third person label that you, as you put it, sort of put on to a lived experience. And when we think about the body as just a set of symptoms or as some inert thing that we can then look at from an outside perspective, if we don’t counterbalance that with first person attention to our own lived experience and how does this actually feel for me, we can risk further entrenching that alienation that we already have. And I think that’s something that also catalyzes this rabbit hole is this sense that, well, I can overcome my self alienation by like figuring myself out. But the attempt to figure yourself out as if you’re an outsider to yourself is never going to give us what it claims to offer, which is that self reconnection because it itself is a sort of further alienating move, which again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself. But I think when it gets caught up in this process, it is.
Christy Harrison: There’s a place for that maybe of having a third party sort of look at you and say what’s going on or give a diagnosis but then getting stuck in that mode of like chasing that I think is the problem. And the information environment that we’re in I think plays such a huge role in this too. Right? Because it is so alienating already. The way that we’re sort of atomized and just on our screens all the time and in these little filter bubbles and being fed things algorithmically that purport to connect us but actually drive us further from each other, all of that is so problematic.
And then some of the things that we get fed in that state, when we’re starting to look for answers for what’s going on, what’s ailing us or whatever, it’s the things that are gonna just keep us sort of on that hamster wheel, I guess, of what’s going on with me? Can I get to the bottom of this? I need to dig further. It wasn’t this thing. This thing isn’t working. I’m going to try harder, I’m going to do more elimination, I’m going to go for this other wellness plan or I’m going to go more extreme.
And I think algorithms just drive us to those extremes anyway. So once there’s sort of an interest there, it’s like, okay, you know, you’ve tried the keto diet and that didn’t work. Well, what about this carnivore thing? What about the lion diet? What about all this nonsense that’s not evidence based but it just feels like, well I did this thing and it didn’t work. So what’s the next step? And you can sort of get pulled down these seemingly logical next steps.
Ellie Anderson: Yeah, exactly. And that seemingly logical feature of all of this I think is really important to highlight as well because as I mentioned before, this comes from our character as rational beings and the line between the rational and the irrational can be very thin. It can be very difficult to determine, especially in this day and age.
Christy Harrison: That’s so true. And it’s so understandable to want those answers, especially when you felt dismissed, especially when you have things going on that are not being treated or supported by conventional healthcare or you’re just feeling lonely and isolated and alienated from society, you don’t have a great support system. It’s so understandable. And I was there myself 20 years ago, 15 years ago. I can still remember viscerally of how that felt of just like, I gotta find something to help me feel better.
Ellie Anderson: And it was really exhilarating for me when I first started thinking about that. This was like 2018 that I first started thinking about my diet. And when I did the kind of promise that I felt from, oh my gosh, if I take this Ashwagandha supplement, then my brain fog that I experience in the mid afternoon will go away. Or if I eat the avocados at that time, that was before I listened to the episode saying I shouldn’t eat the avocados either, then I’ll have extra energy. There’s something that is so deeply appealing about that promise to solve your problems.
Christy Harrison: Totally. I’m curious how your background and your interest in philosophy intersected with all of that, coming from the background you did with a sort of religious understanding of health. And then you also said you have people in your family who are alternative practitioners or sort of integrative practitioners so I wonder if that also drove you in a more wellness culture direction. But then the philosophy piece is interesting too to come in there.
Ellie Anderson: Yeah, for sure. Because I think my family’s piece of it is more the “positive thinking.” I have multiple family members who are anti-vaxers. I have multiple family members who have actually successfully overcome pretty damning diagnoses and then sort of used that as a justification for an anti-medical perspective. As much as my mom wasn’t super likely to hand me an aspirin if I had a headache, that’s definitely not my parents’ perspective. And so it’s more like my extended family and so I didn’t have a ton to overcome that way.
But I think there is nonetheless something that I imbibed which is precisely this idea that if you get sick it’s in some way your fault because you didn’t think your way out of it strongly enough. And something I want to come back to a little bit later is the way that the kind of religious narrative of the good versus evil dichotomy does, empirically speaking, play into conspiracy theories. And so I think I definitely imbibed a bit of that.
I also think my meditation practice, which I’ve been doing since college now, for almost 20 years, I think has helped me dismantle a bit of that. Because even though the kind of narrative that you get sometimes from these pseudo-gurus in the meditation space is that you’ll solve your medical problems if you just meditate. The Theravada Buddhist practice that I have been doing for a long time is really not into that much at all. It’s much more just like, you just sit on the cushion and practice and don’t worry too much about optimizing your life. That’s not the point of this. The point isn’t even really to like relax your mind. It’s to sort of disentangle yourself from your own attachment to ego. I think that has been really, really helpful for me here.
