Hi. It’s Micah from Modern Hysteria, your podcast and newsletter revealing the taboos of women’s brains and bodies (listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts).
This week, we’re talking with Sadie Chanlett-Avery about the world of wellness and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and how it intersects with the alt-right, conspiracy thinking, pseudoscience, and more.
The Taboo
The main taboo explored in this episode is:
Wellness is not inherently good or moral.
Links + Resources
🗞️ Opinion | How MAHA Is Helping Poison Americans While Claiming to Save Them
📱 yogisadie | Sadie Chanlett-Avery on Instagram
👩🏼💻 Sassafras Revival
The Guest Expert
Sadie Chanlett-Avery is the founder of Sassafras Revival, an Asheville, North Carolina, USA-based company offering movement medicine classes, mouth-watering international retreats, and Tarot for the Soulful and Skeptical: a workout for the intuition. She is a Movement Medicine innovator, a Wellness Retreat creator, and a writer wrestling with the question: how do we sustain ourselves right now? With over 22 years of experience in holistic health, her work blends exercise, mysticism, and practical tools for modern resilience.
Key Takeaways
1. Wellness culture isn’t inherently healing—it can be a gateway to control, elitism, and even extremism.
The episode breaks open the assumption that “natural” or “alternative” equals safe or progressive. Sadie explains how wellness spaces—especially those dominated by white women—have become vulnerable to conspiracy thinking, moral purity narratives, and the wellness-to-alt-right pipeline. Wellness can easily slip into fear-based dogma disguised as empowerment.
2. Health is not a personal achievement; it’s a collective responsibility.
Sadie underscores that illness is not a moral failure and that no one can “future-proof” themselves through perfection, purity, or biohacking. Real health requires public health systems, community infrastructure, environmental protections, and collective care—not individual optimization or self-blame.
3. Movement and community offer grounded, accessible counterpoints to wellness culture’s excesses.
Instead of treating movement as punishment, aesthetics, or moral performance, Sadie frames it as “movement medicine”—a way to regulate emotions, process anxiety, and reconnect with ourselves and others. Communal movement spaces, belonging, and ritual are the antidotes to the isolating, hyper-individualized wellness grind.
✅ Action Items
* Avoid getting hangry
* Connect with community
* Move your body in a way that is not exhausting
* Get the best rest and sleep possible
* When someone asks you how you’re doing, answer them honestly
* Practice relaxation techniques
* Exercising agency; movement is free
Time Stamps
* 4:02 | Where MAHA went off course
* 6:42 | Growing up in a commune
* 8:55 | Wellness conspiracy theories
* 11:53 | Biohacking and the health meritocracy
* 16:45 | Spiritual practice that sustains us
* 17:12 | Aside: SNAP benefits
* 19:47 | Movement x wellness x moralism
* 20:57 | Aside: RED-S
* 25:22 | Finding identity in rigid wellness routines
* 27:56 | Aside: Abigail Spanberger
* 35:01 | Wellness x the alt-right
* 39:59 | What’s in your bag?
