The 5 Craziest Wellness Trends People Once Swore By

The wellness industry is vast … and lucrative. Fitness, nutrition, sleep, mental health, longevity — $6.8 trillion’s worth in 2024, with the figure projected to hit $9.8tn by 2029.

Much of it serves ordinary needs. But wherever people are willing to spend heavily on feeling better, you can bet there will be entrepreneurs, gurus, and opportunists ready to sell them a faster way there.

The last time I found myself talking about wellness excess, the question was whether anyone would really pay $2,000 for a better night’s sleep at a luxury hotel in New York. For all I know, it’s worth every cent. My own review may be some time in coming, so I’ll leave that verdict to those qualified by experience.

But it did get me wondering what people have been willing to buy into over the years in the name of wellness. Below are the five I couldn’t quite get over:

5. The Tapeworm Diet

The Tapeworm Diet is one of those crazy wellness trends whose legend is better documented than either its clientele or, for that matter, whoever was supposedly behind it.

In the early 1900s, stories circulated about slimming pills said to contain tapeworm larvae. You swallow one, let the parasite take up residence in your intestine and, in theory, it would consume enough food to help with weight loss.

The famous “Eat! Eat! Eat!” ad, so often wheeled out as proof, is almost certainly a later fake. It names a mysterious “W. T. Bridge, chemist” as the man behind the product, except there is no good evidence that he existed as a seller at all. And even the contemporary stories about tapeworm pills were being challenged at the time. What is not mythical is the parasite. The CDC says a beef tapeworm can grow to 10 metres, and infections may cause abdominal pain, alongside symptoms such as loss of appetite and an upset stomach, which then contribute to weight loss. In rare cases, segments can migrate and block the appendix or bile ducts.

4. Vibrating Belts 

Vibrating belts were pitched as a way to exercise without doing much of a workout. I checked Walmart out of curiosity and, sure enough, you can still buy the things. The language is more careful these days, which makes sense given the FTC’s position that a body-worn device cannot, by itself, produce substantial weight loss.

Older machines typically came as freestanding units, with a wide belt attached to a motorised stand. The strap wrapped around the waist or thighs and shook the flesh back and forth, supposedly trimming inches while the wearer stood in place. By the 1950s, ads were presenting 15 minutes of this as enough to reshape the body.

Giving the old idea a faint scientific afterlife, modern whole-body vibration has produced limited results under controlled conditions. A 2019 review found a small drop in fat mass, but no significant change in body-fat percentage. Anyone looking for ways to stay active without a gym must still get creative and do the moving themselves.

3. Detox Cleanses

Detox cleansing made my list because I still can’t quite get over people paying for everything from juice to colon irrigation to remove something that is so vaguely explained in the first place.

The modern version goes back at least to Stanley Burroughs and his Master Cleanse, devised in 1941. For 10 days, followers replaced food with lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and water, alongside laxative tea or salt-water flushes. Then Beyoncé tried it for Dreamgirls, despite later saying she would never again. Then came the commercial juice-cleanse boom. BluePrint Cleanse launched in 2007, while Salma Hayek teamed up with Juice Generation founder Eric Helms on Cooler Cleanse a year later.

If we go by the science, NCCIH says detox research is sparse and generally weak. Any early weight loss often comes down to severe calorie restriction, while some regimens can cause dehydration or electrolyte problems. No sensible fitness and nutrition advice is going to promise that one punishing weekend can undo months of ordinary habits.

2. Radium Wellness

After radium was discovered in 1898, its novelty, and the fact that doctors were using radiation in cancer treatment, helped create an aura of scientific legitimacy. By the 1920s, companies had taken that reputation and started selling radioactive water, tablets, bath products, cosmetics, and even devices meant to “charge” drinking water with radon.

Among the strangest examples was the Revigator, a ceramic crock lined with uranium ore. Owners filled it with ordinary water overnight, then, the next day, drank the resulting radioactive water. Hundreds of thousands were reportedly sold between 1924 and 1930.

Anything I’ve ever come across with the word radioactive on it, or one of those yellow-and-black hazard symbols, has triggered the same instinctive response. Stay away! Which makes Eben Byers particularly hard for me to wrap my head around. The industrialist and former golf champion reportedly drank around three bottles of Radithor a day for two years. Each one contained radium-226 and radium-228, yet the manufacturer sold the tonic as harmless and claimed it could treat more than 150 ailments. Byers even recommended it to friends before his teeth began falling out. He died in 1932.

1. Cigarettes for Weight Control

Under a very different regulatory system from today’s, Lucky Strike told women in 1928 to reach for a cigarette instead of something sweet. The campaign went straight at a huge anxiety around weight and appearance, at a time when thinness had become tangled up with modern fashion and glamour. Not that we’ve exactly moved past that now, but at least there is a whole conversation around body image and the insecurities advertisers play on.

Some ads went as far as putting doctors in the frame to reassure smokers. A historical review in the American Journal of Public Health found that tobacco companies had dropped that imagery by 1954, once it stopped looking credible.

The weight-control angle, at least, had something real to latch onto. Nicotine suppresses appetite, and a cigarette could replace the habit of reaching for food. To many, that may genuinely have felt like it was helping with cravings, of course, without much sense of the bigger health damage attached.

What the Craziest Wellness Trends Cost 

The following table puts a price tag on each of these five wellness crazes, both in dollars and what buying into them could cost the body.

Sources: ¹ The Quack Doctor on the disputed 1912 tapeworm-pill report Tapeworm diet-pill history. ² Kansas Historical Society on the Walton belt vibrator and $10 monthly rental Belt Vibrator. ³ Contemporary reporting on BluePrintCleanse pricing BluePrintCleanse pricing source. ⁴ Oak Ridge Associated Universities on Radithor and its $1 bottle price Radithor history. ⁵ Time on cigarette prices after the 1928 price cut Cheaper Cigarets.