In terms of the philosophy stuff, I think my interest in research and in getting to the bottom of things is part of what catalyzed the interest in wellness culture when I got into nutrition, specifically, a number of years ago, because I think research is so fun and I love to read the studies. I will admit I wasn’t always reading the studies. I was just sometimes listening to that mindbodygreen podcast and listening to whatever doctor told me. But it really made it fun for me to think about, like, well, what if I tried this cocktail of supplements? What is this gonna do? And this and this and this. Then also figuring out what might be the cause of this symptom that I’m experiencing.
And so I do think the critical thinking skills that I have from philosophy helped me get excited by figuring out what wellness culture had to offer. But at the end of the day, I’m not a scientist and so I can have all the critical thinking skills in the world and I’m still not going to really know what supplement cocktail would “cure me.” And the spoiler alert, it’s none of them. Right? But I think at the end of the day, my philosophical training in, I mentioned the term “lived experience” a while ago, which I imagine many listeners are familiar with. My philosophical training is partly in the tradition known as phenomenology, which is a school of philosophy that emerges in early 20th century Europe. And that’s actually the school of thought from which the term lived experience really originates and becomes popularized.
One of phenomenology’s central tenets is that lived experience is kind of the starting point for any inquiry. And that doesn’t just mean that whatever you feel is right is right. It’s only a starting point. But phenomenologists emphasize that any kind of objective third person and or scientific inquiry emerges out of experience and that we can’t forget that sort of first person perspective when we are engaging in those kinds of inquiries. So a lot of what I was saying a few minutes ago is implicitly stemming from my investment in that school of thought. And I think one of the really beautiful things that comes out of that way of approaching things is an understanding that the self is always in the process of being shaped through our relations with others and through our understandings of ourselves.
It’s not a matter of finding some true or core self, because there just is no such thing. We are reflective and interpretive creatures who are products of our relation to our environment. It’s a little bit different from saying we’re products of our environments. Rather, we sort of are always in a reciprocal relationship with that environment. And I think that perspective of your wellness journey or your spiritual journey or whatever journey it might be is not a journey of discovering an authentic or core self, but rather of shaping who you want to be, has been really formative for me.
Christy Harrison: There’s so much here I want to unpack, and I think it relates to a lot of what we’re going to talk about, kind of in a more philosophical sense about post-truth and its connection to wellness culture. But I also am thinking about the way that wellness culture often presents self optimization or self inquiry or getting to the bottom of your symptoms or your issues is this search for the true self. That if you can just like clear away all this modernity that’s clogging you up, that you can get to this sort of pure, true self that’s unfazed by the shackles of modern life or whatever that doesn’t have all of the symptoms and things weighing you down. And you can be sort of light and free and natural.
And I think in the most extreme cases, it’s like, you won’t need any sort of drugs or any interventions. You’ll just be naturally healthy if you can get back to this kind of pure self. I’m curious to sort of trouble that with what you’re talking about, with the idea that there is no true pure core self to get back to, really. We’re all constructed selves and making meaning out of our relationship with our environment.
Ellie Anderson: Absolutely. And I think in what you just said too, is implicit politics too, which is a conservative and nostalgic politics of some good old day that used to exist and that we should return to. And I see that a lot in discourse on social media about the divine feminine. I was really taken by the divine feminine stuff when I was in college. The Clarissa Pinkola Estés book Women Who Run with the Wolves was my favorite book at the time. And I think the idea of connecting with feminine archetypes, there can be a time and a place for that in society that is very anti-femininity. However, the idea that we should “reconnect” with the divine feminine because that’s what we’ve lost in our evil modern age is just an essentially a conservative fantasy, even when it is proposed by people who consider themselves to be progressive.
Gender norms are constructed and taking the divine feminine kind of approach too seriously can lead to really problematic forms of biological essentialism that are very exclusionary and damaging and also just philosophically unsound. As somebody who specializes in feminist philosophy, that is one of my areas. And so I see that there. I see the desire to type ourselves as well as being part of this yearning for finding core truth. I mean, whether that’s through the proliferation of self diagnosis on social media or the turn to astrology and manifestation or Human Design. I see a lot of that in LA.
And it’s so funny because, even if you know that some of this stuff is not backed by science, it can of course be hard to think your way out of it. And I have so many friends here in LA who say, yeah, I don’t buy into the physics or maybe even the metaphysics of astrology, but I find it really satisfying in my daily life. And it’s easy for me to be like, what? You guys should just know better. But I went to an event a few years ago that was a Human Design event, which is one of these forms of typing oneself. I don’t know too much about it, but it’s I think like quasi rooted in astrology and or Jungian psychology and a number of other things. And it’s based on your time and place of birth.
