I am a sucker for marketing dressed up as a magazine. Every month I get excited for the new release of the ‘food’ magazine released by my local supermarket, even though I know its entire purpose is to sell supermarket products to me. But I enjoy flipping through and tearing out recipes to use another time.
This month, as I was perusing Tesco’s latest magazine, I reached a “Health and Wellbeing” segment, and the feature “The Big Wellbeing Reset”, which offered a description of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and told me that September can mark the onset of symptoms for many people.
The feature laid out some mental health suggestions including “going analogue”, a recommendation to avoid too much screen time – something that is genuinely impossible for many of us (although I do agree it’s helpful to minimise doom scrolling in our downtime). There was also a recommendation to socialise in the sauna, a trend apparently picking up at the moment, and a suggestion to increase our “mono tasking” – which honestly just feels like dressing up mindfulness as some kind of new fad.
We also get the common-sense advice: “try other small tweaks to your day-to-day such as taking a whole lunch break”. Then there’s the assertion that, when it comes to exercise, “together is better” – the reasonable idea that social exercise can help with motivation, but neglecting the point that any exercise is better than no exercise, and that adding pressure to find a workout buddy who enjoys the same fitness routine and has the same free time might just be putting up another barrier that most people don’t need.
Topping off the list of suggestions is something called “colour walking”, a trend that’s apparently “doing the rounds on socials”, which suggests you pick a colour to focus on when out for a daily walk. Once again, mindfulness dressed up as a new fad.
The same Health and Wellness section contains their “What the Health” article, which includes a suggestion to try jump training also known as plyometrics – exercise that includes jumping, with the apparent benefit of increasing bone density. And then there is the short snippet titled “The Truth about Sea Moss”, which simply reads:
A type of seaweed, this trending sea vegetable comes in everything from supplements to gel you can use in cooking. It contains iodine which is linked to health benefits like supporting gut health and normal thyroid function. But too much can be harmful and bad for your thyroid so speak to your GP first.
What we have here is a suggestion to use a supplement for supposed benefits, followed by a vague note about potential risk, and then directing people straight to their GP to ask for more information about that supplement. At a time when GPs are overworked, and my GP at least is redirecting everything that can possibly be redirected to pharmacists to better manage their workload, it seems hugely unhelpful to encourage patients to go to their doctor to ask about the latest supplement craze.
Sea moss
Sea moss is becoming quite trendy. An article in Vogue from late last year titled “Sea Moss Is A Superfood Beloved By LA’s Wellness Warriors – Here’s Why” explained:
All the girlies are taking sea moss – or so says TikTok, where there are 1.3 billion views on the term.
Meanwhile Glamour Magazine speaks to global skin and wellness expert Marie Reynolds who tells us “Sea moss is a natural chelator, which means it attracts heavy metals from the bloodstream, and it is naturally abundant in minerals, proteins and iodine that the body needs to survive and thrive,” as well as “sea moss is a super antioxidant and is rich in omega 3, so it has numerous health benefits, including helping to reduce inflammation, increasing energy and boosting the immune system.”
According to her website, “Marie has studied Skin health, Homeopathy, Acupuncture, Counselling, Aromatherapy, Oriental Diagnosis, Bowen Technique, Colonic Hydrotherapy and Quantum Energy Medicine” – so, maybe not the best source of insight into whether a dietary supplement actually has any benefits. Rather than interview any other actual experts, Glamour Magazine speak exclusively to Reynolds, who also tells us: “Sea moss is abundant in essential vitamins and minerals that the body needs, including zinc, potassium, magnesium, sulphur and phosphorus — all of which have multiple health benefits, so it is a great ingredient for overall health and wellbeing,” and that “Sea moss is perfect for this as it is an antiviral and antibacterial agent, so it may help to protect the body from everyday infections like colds and flu”. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the article has an affiliate link disclaimer at the top of the page.
