Maintenance Phase - Moon Juice

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

What's that Gwyneth Paltrow's drinking? It's MOON JUICE! This week, we're talking adaptogens, brain dust, hot sex milk and the wellness company that's taken L.A. by storm. Be sure to take your quinton shots before you listen to this one.Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks!:How Hollywood's Favorite Juice Bar Owner Eats Every Day (Elle)How Amanda Chantal Bacon Perfected the Celebrity Wellness Business (NYT)What Are Adaptogens? (NYT)Wellness Brand Moon Juice Has Plenty of Haters - And Its Founder is Cool With That (Entrepreneur)The Moon Juice Gospel of Self (The New Yorker)How Wellness Got Whitewashed (Glamour)Support the show

Hey, maintenance phase buds. Today's episode is a real treat. It's one that we're really excited to bring to you And also it is important that you know that I fully fucked up the sound Mike is like an audio MacGyver and did a bunch of neat tricks to save it But just know that the audio quality for this one is a little a little downgraded from our usual We'll be back up and running next time, but this one's on me. That is not how I would frame it. I was not gonna blame you for this.

This is a very strange and technical process. We had to use Aubrey's Skype recording rather than her microphone recording because there are knobs and dials on the microphone that were in the wrong place, I guess. And I'm just a very loud person. So the place they all need to be, is it like the lowest setting? Well, both bellowers.

I think we both have a bellowing issue. And so sometimes that fries our microphones. And it was Aubrey's turn to fry hers. Well, please. So we are sorry. There's a couple places where the audio cuts out. It sounds little tinny. We're working on it. We think we fixed it. So please are sorry, there's a couple of places where the audio cuts out. It sounds a little tinny.

We're working on it. We think we fixed it. So please bear with us and enjoy. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast about health and wellness and energy drinks, I guess, or something.

Yeah, sort of. I am Aubrey Gordon. I am a columnist for Self Magazine. I'm Michael Hobbs. I work for Huffington Post. Awesome. Yeah, look at that. We did it.

And today we're talking about Moonjuice, which I literally have no clue what this is. So like, no, this is not cross your path at all. Literally, these are just like random syllables to me. The only thing I know, which I think I heard from you, is that this is somehow in the Gwyneth Paltrow extended universe. So if we're thinking about like Oprah and sort of who are the people that Oprah introduced us to.

Oh no, they're all bad. The first big one that Oprah introduced us to was Dr. Phil. Yes. And Moonjuice is like Goop's Dr. Phil. This is sort of like her like first big sort of like endorsement of another company. So Moonjuice is a company, not a substance. Correct. Okay. Moonjuice is only meant as well digging.

I was gonna like dig in more. I'm like, what else do you know? And it's just like, you're just. Correct. Okay. Moonji, so we might as well dig in. I was gonna like dig in more. I'm like, what else do you know? Like, and it's just like, you're just like nothing. No. Right? There's no, you have mind as deep as you're gonna get. This is like, we are out of or. So it started out as an LA juice bar.

I don't know if you know LA much, but it's first location was in Venice. Okay. Second and third locations were on Melrose and in Silver Lake. So it's really and truly just like where are the crunchiest hipsters? Ooh, give it to me in retail brands. Are these neighborhoods like Prada? Are they Banana Republic?

Are they all Saints? Hot Topic? They're like seven for all mankind. Ooh, okay, I know exactly what you mean. Do you see what I'm saying? Yes. It's like the, it's like the wine moms who do yoga and they're like just on the border with anti-vaxxers. They haven't quite crossed over.

Yes. There is a lot, a lot, a lot of skepticism about Western medicine. Yes. There's, yes. So they started as like one of many cold pressed juiceries in LA. There are a lot of those, right? That's a green juice and wheat grass and the whole bit.

Can I ask you a really dumb question? Yes. What is cold pressed mean? Like what is the cold adding to this? So there are different kinds of juicers. There are, I learned this. I read the entire moon juice cookbook. So ask me anything about juicers.

There are several different kinds of juicers. The idea behind cold-press juicers is that you are not oxidizing the juice. Okay. Normally, if you bought a juicer, like a juiceman juicer or whatever, it would look kind of like a food processor, right? And you would use this kind of plunger thing to push in fruits and vegetables that go down into this basket that's spinning really fast and then shoots juice out of a little spout

and there's your juice, right? It's the wood chipper from Fargo. Yes. Yes, correct, correct. So the challenge is that that juice then oxidizes more easily, right? Which means that it turns brown within 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, right? So it doesn't look great in a bottle on a shelf.

Yeah. So cold pressed juice does two things. One, it keeps the juice from heating up so it doesn't oxidize, but it also keeps the juice from heating up so that for people who are committed raw foodists, uh, right. Raw food is a big part of the moon juice aesthetic. So the cold press just basically means you just like squeeze a carrot at high pressure, like you run over it with your car and then a bunch of juice comes out.

Yeah, you scrape up the juice from the pavement. Yes. So they started out as a juice bar. They have since expanded quite a bit. Their whole thing is like food is the best medicine, right? Ooh, okay. So they now sell snacks, which they call cosmic provisions. Nice.

They sell capsule supplements, and they've actually gotten into beauty supplements that are now in like Sephora and urban outfitters. And so they're like, you know, they're getting out there. This is the life cycle of the American lifestyle brand. You start with one thing and then once people are sort of bought into the brand, then you extend the brand to all this other random stuff.

Yes, absolutely. They've also released a cookbook. They still have their juices and they've got these things called dusts. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah. Which are these sort of powdery supplements that are mixture of usually like mushrooms and herbs

and a lot of ingredients that are borrowed really heavily from Chinese medicine, from Ayurveda, from herbalism, a wide range of sort of eastern slash alternative medicines. I can see why Gwyneth Paltrow likes this. Right, apparently. It's interesting, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow calls her website Goop, right? It's kind of like a satire of people who are promising to fix your life with some sort of Goop.

