OPERATION INFLUENCE

A HEAD-TO-TOE MARKETING GAME WHERE EVERYONE-YES, EVERYONE!-IS THE DOCTOR.

- BY ELANA KLEIN

DOES YOUR FACE look puffy in the morning? Could the quality of your sleep be improved? Are you inexplicably feeling a little off? Join the club. But don't worry: The wellness industry probably has your fix—and you won't need to step foot in a doctor's office.

Big Wellness' solution might not come cheap. People spend $6.3 trillion a year on wellness products, according to the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute. Nearly a third of that comes from the US alone, which spends more than the next five countries combined.

For Americans, wellness isn't just big business anymore. It's practically national policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has pledged to loosen government regulation on food supplements and raw milk, among other products. One of his top aides cofounded an online wellness marketplace. That aide’s sister—who is also President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general—is a physician turned entrepreneur turned wellness influencer who never completed her residency program. The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz, used to promote dietary supplements on his TV show, where more than half the medical claims he made were either contradicted or unsupported by scientific evidence.

That doesn’t mean everything Kennedy or his colleagues say is false. “The insidious nature of pseudoscience is that there's usually some sort of nugget of truth behind the claim,” says Andrea Love, a biomedical researcher and science communicator. But with the stakes as high as people's health, and so much money floating around, it’s difficult to know what exactly is real. As Kennedy himself said recently, “We don’t want to have the Wild West. We want to make sure that information is out there.” WIRED wants that too. Here’s our guide to some of the top wellness fads that may cross your feed.

1 Facial Massagers

IF YOU HAVE: A PUFFY FACE