As for Vogue, in their article they speak to Kylene Bogden, a board-certified registered dietitian, who specialises in sports nutrition at FwdFuel who explains “Sea moss is said to improve energy, support thyroid function, digestion and skin health,” but the article cautions that she also says “there isn’t enough scientific evidence to back these claims up”.
Yet, in the very next sentence, the article proclaims “However, many other types of seaweed have been clinically tested and suggest great health benefits, including preventing cancer, viral and fungal infections – and they’re closely related to sea moss” – which completely undermines Bogden’s caution. Vogue link to an article in Marine Drugs to back up this claim, and it does mention anti-cancer properties… but only in relation to cell lines, and not in relation to prevention, except in relation to one of the active ingredients extracted from one type of seaweed.
There are a lot of claims around specific compounds in sea moss, but most of these compounds aren’t uniquely found in sea moss, and many of them are things we’ve discussed in this magazine previously. Most of the specific claims around sea moss come from two things: that it’s high in vitamins and minerals, and that it’s high in iodine.
In terms of vitamins and minerals, it’s true that sea moss has a high level of various nutrients, but if you’re eating a varied diet rich in fruit and vegetables then this shouldn’t matter too much. It is also true that sea moss is a good source of iodine, and that iodine is an essential mineral that keeps our thyroid healthy. I grew up in an area known for having low iodine levels in the soil and, back when people ate foods derived from local soils, those foods didn’t contain high enough levels of iodine. Humans can’t make iodine ourselves, so we have to derive iodine from our foods; the absence of iodine in the local soil of the East Midlands meant that people would develop a goitre – a swelling of the thyroid – which was known colloquially at the time as “Derbyshire Neck”.
These days, when our food originates from more than a few miles from our house, we typically get plenty of iodine from our diet to prevent these kind of conditions – in parts of the world where that’s less true, table salt is supplemented with iodine to reduce deficiency. The UK isn’t one of those places. Most people get more than enough iodine from their diet, particularly from eggs, dairy, seafood and fish.
If you’re vegan, sea moss and other seaweeds can be a good source of iodine – however, that needs to be managed with caution, because too much iodine can also be bad for the thyroid. The according to recommendations from the Vegan Society:
The following options are reliable ways of adding iodine to a vegan diet: Ensure a daily intake of around 500 mL of a fortified milk alternative that includes iodine. Use a daily supplement containing potassium iodide or potassium iodate.
Nowhere in that list is sea moss or seaweed as a primary source of iodine, because iodine levels can vary significantly, and some seaweeds, like kelp, contain too much iodine. Indeed the Vegan Society explicitly state:
However, regular seaweed consumption is not recommended because it provides variable amounts of iodine and some types of seaweed, such as kelp, contain too much.
This is the issue when it comes to casually recommending sea moss supplements: if they’re taken to supplement iodine, you often have no way of knowing how much iodine is in there. I checked the ingredients list of a few such supplements and most of say they’re ‘a good source’ of iodine… but don’t actually list in what amount.
It’s far healthier to have a varied diet and if your diet is low or absent of fish, seafood, milk and dairy, to supplement either through fortified milk or through an iodine supplement with a stated amount of iodine in it.
Health as lifestyle content
The increasingly common recommendation for sea moss supplements – even in the free recipe magazine from a supermarket chain – is another illustration of how health and nutrition claims are not considered important enough to fact check, which is why you’ll see chefs throwing out health claims when they’re using an ingredient on a cooking show, or health benefits will be included in food magazines when the nutritional value of foods is described.
It is jarring and counterproductive to see the same magazine go from an acknowledgement of seasonal affective disorder and a suggestion of mindfulness to manage mental health concerns, to lists of health fads to try and specific health concerns to focus on. Autumn, it’s telling us, isn’t just a season where the weather turns cooler and the plants start to lose their leaves, it’s the slide into winter – and you must do all of these things in order to prepare yourself. Boost your health. Change your diet. Add more exercise. Try this fad. Or this other fad. And remember, you might be prone to this health condition or the other.