Yeah. LOL, everybody has a Goop, they're selling. ours is just gonna be called goop, right? And they're doing, it feels like they're doing the same thing here by calling it dust, right? Where dust is associated with like dirt and filth. They're sort of tongue-in-cheek referencing how much fucking snake oil there is in this field. So potentially that's the case.

I will say I did read one review of the dusts that was like, I really liked that it was dust and not powder because powder sounds synthetic and dust sounds natural. And I was like, I really liked that it was dust and not powder because powder sounds synthetic and dust sounds natural and I was like, this bizarre. Yeah, that's probably going on too. Yeah, this idea that everything has to be quote unquote natural. Mungius is also big on adaptogens.

Oh, fuck. It's like Chevron with Tecron. It's just a made-up word. Yeah, so do you know anything about adaptogens? Has that come across your... Is that a real word? Yeah, it's a real word. What? Okay. It's totally a real word and it's totally Chevron with Tecron.

Here's there's a quote from The New York Times did a whole piece called, What Are Adaptogens? Okay. Because if you are like me, a white woman in your 30s, adaptogens are everywhere on Sephora me a white woman in your 30s, adaptogens are everywhere on Sephora, they're everywhere in juice bars, they're everywhere. All kinds of stuff, right? Wow.

So this is the definition and sort of little explanation from the New York Times. Quote, coined in 1947, the term adaptogen refers to substances that theoretically, quote, unquote, adapt to what your body needs and help protect against various stressors. Oh, for fuck's sake. Although the science is as murky as a mushroom drink looks, and these supplements are unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration, that hasn't stopped trend centers from sharing their purported benefits, which includes supporting the body's adrenal glands, reducing stress

levels, and regulating hormone responses for an overall sense of homeostasis or balance. Oh, God. It's just like classic marketing stuff. So there's like a little bit of science that shows that there might be some benefits. Those studies have all been done in rats. Nice. Wait, what are they though?

Are they a pill or like, are they found in like broccoli or something where are we getting these adaptogens? They're found mostly in like mushrooms. Okay. Everything in the moon dusts. So there's like brain dust and power dust and spirit dust and something called sex dust.

Yes. That's called cocaine. Well also just like, if you are sex is dusty. That's not sex. I want to be happy. I had the dustiest sex yesterday. So all of these dust are just made up of basically like ground up ingredients like ashwaganda, hoshu wu. Pearl has a bunch of adaptogens in it.

So the idea is that these adaptogens are naturally occurring. So what Moonjus has done is they've taken these exotic mushrooms or whatever and they've boiled them down only to the adaptogens and now you can get pure adaptogens in a pill or whatever. That's right. They're pointing the most concentrated natural sources of adaptogens, a thing that is like pretty ill-defined, right? Right. And there's also the big step of even if, because we see this with vitamins quite often,

that even when we see the benefits of vitamins in broccoli or whatever fruit or vegetable that you're eating, oftentimes those benefits don't actually appear once you take out the vitamin and put it in pill form. So even if adaptogens are this like amazing great thing, in mushrooms, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will get the same effect if you take them in a pill. And just because it works in rats doesn't mean it was in people. Yes, also. Sure, and you like, there's just like a lot, a lot, a lot of layers of stuff we don't know.

Yes. I'm not going to say like, let's never try adaptogens or they shouldn't be so or what have you. But I am going to say, hey, maybe cool it on your like big sweeping claims about what adaptogens are capable of doing. Yes. And Moonjus' founder, Amanda Shantal Bacon, his her name, has very big, very sweeping claims about what adaptogens can do. Nice. But basically, like, because this science is both really underdeveloped and also really highly contested, if you, like me, are not a medical researcher or a health care provider, adaptogens and sort of the whole moon juice thing becomes kind of a screen that we can project

our own worldviews to, right? Right. So if you don't tend to buy into alternative medicine treatments, you are probably going to dislike Munche's and you're probably going to relish disliking Munche's. Right. This is me right now. Yes, I am raising my hand. It is me often.

If you are down to try a lot of things, if you have tried, you know, colonics and enemas and acupuncture and acupressure and cupping and raky and all of that kind of stuff, then you're probably down for moon juice, right? The other thing that's important to know about moon juice before we get into Amanda Shantal Bacon is that it has an incredibly high price point. So one of their cosmic provisions, quote unquote, from their snack line, is a bag of activated cashews. In the MoonJews cookbook, she tells you how to activate cashews. And here's how you activate cashews. You take raw cashews and you soak them in salt and water. Tired of these dead, unactivated cashews. Tired of these inert cashews, man.

So basically like they're sprouted cashews, but she explains in the cookbook, we don't call them sprouted because you don't see a sprout. Coming out of them and I was just like, whatever. Yeah. So you can get a bag of activated cashews. It's like a normal size. They don't list the number of ounces on the website,

but it looks like, I don't know, eight or 12 ounces of cashews. That bag of activated cashews will set you back $30. You can get a 30 day supply of their super beauty supplement where you take two capsules a day. That is $60. Oh, fuck. And a year's supply of sex dust, which by the way, their owner, Amanda Shantalbacon,

strongly suggests taking sex dust before work. What? Because she says that creative energy is linked to libidinal energy. Ah, if you're arc-helly, I feel like we're normal fucking people. It's not. So a year's supply of sex dust would cost over $1,500. That's a youth car. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

So most folks will know Moonjuice, not because of the brand itself or because of the products, but because of its owner, Amanda Shontal Bacon. She is a young white woman. She's in her mid-30s. She's regularly photographed and sort of gauzy, white clothing and big floppy hats and turquoise like statement necklaces, right?