I didn’t know what it was and I kind of accidentally ended up at this event in West Hollywood that was just like very LA in all the ways that you can imagine. And they had us do, by a show of hands, say what time and date we were born. And I was like, okay, what is this? And then I guess there’s one type that only maybe 1% of the population falls into and that’s my type. And even though it was just as arbitrary as based on the time and place that I was born, I was like, oh, wow. It’s telling me that I’m the rare and therefore most special type. Maybe there’s something to this.
Christy Harrison: I totally fell for that with Myers-Briggs as well, which is not actually scientific it turns out. It had that sort of veneer of scientificness to it. I was like, oh, I’m an INFJ, that’s the best and rarest and most special type and really clung to that for a while.
Ellie Anderson: I can’t remember which one I am. I’m definitely an N. Anyway, it doesn’t even really matter. We’re about to do a personality episode of my podcast Overthink. I just started this book called The Personality Brokers that’s about Myers-Briggs and the strange history. I have nothing intelligent to report about that because I just started the book. It’s a really interesting analysis of how this typology started. And I was also really into Myers-Briggs when I was young and I think it was helpful in certain ways.
It’s just sometimes a matter of, okay, even if you don’t buy into this fully with your critical thinking mindset, there could be something there for you if it’s gonna help you. If identifying as a Taurus is gonna help you better articulate your needs and desires, then, who am I to tell you not to do that? But I think it’s just very easy for us to outsource our own interpretations of ourselves to ready to hand frameworks that actually may in fact end up limiting us more than they free us.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, such a good point. I feel like it can be scary to self define and to sort of plant a stake in the ground and say, like, this is who I am. These are my needs and desires. This is my personality or how I’ve come to know and understand it without any sort of benchmarks or ways of typing ourselves like, oh, I’m this kind of person. I belong over here. Okay, I’m all right. The Myers-Briggs and some of the other stuff, in my teenage years, I was definitely into astrology to a light extent. I never was super hardcore. But I’d read my horoscope in the paper and magazines and be like, that’s me. I totally am a Leo, just self defining in that way.
Because I liked those aspects of my personality that were foregrounded by that label and maybe wanted to highlight those or like with the INFJ stuff, the Myers-Briggs stuff. Oh, these are aspects of my personality that have confounded me or felt like they hindered me in certain ways. Like when I was in social situations with a bunch of really extroverted people or people who just operated in a very different way, whose brains worked differently. I felt so out of place and I felt so less than. And so to identify with this thing and to be like, oh, actually I’m special because of this was very exciting and it felt freeing in some way. It felt like it freed me from negative self comparison to other people.
Ellie Anderson: Yeah and I think when you say it felt freeing, it probably was freeing. It’s just that then if that becomes your main lens through which you understand yourself, then it’s no longer freeing. And so I think we just have to have a really light touch around how we engage with all of this stuff, because otherwise it fosters the sense that the self is just some kind of object and then we end up relinquishing our agency. But I think so much of all of this is wrapped up in a phrase you said in passing earlier which is, I’m all right. We want to be all right. We want to be special. And we also just really want to want somebody to tell us that we’re all right.
Because to be human is essentially not to be all right. It’s always to have to take up the stress of our own existence. Existence is stressful and, and we never really know quite who we are or what we can be, especially in really constrained circumstances under which we live. And obviously some people’s circumstances are far more constrained than others. And I think really at the core of all this drama is just a desire to be all right.
Christy Harrison: That’s so true. It’s like to be both special and normal at the same time. I think I have long felt these two opposing poles of wanting to be affirmed as special and also affirmed as normal. Like, you’re okay, you fit in, you belong, and you have all these really great qualities that make you special. There’s a tension there.
I want to talk a little bit about this idea of post-truth. You had a great episode of your podcast that we’ll link to in the show notes about this and partly what made me excited to talk to you, many other things as well, this so called “post-truth era” that we’re living in, which has often been cited as fertile ground for wellness misinformation and a place that wellness culture has really flourished.
And to me, that has felt true and resonant in a lot of ways, that the sort of breakdown of a sense of shared truth and shared values or whatever, or even the breakdown of any sort of monoculture, where we’re now being fed all these different iterations of supposed truth by different media outlets that we can find something that’s right at our place on the political spectrum and don’t have to engage with anything else. All of that, I think, does make it easier for misinformation to take hold. So can you first, before we kind of get into all this, can you define what post-truth means to you or what it is and how you see it connecting to wellness culture?
