Xand van Tulleken arrives at this book with better credentials than most wellness critics: he's a working clinician who trained during peak vitamin D enthusiasm, when the supplement felt like it might solve cancer, heart disease, and dementia in one convenient capsule. He took it seriously. The early chapters carry the weight of a man who genuinely expected to find something, and the chapters are better for it. The vitamin D section sets the template the book will repeat, to good effect. Van Tulleken doesn't just call the science weak — he traces how the weakness happened, interviewing a professor who devoted his career to the molecule and came to view the whole programme as a false promise. The gap between early observational studies linking vitamin D to health outcomes and the subsequent randomised controlled trials that failed to confirm any benefit is not just a statistics story; it's a sociology-of-science story, and Van Tulleken tells it well. The collagen chapter is where the book's ambitions sharpen into something genuinely alarming. A 1,000% mark-up on meat-industry byproduct is one thing. Ejiao — premium donkey-hide collagen — has exhausted Chinese donkey supply and is now driving slaughter of African rural communities' working animals, so that the skins can be boiled into expensive gummies. That's not a wellness myth; that's a supply chain with real victims. Van Tulleken earns his keep in passages like this. The book's structural argument — that the wellness industry exploits a real publication ecosystem of industry-funded trials, industry-owned journals, and conflicted researchers — is not new. Ben Goldacre made this case in Bad Science (2008) and Bad Pharma (2012) with more statistical ferocity. What Van Tulleken adds is the consumer product walkthrough: collagen, testosterone, multivitamins, turmeric, krill oil, glucose monitors, wearable tech, private blood screening, personalised nutrition. Each category gets its chapter, its follow-the-money, its evidence audit. The breadth is both the book's strength and its main structural weakness: by chapter six, the formula is familiar enough that the diminishing returns set in. The conclusion — that genuine wellness is a diet of whole foods, and a hobby involving achievable mastery of a skill, and that the evidence base for becoming a potter or learning piano is stronger than for any supplement — is both correct and slightly deflating after 300-odd pages of investigative buildup. Van Tulleken lands where you expected him to land. The journey is more interesting than the destination, which is fine; that's true of most good investigative nonfiction. The writerly voice carries it: he's warm without being soft, medically precise without being dry, and he keeps the pacing tight in a genre that frequently indulges itself.