Should I Google image search her right now? Oh my God, you totally should. Amanda, you said shantal bacon? Yeah. Oh wow, okay, wow. She's extremely pretty, like she's very conventionally pretty. Yeah, she's beautiful in a lot of the photos that are coming up She's wearing sort of these like Daenerys Targaryen white linen kind of flowing dresses

It's just like yard after yard of fabric. Yeah. Yeah, she's a conventionally attractive white woman I can see why people find her messages appealing totally Totally. She also gets asked a lot about her beauty regimen and every time her response is like, I don't really wear makeup. And like real beauty comes when your body is in its right state. Oh my God. When you're tuned with your body. So she's really able to sort of like bring that back

to moon juice foods and supplements and the whole thing, right? Which always bothers me because it's like someone who won the lottery giving you money advice. The key is just to not care and don't wear makeup and eat lots of fruits and vegetables. It's like, or the key is to be born with genetics that make you not store body fat, that make you not have acne,

that make you have nice hair and nice skin. I mean, so much of this is totally out of her control. Totally. It's both like genetic advantage, right? Plus having kind of astronomical amounts of disposable income. Yeah. So you mentioned in the Google image search, you said the first thing that came up was a food diary.

Yes. And that is actually how I came to know of Moongear. Because of what was in the food diary. So, El magazine does this thing from time to time where they say, like, tell us everything you eat. Oh, we're like they invite celebrities to lie about it, basically. Yeah, totally. So Amanda Shantal Bacon wrote her own food diary. And I'm just going to give you a couple of quotes from it. I'm not going to, we're not going to lead up. We're just going to do quotes at 8 a.m.

I had a warm morning cheat drink on my way to the school drop off, drunk in the car. It contains more than 25 grams of plant protein thanks to vanilla mushroom protein and stone ground almond butter and also has the super endocrine brain immunity and libido boosting powers of brain dust, cordiceps, rachy, maca, and chila-jee-trezm. I throw Hoshu Wu and Pearl in as part of my beauty regime and I chase it with three Quintan shots for mineralization and two hypospheric vitamin B complex packets for energy. You are fucking making this up, Audrey. This is not real.

All of these words are made up. She's having like fucking, what was it? Quadricep powder. Cordiseps, how do you do? Cordiseps. Please, I don't pretend like you don't know about Cortisep. I see you with your Quintan shots in the morning. Jesus Christ.

Initially, I was picking out quotes and I just picked out every paragraph because everyone is this level, right? So here's her lunch. For lunch, I have zucchini ribbons with basil, pine nuts, sun-cured olives, and lemon with green tea on the side. That's almost a normal meal. Let's pause and appreciate. I mean, it sounds good to me, honestly.

Yeah, Amanda, congratulations. She says, this is such an easy, elegant and light meal. I made this while on a phone meeting before heading out for the rest of the workday. I often alternate this with my other lunch staple, a nori roll with umeboshi paste, avocado, cultured sea vegetables, and pea sprouts. Where the fuck is she getting these ingredients?

I wouldn't even know where to begin getting like pea sprouts or whatever. Yeah, I mean like so much of her food is like dependent on you take a day each week to make your nut milks from scratch to do bubble but really like to do all this stuff to ferment things to do all of that. And I would say all of this does sound like tasty. It sounds tasty to me as a snack and it's really hard to me to imagine being like, my whole lunch was roasted seaweed, fermented plum paste, avocado, fresh seaweed,

and pea sprouts. I'm just like, that sounds great. What is lunch? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does the real lunch get here? Yeah, I'm totally down to eat these foods. And come on, lady. It's also interesting how this is wrapped up with sort of her work schedule. That she's

mentioning with the breakfast that she's dropping off her kids, and she's mentioning with the lunch that, oh, I'm doing this on a meeting. And then I rush off to work. The fantasy is that we can all eat like this and deal with all of our other obligations. Like, oh, I just like whip together a bunch of zucchini ribbons and a, you know, couple sprigs of basil, I tore them up. And it's like, no, the amount of preparation that goes into these kinds of meals and this kind of eating, unless you're like a stay-at-home person

or you have a live-in chef or personal assistant who's doing all the shopping for you, it's not attainable for most people. So, like, one of the things that happened has fall out from this on that note. First of all, I should say this blew up on the internet. Oh, yeah. You can imagine the heyday that people had.

There were like snarky pieces on like Jezebel and in the New Yorker and like everybody went to town. I am all for just like heaping scorn on clueless rich people who do shit like this. I think we always have to temper this, but like sometimes it's like shot through with misogyny. There's like there's other things that we need to be wary of and we don't want to go overboard. But I also think that like clueless rich people are the most fucking infuriating thing, especially now. And salty articles about them, I think are completely fine.

So there were two headlines that were like outstanding. One was G. Atalantino's headline, which was, I've never heard of any of the things this white woman eats. And the other one was from New York magazine. And it just said, this woman makes Gwyneth Paltrow look like Guy Fieri. So it's partly like folks are, you know, there's backlash to the like incredible, weird, wealthy name dropiness of it all. And some of it is also this like incredibly curated life that people are like, that's not actually how people live.

There's also something that usually these clueless, celebrity look at my life type articles. There's usually also a through line of sort of couching this as like sustainability or couching this as like, oh, look how good I am for the planet. And all this other fake virtue about eating like this and living like this. I mean, oftentimes it comes with this implicit

or explicit social message about how if everybody lived like this, wouldn't the world be better? And it's like, no, the all the data indicates that we cannot live like this, and this is not remotely sustainable. But you're telling yourself that you're a good person, even while you're like baking the planet with this shit. Totally. So there's like continual sort of refrain throughout the Moonju's cookbook is that you can heal your body and heal the planet. Oh, God. The other thing that I will say that was part of the backlash to this piece is that as all of these news outlets started writing about it, a number of them started estimating the cost of these

groceries. Nice. One website sort of came up with the low end cost. And that was about $700 a week. That's the low end. The high end estimate that I found was about $ $700 a week. That's the low end. The high end estimate that I found was about $1,200 a week. Jesus Christ. So this is a diet that is straight up for wealthy people. There's also a thing, I feel like we should also mention, I really have no problem with rich people eating rich people shit and doing rich people shit.

