The Direct Message
Tension: The funniest person in a friend group is often the one carrying the most unacknowledged pain, because their humor creates an illusion of resilience that prevents anyone from checking on them.
Noise: Society classifies humor as a ‘mature’ defense mechanism and celebrates those who wield it, conflating comedic skill with emotional well-being and rewarding the performance that keeps the real person invisible.
Direct Message: The joke was never about making people laugh — it was about making sure they stayed. And the only person who knows the difference between genuine resilience and skilled deflection is the one who can’t stop performing.
Every DMNews article follows The Direct Message methodology.
Walk into any grocery store ten years ago, and you’d find yogurt in the dairy aisle, cookies in the snack section, and maybe a small health food corner with some granola. Walk into that same store today, and nearly every product speaks the language of a doctor’s office. “Probiotic” cookies. “Antioxidant-rich” candy. “Gut-healthy” soda.
The transformation happened so gradually that most of us didn’t notice when food marketing stopped trying to sell us on taste and started diagnosing our problems instead.
I’ve been watching this shift for years, first from inside the wellness world as a yoga instructor, then from my current vantage point writing about the gap between health claims and actual evidence. What strikes me most isn’t just that companies learned to mimic wellness vocabulary. It’s that they’ve gotten so good at it that we’ve started believing a bag of chips can be a form of self-care.
When medical terms became marketing gold
The blueprint was simple once someone figured it out. Take a term that sounds vaguely scientific, strip it of its actual meaning, and attach it to whatever you’re selling. “Superfood” was one of the early winners. There’s no scientific definition for it, no regulatory oversight, no criteria a food needs to meet. But slap it on a package of overpriced berries, and suddenly you’re not just selling fruit anymore. You’re selling the promise of transformation.
The companies behind this shift aren’t hiding their strategy. They talk openly in trade publications about “leveraging wellness trends” and “capturing the health-conscious consumer.” The Hartman Group, which advises major food corporations, explicitly tells clients to use wellness language to create what they call “permission to indulge.” Translation: make people feel like eating your processed food is actually good for them.
What makes this particularly effective is that it targets our deepest anxieties. During my yoga studio years, I saw how people came in carrying stress about their health, their bodies, their sense of control. The wellness industry recognized this vulnerability and turned it into a business model. Create the worry, then sell the solution. Except now the solution comes in a package with a barcode.
The science that isn’t there
Here’s what happens when you actually look at the research behind most wellness-marketed foods: it evaporates. That “gut-healthy” kombucha? The probiotics likely don’t survive your stomach acid. Those “immune-boosting” supplements added to your juice? Your immune system doesn’t work like a volume dial you can turn up. The “detoxifying” charcoal in your lemonade? Your liver and kidneys are already handling detoxification just fine, assuming they’re functioning normally.
The particularly maddening part is the “studies show” game. A company funds a small study with twelve participants. The study shows a tiny correlation between their ingredient and some health marker. The marketing department transforms this into “clinically proven to support wellness.” By the time it reaches your grocery shelf, that weak correlation has become a promise of better health.
I spent two years at the CDC watching how actual public health research works. The timeline from initial finding to confident health recommendation is measured in decades, not marketing quarters. Real science is slow, careful, full of caveats. Marketing science is fast, certain, and never mentions the contradictory evidence.
Why we keep falling for it
The genius of wellness marketing is that it doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like empowerment. When you buy that adaptogenic smoothie or those mindfulness cookies (yes, those exist), you’re not just purchasing food. You’re taking control of your health. You’re investing in yourself. You’re practicing self-care.
This is where the industry’s understanding of psychology becomes clear. They know we’re overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice. They know we’re anxious about our health but don’t have time to research every claim. They know we want to make good choices but need those choices to fit into our actual lives. So they offer us shortcuts: health in a package, wellness in a bottle, transformation in a bar.
Margaret McCartney, a GP in Glasgow, put it perfectly: “Wellbeing as a modern concept causes me existential pain.” She’s talking about how the commercialization of wellness has turned basic health into a luxury product, but I think about this quote whenever I see another food product promising to optimize my existence. The idea that we need special products to achieve basic wellbeing is itself the scam.
The real cost of fake wellness
Beyond the obvious financial cost (wellness-marketed products typically cost 20-40% more than their regular counterparts), there’s a deeper price we pay. Every time we buy into the idea that processed foods with wellness vocabulary are healthy choices, we move further from understanding what actually supports our health.
My family’s approach to food, rooted in Mexican-American traditions, never involved superfoods or optimization. It involved beans, rice, vegetables, community meals. Simple stuff that no one was trying to patent or trademark. But that kind of eating doesn’t generate profit margins, so it doesn’t get marketed as wellness.
The irony is thick: the wellness industry creates the very anxiety and exhaustion it claims to solve. You stress about not eating enough superfoods, so you buy the expensive supplements. You worry about your gut health, so you purchase the probiotic everything. You fear inflammation, so you seek out anti-inflammatory processed foods that are often highly processed themselves. The cycle continues, your wallet gets lighter, but your actual health? Probably unchanged.
A more honest picture
If we strip away the marketing language, what actually supports health is remarkably unsexy. Regular vegetables, not superfood powders. Movement you enjoy, not optimization protocols. Sleep, water, connection with others. These things don’t come in packages with wellness claims because they can’t be trademarked.
The next time you’re shopping and see a product using wellness language, ask yourself: What actual evidence supports this claim? Who benefits from me believing this? Would this food be healthy without the wellness marketing?
I’m not suggesting we need to eat perfectly or avoid all processed foods. I certainly don’t. But we should recognize wellness marketing for what it is: a sophisticated strategy to make us spend more money on products that rarely deliver what they promise. Your skepticism is warranted. Your grandmother’s cooking advice is probably more valuable than anything printed on a package.
And your health is too important to leave in the hands of marketing departments who’ve learned that the right vocabulary can make anything sound medicinal.