I’m usually cautious to complain about over-medicalisation, because I live with conditions that are sometimes under-medicalised and dismissed. We shouldn’t talk about over-medicalisation without the nuance of understanding how people’s real medical concerns are dismissed as just a part of life as a way to deny them treatment, but we also need to be careful not to medicalise an entire season. Doing so preys on the fear people have of becoming unwell, and it’s often done just to sell them a supplement, using real medical conditions as a hook to offer fluff advice; marketing and promoting health anxiety. The ease with which we throw out health advice is not harmless, even if individual examples might seem to be.
Burnout
In 2025 this seems especially important to recognise. This year has been a slog for so many people. After a rough five years learning to live with the aftermath of a global pandemic that still affects entire groups of people, we now see the world sliding towards fascism. The political and physically violent attacks on basic human rights and human beings across large parts of the world is burning people out emotionally and mentally, physically and financially. I don’t know a single person who is having an easy time of it right now.
As a person living with multiple disabilities for multiple years I have something a lot of people don’t have – I have an awareness of how that exhaustion can affect us physically. I know part of the reason my health has been so poor in 2025 is because the world is fucked and my body is reacting to that. And that isn’t me saying anything about psychosomatic illness, it’s just the real truth that our bodies exist in the world, our health exists in the world, and the world is part of the environment that affects our health. Feeling worn down by over working or over worrying so often causes ill health that we have a term for it – we call it burnout. And burnout, whether we call it a health condition or simply a series of symptoms, does have recognisable physical symptoms.
When you suddenly start experiencing new symptoms – you go searching for answers. You should be able to see a doctor and get the support you need but, instead, people are being sold responsibility dressed up as autonomy. We are told we can avoid the worst of SAD by going for a walk – the consequence of which is that when it doesn’t work, when we feel too depressed to even put shoes on to get out for that walk, we might feel we just didn’t try hard enough. But we’re told that we should try skipping, taking sea moss, and eating vegetables.
I’m not saying that adding more exercise and eating more vegetables aren’t important for health. What I am saying is that this constant turnover of fads is unhelpful, smuggled into our thoughts from social media and lifestyle content. We’re told we should ‘mono-task’ and ‘reduce screen time’ so we can calm our busy brains, but sold right alongside that is the promise that if you just try X, Y, Z fad and do research on this supplement or that special exercise then maybe you’ll be healthy, and you’ll feel better, and you’ll avoid bone injury, and avoid colds, and avoid the worst symptoms of seasonal depression.
Honestly, I’m tired. Tired of all this wellness noise while living with a disability in a difficult, capitalist world where my productivity is linked to my worth, and where there are attacks to democracy and equality all around us. I’m tired of trivialised health advice dressed up as supporting us to feel better and stay well, when it’s poorly researched and gives no thought to the context of who might read that advice and how it might be received.
I’m tired of the implication that, when people are unwell, it’s because they did something wrong. I’m tired of having a flare up and the first question anyone asks is “what do you think caused it?” because, I wish I knew, I just feel unwell, please just let me feel unwell for a bit before I pick myself up and figure out what I need to add to my toolkit to prevent that particular version of a flare up from happening again.
Ultimately, we need to be careful about how easily we throw out unevidenced health advice as a marketing hook to sell a product, or to make a conversation slightly more interesting. We need to avoid over-medicalisation of symptoms that are normal, while also avoiding under-medicalisation and undermining the severity of symptoms and conditions which have a meaningful impact on individual sufferers.
SAD shouldn’t be the hook for an article on winter wellbeing, nor should sea moss be casually dropped in as ‘supporting thyroid function’ without providing proper context. This tendency to devalue health advice in the name of finding seasonal content is contributing to a climate where individuals feel pressured to solve their struggles by spending money on products or valuable time on advice and recommendations that are over-complicated or labelling themselves with a diagnosis.
Instead, we should empower people to listen to their bodies, to seek professional advice when they need it, and otherwise find simple and accessible ways to integrate healthy habits into busy lives.