If you've made a ton of money and this is what you want to spend your money on, like morally speaking, I don't particularly care. I think what is offensive to me anyway, is sort of the influencer-ness of this in the literal sense. They are trying to influence people to live this way and they are implying both that everybody can live this way and that everybody should live this way. Right, I mean, I think that's part of what's really interesting to me about Moonjuice is that it is this sort of encapsulation of like a lot of the most sort of insidious parts of wellness culture, right? That's like, it's natural so it's better. You are doing this incredibly self-focused and self-centered thing

that also gets painted as somehow altruistic or somehow benefiting other people, right? It lets you be a consumer, right? You're buying things, which is fun and feels good. Like, I like to buy things and makes you feel like that is somehow for your health and for the benefit of others. It's just sort of collapsing all of these opposing concepts or at least concepts where they're tension between the two. It's collapsing them all into the same bucket. And that bucket is full of brain dust. A lot of this is self-improvement, but it's couching the self-improvement as, no, no, I'm doing what everybody should be doing. So a managed on Talbayak and become sort of this lightning rod, right?

Some through her own doing and some through just being at the right place at the right time, to sort of capture a bunch of backlash to this sort of like wealthy wellness stuff that's been on the rise for a while, to the influencer stuff that's been on the rise for a while. And she's particularly invested in, and Moonjuice is particularly invested in this clientele of predominantly wealthy and predominantly white women who become fixated on their own sort of wellness, right? And they're all sort of united by like, they've got the space to wonder what's wrong with them. And because they have the resources to try a bunch of stuff to fix these sort of ill-defined kind of mystery problems.

It's really hard to talk about mungus without talking about the history of sort of women's wellness. I would say some early examples that I would reach back to are in the 1800s, we start to see this kind of wellness stuff get really medicalized, right? And particularly focused on women. There are a couple of diagnoses in the 1800s that become very popular. One is Neurosthenia and other is Hysteria, which is basically just like women be crazy, right? I mean, there's not much else to it as my understanding.

Totally. So there were symptoms from Hysteria. Those symptoms included unusual behavior, failure to marry, and they described as having a wandering uterus. Oh, buddy. That's like how octopuses eat with a wandering uterus. Yes. So the idea was that your uterus essentially becomes detached from your vulva.

So totally biological concepts that aren't socially determined at all. Neurosthenia is sort of a twin diagnosis to hysteria. It was this purported sort of nervous system condition in which people had depleted energy. And that depleted energy, or sort of weak nerves, is the other way that Neurosthenia gets described, is seen as a natural consequence of modern civilization. Ooh. Which feels very wellnessy now, right?

Yeah, and very similar to what we saw in our other episodes about this idea that we're this sort of like fallen species who has been degraded from our pure hunter-gatherer selves. I mean, these are anxieties that seem to cross country and time barriers. Absolutely. I would say symptoms on this one are a little cloudier. You know, like when scientists will recruit people and they'll be like, do you ever feel sad? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what these symptoms are like to me. So symptoms are fatigue, anxiety, headache, depression, heart palpitations, right? That is just sort of like, do you ever feel bad?

Yeah, it's adulthood. That is adulthood. It's just being tired and having a fucking headache. So this was diagnosed disproportionately in veterans, actually. Essentially, it seems like what we would now call PTSD was then being called Neurostemia. It's diagnosed much more in Americans, so much so that it has the nickname of being Americanitis, and it's overwhelmingly diagnosed in women. So Virginia Woolf writes about her Neurostemia experience

and being prescribed a quote-unquote rest cure, which is just like you have to be away from the world. I think it's also worth noting that in the 1800s, because of sort of the way that white women were situated in the world, that almost all of these diagnoses came at the behest of men. So it would be, again, like husbands or fathers complaining about their wives' behaviors and deciding to call a doctor who would go, yep, you got it. Her uterus is detached. And this is also a time when men's bodies are being studied as the default and women's bodies are not being studied at all.

We've just seen a sort of like defective versions of men's bodies. So it's really, really steeped in these kinds of social values. But it is interesting how a lot of the kinds of vague symptoms that they were identifying back then are still being diagnosed today. Yeah, so much of this stuff about like cleanses and toxins and purity. I mean, it sounds like it's like word for word, the same stuff as we were doing back then.

Absolutely, like it maps on really, really cleanly. I would say inflammation also goes on that bucket, right? Of sort of stuff that's like, why don't I feel good? And the answer is, here's a bunch of stuff that's like, why don't I feel good? And the answer is, here's a bunch of stuff that might be why I don't feel good. And also, you might just not feel good because sometimes life doesn't feel good. Yeah. You know, because we all have off days and also sometimes things are just wrong and bad. Right. But it sort of keeps these like

wealthier white women in this loop of trying to solve the mystery that they haven't even sort of defined what happened, right? And the way that you solve the mystery that they haven't even defined what happened, right? And the way that you solve the mystery is by buying a bunch of stuff. Yeah, and it's always one thing, right? It's always like, oh, oh, it's gonna be adaptogens. Once I take the adaptogens, I don't have to change anything else. Everything else is gonna be fine.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So like all of this is happening, hysteria, niresthenia, all this kind of stuff is happening. Shortly thereafter, we start to see this boon of better living products, which are what we would now call wellness, right? That's when Coca-Cola is founded as ostensibly a health beverage. Really? Do you not know this about Coca-Cola?

No, I mean, I know that it like used to have cocaine in it, but I didn't know that it was like a tonic at first. Well, that was the tonic, was the cocaine. All fucking met it was. Yeah. Sex dust. It's also around the same time that Kellogg's is founded, Kellogg's conflicts, which were invented by John Harvey Kellogg, who was a doctor who ran a sanitarium.

The sanitarium was a sort of, it sounds a little spa-like. And he came up with this recipe for toasted cornflakes, and his brother bought the right since started Kellogg's cereal, and it was marketed as a health food, right? Oh, some of these products were also specifically marketed to women, including one that was advertised in a 1902 Sears and Roba catalog. Here is the text of that ad. Ladies, you can be beautiful, no matter who you are, what your disfigurements may be. You can make yourself as handsome as any lady in the land by the use of our French arsenic wafer.

Arseneck wafer. Arseneck is the only thing standing between you and true beauty. That's awesome. Totally. So they say it will take care of your freckles. It'll take care of like any skin breakouts or redness or jaundice or rough skin. They say it will sort of like make you more beautiful than anyone. Just eat Arseneck. Small doses of poison, yeah. So as you've noted, like there's a lot of this, we can sort of hear echoes of this today, right? And you know, as close as we get in the moon juice world and in contemporary wellness, in terms of a definition of being well,

is just like, is your whole life going the way you want it to? Right. Are you happy every day? Are. Are you happy every day? Are you having great sex every day? Are you alert every time you're awake? God, is anybody? Right.

But again, like, this is just being a person in the world. Yeah, it's, I mean, yeah. It's so hard to talk about this stuff without sounding judgy, right? Because people do struggle with fatigue, people do struggle with sleep, general, you know, aches and pains, people get lower back pain as they get older, their knees hurt. You know, there's just a lot of hurt going around and like you don't want it in any way invalidate that or act to people like, oh, just you complaining, which it objectively isn't. Like people are hurting mentally and physically. But also, what is gross about stuff like moon juice is that then you get these fucking vampires

coming in and using those real problems as an opportunity to sell you bullshit that does not help you and enriches them. Right, and as any person who is disabled or who has a chronic illness will tell you, you will hear about this shit, but like this moon juice style nonsense all the time as a prescriptive thing, right? Right.

So people who are disabled will get like a, hey, you just need to try this mushroom powder or you just need to eat more vegetables or you just need to exercise more or you just need to bubble, right? So it also sort of like not only does it not help people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, it also sort of feeds into this weird, concerned trolling, able people saying, I know better than you, disabled person, kind of vibe,

that's really creepy. Yeah, it reinforces this idea that, you know, if you have a real illness, like it must be because you're not eating enough probiotics, or there's something you're doing wrong, as opposed to just trying to connect with that person and trying to find out what their experience is like. It's like you're constantly looking for a reason that they've done it to themselves. Totally! Like, if you have chronic fatigue syndrome, which is a real thing that people have thought is fake for decades.

It's like, oh, no, no, no, it must be a food allergy. It must be because you did this wrong. It must be because you're not getting enough fresh air. The explanations change over the decades, but there's always some reason why you don't have a real ailment. It's really gross. Right. It's just really gross from every angle.

I mean, to like bring us back to Moonju's land in particular, Moonju's is kind of almost synonymous with Amanda Shantal Bacon, right? She's the face of the brand. She's the only Moonju's employee who's really quoted anywhere. That said, it's really difficult to dig in on her because the only things we know about Amanda Shantal Bacon are what she has told us, which is not much. There is not a Wikipedia page for her or for many tubes, which is super strange. All we have are sort of these kind of tales that she tells about her own wellness or lack of wellness.

I should say, like, in fairness, all anybody knows about me is what I've told them, right? I mean, this is, yeah, being a public semi-public figure. Yes. So, there are a couple of sort of stories that she tells about her own wellness or lack thereof that are sort of really important to the mythology of her shoes. So she grew up in New York City and she had this bronchial issue as a small child. She's like four or five when this is happening. She's coughing at night.

She can't figure out what it is. Western doctors, she says repeatedly are sort of no help. And sometimes they say she will outgrow it or whatever, right? So she's just like living with this kind of miserable condition until she and her parents are grocery shopping in a health food store. When a stranger hears her hacking cough and comes over and says that she should stick out her tongue, he takes her pulse, he asks her a couple of questions, and it turns out that he is an

Ayurvedic medicine practitioner from India. Oh, I thought he was going to turn out to be Elrond Hubbard. Okay. That'd be great. So she says within just a few minutes that he makes this diagnosis and tells her everything she needs to do, which includes avoiding wheat, dairy, and sugar. Okay. But she also says that within a week of doing it, that all of her symptoms are gone. So here's a quote from her about sort of the effects of eating this way. As I grew,

my immune system also became stronger. So I was able to have moments of flexibility. Even then, I always felt it the next day. And I was susceptible to bronchitis, chronic sinusitis, and terrible allergies. As I moved into my teens, I began to receive warnings from Western medical practitioners, which became diagnoses of exhaustion, hormonal imbalance, and emotional distress ranging from ADD, autoimmune disorders, depression, pre-diabetes, and a whole range of other maladies. All of these diagnoses came with the message that it was a lifelong sentence

that could only be addressed with synthetic drugs, and that failing to take those drugs would ultimately be life-threatening. Oh, God. I really love how much you hate this. Oh, my God. It's just such a human story, and it could be such a inspiring and nice story of somebody who found happiness in this unconventional way But instead of using it as a platform to show curiosity about what's going on with other people

She uses it as a platform to be like well everybody else's body must be just like mine Totally. I just we hear this so often. It's like these nice inspirational stories that just become Gross marketing bullshit. So she's doing all of this. Later on, she also goes on a juice cleanse to cure her own sugar addiction. Of course, juice cleanses are involved in this. Here's another quote from sort of the effects of going on this juice cleanse. The changes weren't all physical. I noticed that the inclusion of green juices and live plant foods in my diet incited a personality shift. Okay.

Thought patterns and roles I had assumed were part of my quote-unquote personality dissolved. These apparently deep-seated traits of mine were disappearing just as my cough had vanished in the absence of sugar, wheat, and dairy. Oh my god. The foods I was choosing were changing the nature of the thoughts that were creating my reality. Oh no, she's like a kid who studied abroad and then they come home and they're like actually in Belgium, the way that they do things in. Michael, she did this juice cleanse in Italy.

Damn, I'm good. This is happening during a chapter of her life when she is spending her teens and twenties traveling the world. It hurts me so much because I fucking was that kid. I studied abroad when I was 19. And I was so insufferable when I got back. I didn't study abroad, but I had the air of someone

who said I had the undue certainty of someone who did. A little eye. Here's part two. She says, I began to react to life triggers differently. The live plant foods in medicinal herbs, I fed myself, gave me a new sensitivity and access to a subtle yet powerful energy force. No, whatever.

This is what ultimately led to the birth of moon juice as I became aware that there could be nothing better for me to do with my days than share this new wealth with others. Oh no. But then if your goal on this planet is to share your knowledge and your wellness with other people, why do you charge so fucking much for it?

This is almost exactly what a reporter with marketplace asks her at one point. She doesn't interview and she's like, look the point of this isn't so that I can retire in Kauai and make up of money. The point of this is to bring it to the people. And the reporter says, right, but the juice that I just had was $14. Do you think that's bringing it to the people? Like it's like very point. Like it's the only interview that I've heard with Amanda Shontal Bacon that is kind of holds her feet to the fire of it. And it's so gentle. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. But like the idea underlying this sort of like

my whole emotional world shifted and stuff, it feels very much like the secret to me. Oh totally yeah. Right. Like any flaws in your personality, any relationship struggles you have, any trauma you might have, right? Are all a result of like something is wrong in your body? And everything can be fixed by diet too. That it's like this one relatively superficial change about my lifestyle. We'll solve all of these completely unrelated problems. Right.

It's similar to this sort of like anti-psychiatry thread of Scientology, right? Yeah. Which is not only is there like one way to fix this, but also you should sort of mistrust people who are telling you there are other solutions, right? Right. So I kind of want to dig into the Moonjuice cookbook. Oh, okay. I got this from the library. I read the whole thing. I thought it was just going to be a bunch of wacky recipes, and there's plenty of that. But it also sort of lays out the moon juice way of life. Oh, it's like the 10 moon juice commandments. Totally. And there are actually like 10 things that you're supposed to do, right? Like there's like go organic and

eat adaptogens and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of stuff. But the things that released it out to me about the moon juice cookbook were a few things. One, the number of contradictions and tensions here that she just sort of never really resolves, right? She says like, this isn't about restricting your diet, it's about additions to your diet, but also when you add those things to your diet, you shouldn't eat more than this amount of sugar. She says, this isn't about weight loss and that healthy is a different size and shape for everyone. But if you do this, it will lead to weight loss. This is like the new rhetoric around weight because now that people are finally acknowledging

the fact that fat phobia exists, there's now this move to be like, we're not telling you to lose weight, but you're going to lose weight if you do this. Right, she also says like, this is about health, it's not about beauty, I'm not telling you to look a certain way, but when you're healthy, you will have this glow. You know what I mean? Like all of this sort of stuff. Yeah.

She also says, because she doesn't believe in restriction, she's not vegan, but she doesn't eat animal products. I'm like, why don't you? Okay. Then you're probably gonna get a different thing. I'm not a Christian, but I just believe that Jesus was killed on the cross and then was resurrected three days later. But I'm not a Christian. She sort of seems to know that her customers will bristle at that kind of prescriptive stuff, but they will accept it if it's a byproduct of a loftier enterprise, right? Right.

And I think it's also worth noting like, this is the logic of weight loss, right? If you get your body right, your whole life will fall into place. What she's selling here essentially is the idea that like, you know, like she's saying, like I stopped eating wheat and I started doing juice cleanses and my whole personality changed. And I felt happy all the time.

I was, you know what I mean? Like all of these things sort of change. And it is this idea, this sort of very tempting magical thinking that if you can just address this one thing that's kind of a mechanical that don't actually have to do the messy work of fixing your relationships, you don't have to worry about uncertainty or heartbreak or sickness or any of the things that makes life uncomfortable or uncertain. That is a very insightful way that you just put it.

That the rhetoric has shifted from you need to lose weight to you need to eat a more pure diet and as a side effect, by the way, you will also lose weight. Right. But you're couching it as this lofty or goal. Like, oh, I'm becoming a better person. Oh, and by the way, I'm finally gonna have abs. Totally, but it's not superficial. And if you think it's superficial, then that's actually your stuff. Yeah, yeah, oh, my God. Yeah.

What I sort of sat with while reading the Moonjuice cookbook and like working over time to set aside my skepticism to just be like, I really do want to sort of consume this on its own terms, was that it really, it doesn't seem ill intended. Oh, yeah. This just feels like a very insulated, very wealthy white woman who does not imagine, you know, I think she thinks this has like only a net game to the world and doesn't really think about like, who could this hurt? Okay, you know, like, she doesn't think about all that stuff. And I also don't think she's like necessarily cynically profiteering off of it.

I think she's just wealthy and has always had money. It doesn't occur to her that a $14 juice is like not an option. I also think that as adults, we should all be cognizant enough of history to know that some of the worst things that have ever been done have been done with genuine good intentions. Yeah, the road to hell. Exactly. I mean, there's oftentimes, especially in the media, how we sort of give people like Gwyneth Paltrow a pass. Because it is very obvious that, like, they believe what they are saying. They think that they are helping the world, they are doing this out of genuine, like, philanthropic instincts. But, oftentimes, regardless of the intention,

the effect of their advice can be really pernicious, and at a certain point, if you are one of the people in an industry where you are giving this advice, and that is having documented pernicious, negative effects over and over and over again. At a certain point, it is negligent to not change what you are doing. Totally. I would say there has not necessarily been a lot of documented pernicious effect with Moonjuice.

That's right, I mean, it's not like Fenthan. It's not people who are not overdosing on it, I guess. Totally. It feels kind of like the wellness version of the college admissions scandal. Oh. Right, where you're like, oh, it's just like rich people do and rich people things.

Right. And it's sort of all happening in that closed world. Yeah. And the rest of us can see into it. But we can't, I'm not like affected by, I'm not negatively affected by anyone else taking moon juice or believing in it or whatever. Right.

On some level, me and you can just not buy moon juice and continue to live our lives. And it's fine. That's right. I do think it feeds rhetoric that's unhelpful, right? And is sort of feeding into a culture, like a sea change culturally that I find unhelpful. But I don't think like, I don't think Amanda Shantal Bacon,

at least I haven't come across anything that's like, I was personally harmed by moon juice. I don't want to like put her in the gulag like I have no Holy same fit. She's not sauron. So this is actually another thing about the Moonjuice cookbook that I find really interesting. She talks about like I'm not a doctor but I have studied under all of these herbalists and alternative medicine practitioners and all this sort of stuff and I want to bring the

lessons that I've learned to you. She doesn't cite the sources, right? There's no footnotes in the Moonjuice Cookbook. There's no citations. That's because they're all like QAnon Facebook groups. But like in addition to not citing her sources and not saying, hey, this came from this study at this point, she also sort of flows pretty freely back and forth between her own experience and her own worldview and these findings that she sort of says exist. And she doesn't really announce when she's changing. All right. As a reader, it becomes really difficult to pull apart what is a widely accepted scientific

claim, what is a disputed scientific claim, what is a disputed scientific claim, what is her own worldview, what is my wishful thinking as a reader that I want to believe, right? Like, it's really hard to pinpoint what is coming from where. She talks a lot about purging fat soluble toxins, but doesn't say what those toxins are.

Oh no, toxins, that's like such a red flag for me, because it's such a poorly defined term. Well, also, every healthcare provider, I know, including alternative medicine providers are all like, that's why you have a liver. So, did you make any of the recipes in the book? I did not. I thought about, there are some that look actually like really good to me. She has a recipe for cherry and black pepper jam. Oh, that actually sounds really good. Doesn't that sound so good? Yeah.

Yeah. She says it's like a low glycemic. Oh, shut up, Amanda. It's just a good jam. God. God. She's also like, as someone, so like one of my best friends is a type one diabetic. She's like, what's in it?

And I was like, oh, she puts in like agave or maple syrup or whatever. And my friend Lisa is like, cool. So I can't have that because that's still just sugar. Yeah, it's fucking sugar. I mean, it's fine to eat sweets. Like it's not white sugar. So I think there's some belief that because white sugar

is more processed, right, than it is less natural and therefore worse. Which is not true, by the way, we will do an entire episode on this eventually. It's just not true. It's just not true. Like your body receives honey and maple syrup and agave and all of that stuff, ash sugar.

If you look at the labels of all of those things, they just are sugar. Yeah, it's fine to eat something that's bad for you sometimes. Like brownies are fucking good. Eat a brownie, it's fine. Totally. There's sort of this presumption that there is knowledge that we are not tapping into

from other cultures, which is also like totally true. Yes, sure. And also it feels equally unhelpful to be like none of our stuff is the answer. Yeah, exactly. And all of this other stuff is the answer. And to exoticize foreign cultures of like,

they have like hidden secrets that we don't have access to. When actually we need to have processes to evaluate the truth of health claims. Like whether it's coming from like, Confucian medicine or like a straight up lab in New Jersey, we need to have the same processes to determine, okay, we're going to test this concept and then we're going to decide if it's beneficial or not. That's right. But on top of that, there's also like really weird race dynamics happening here.

Oh no. She is borrowing ingredients from centuries-old traditions of ayurveda, of herbalism, of traditional Chinese medicine. Yeah. And that it is talked about in such broad terms, right? She talks about Ayurveda only in the terms of being like, this is an herb that's used in Ayurveda, or this is an ingredient that's used in Chinese medicine. That's about it, right? Yeah.

I talked to one Chinese medicine practitioner for this piece who described it as being sort of the trappings of Chinese medicine without any of the who described it as being sort of the trappings of Chinese medicine without any of the logic or treatment of it. A big part of Chinese medicine is there is a whole paradigm about how energy flows through your body, all of these sort of gears that get turned, right? And she's just sort of pulling out one of those gears, right? And going, this is the thing. We gotta eat this one thing, right? Similarly, Ayurveda has deep roots in Hinduism and diet is one small part of it.

But the way that Amanda Shantal Bacon is presenting it, she's presenting it as her thing as a white woman. She sort of talks about her teachers, right? In broad terms, but she never names those people, she's not lifting up those people. She's just personally profiting as a white woman from sort of cherry picking parts of Eastern medicine to sell at really high prices, right?

Like in very concrete terms, that is what's happening. Right, you're just juicing carrots. It's fine. She's using it as like a marketing thing. I mean, I think so much of this sort of LA white people influencer thing, drawing upon these other medical traditions. So much of it feels like a shield to me. You're like, oh, eat bee pollen.

It's really good for you. And someone says, well, there's really no studies to back that up at all. And you're like, it's Chinese. Right. That's not really a defense of anything. And it's not clear for you. And someone says, well, there's really no studies to back that up at all. And you're like, it's Chinese. That's not really a defense of anything. And it's not clear that it is Chinese. And you're taking that out of context. Like, it just feels like a way of deflecting criticism

of being like, oh, it's from Eastern quote unquote, Eastern medicine, which like, which century you're talking about, which country are we talking about? You know, it's never quite specific. If we're being honest, the people who are part of that conversation about is this or is this not legit or overwhelmingly white people. So it becomes a way for one white person to invoke race and freak out the other white person.

Part of that conversation is absolutely no one knows what they're talking about. And it also erases contemporary Chinese medicine, right? It's sort of, again, taking ownership away from the communities that are still practicing this, and talking about it as some sort of, like, magical, historical thing. I think any theory that depends on this idea that one society at a particular time

in a particular place had it figured out, I just think that, as a meta-analysis of world history, is just never going to be correct, because at any time in history, in any societal, anything, there's going to be pros and cons. Like, ancient Chinese, anything, those societies had problems, just like our society has problems. There's no such thing as like, a good society in some unremembered past. Like that doesn't exist. Just to be really clear, like none of this is actually about Chinese medicine.

None of this is actually about Ayurveda. Good point. All of this is about, right, like none of this. None of this, like there is no primer in the Moonju's cookbook on Ayurveda and what it does and how it works. There is no primer on Chinese medicine and she and how energy flows through the body and all of that kind of stuff.

Really, none of that is covered. She essentially is just sort of paying lip service to it and you're right, like using it as a marketing tool, right? This is all very much shaped by the sort of white gaze. This is a cookbook that is produced by a wealthy white person for other wealthy white people. Yeah. Right. Who are not going to, like I say, who are not going to go to an herbalist in an immigrant

community, but they will buy the same products when they are repackaged in sort of minimalist jars sold to them by like a young, conventionally beautiful white woman in a storefront in Venice Beach. Yeah. So she has a recipe for something called a Yam Julius. Yam Julius? Is that like a sweet potato juice? She says this is an orange Julius, but made with Yam, where you are juicing raw Yams.

Okay. And adding ground cinnamon and some other things. And she's like, it tastes just like an orange Julius, but it's cinnamon, and some other things. And she's like, it tastes just like an orange Julius, but it's made with yam juice. Sure. She says she loves lemonade, but it's too sugary. So instead, she makes beet aid. Beats are also really sugary.

Most of the sugar that we get is actually processed from beet, not from sugarcane. She also has a recipe for something. I already don't want to say, I put it in, because I was like, this is hilarious. And now I'm like, I don't want to say it. It's called hot sex milk. You, what the fuck is in it? We went from sex dust to hot sex milk and I like don't want either one.

So what is in hot sex milk is pumpkin seed milk, mocha powder, pumpkin seed milk, mocha powder, hoshu wu, coconut oil, cacao powder, shisan draberries, cayenne, and bee pollen. I mean, sure, I don't know. I feel like some of this stuff is just, if something is kind of unpleasant, then it must be good for you. Totally, totally.

I will say, she also includes the mission ofjuice. Ooh, ooh, love missions. I fucking love rich lady products with missions. Just everything about this quote, this is maybe my favorite Moonjuice quote. Ooh, tell me. People always ask if I knew Moonjuice would be so successful. And to be honest, I did. There's a cosmic calling and a powerful movement here to push us forward as a race. Oh my God. A big part of the movement is caring for our bodies as well as for the health of our

planet. Other folks, anytime we make a move towards supporting or joining that mission, we tune into the flow of other worldly success and abundance. That's what Moon Juice really is, not just a product or a place, but rather a healing force and aetheric potion and a cosmic beacon for the evolutionary movement of seeking beauty, happiness, and longevity. She got one of the sets of refrigerator magnets with words on them. I just like put them in an order of just like transcend them in an order. I was just like transcendent, harmony, planet.

She got two sheets that just say cosmic. Yeah. I mean, she genuinely seems to be pretty okay with people having fun at her expense. Okay. She's sort of like, ah, I see that as an entry point. Oh gosh, she's gonna listen to this and like tweet it out with like a winky face, isn't she?

I don't know what's gonna happen. There's actually a great quote from another New York Times piece called How Amanda Shantal Bacon perfected the celebrity wellness business. Nice. So good job. The quote from that piece is this,

what Goop and accolades like Moonju's cell is the notion that it's not only excusable, but worthy for a person to spend hours a day focused on her tiniest mood shifts, food choices, beauty rituals, exercise habits, bathing routines, and sleep schedule. What they sell is self-absorption as the ultimate luxury product. Oh, that's good. The other thing that I would say about her proof positive that Moonjuice has a very, very

wealthy client base is that they actually say that many of their products, especially their sleep-related products, their sales have increased up to 70% during the COVID pandemic. I mean, that's, that's just because everyone in America is suffering from fucking clinical anxiety right now. And none of us can fucking sleep.

I haven't slept since March, man. Nobody's sleeping. Totally. Nobody's sleeping, but also, who has $70 to drop on a magnesium supplement or whatever that says that it will help you sleep. Got magnesium, really? There's this actually called magnesium ohm. That's actually pretty good, though. I know, I know, I know. You know, the marketing is very good.

All fucking better it is. And that's, I think the more that I sort of dug in on Moonjuice the more I was like, oh, it is marketing. Oh yeah, I mean, most of our buying decisions, like the bottle of wine that you buy at the store is based on like the font and the graphic design on the label. Like none of us know enough about most of the products we buy to make any kind of informed judgment beyond this label looks attractive to me. She really knows what she can sell and how she can sell it and she really knows that ultimately she is sort of the product. Yeah. Anyway, that's

Moonjuice. That's Moonjuice. Now I know what it is. Now I wish I could go back and not know that anymore. And you like me can get drunk at parties and yell at people about. If I ever go to a party again, yes, that is what I will do. Yes, totally. Don't go to parties right now, but sometime in the mystical future. I also think we somehow skipped over the fact that her entire origin story is based on her coughing in a store and a random man coming up to her and diagnosing her with an illness. I still think the central advice to come out of this episode is don't do that. A, don't go up to small children and stores and diagnose them with anything.

And B, probably don't accept the diagnosis of random men who hear you coughing and come up to you and take your pulse. Right, it's like a it's a medical meet-cute. Yeah. It's just the whole thing is just odd and I really I sort of struggle with a lot of elements of this, right? Where I'm like, yeah it's of course, do your thing. Yeah. Go forth God bless. Again, I'm not personally harmed by other people using bring dust. And at the same time, this really is like feeding into weird race dynamics that happen in the wellness community. It really is an encapsulation of the sort of strange attitude toward disability in wellness spaces. It really plays into classism. It's just a really fascinating little encapsulation

of all that stuff, I think. Yes, it's dark and weird and problematic, but if you like your sex milk, you can keep it. This has been maintenance phase. Thank you.