Millennials are embracing good nutrition and herbal remedies as components of good health and wellness
Millennials can access any information they want at any time, on their smartphones. As social media expert, Malorie Lucich, says, “People share, read and engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.” This situation can also be extended to healthcare. Unlike earlier generations, people don’t have a wait to visit the doctor’s office to find out what ails them. Browsing the web gives them an idea, not only of what is wrong, but details of possible remedies.
Just as Millennials traded in-your-face advertising in favor of more honest and transparent discussions on social media with trusted friends and like-minded individuals, their views on healthcare are also uncompromisingly independent, as they refuse to blindly follow the traditional healthcare system.
The world’s leading consumer collaboration industry, Communispace found in a recent study, that Millennials equate wellness with health, and therefore take a broader view of what constitutes health. For instance, 37% of Millennials believe the US currently has “terrible” or “poor” healthcare service, and 49% of them blame the government for the situation. The study also concludes that two-thirds of Millennials believe insurance companies wield too much power and that greed for profit more often than not, gets the better of them. Pharmaceutical companies are viewed as deceitful and greedy, and ranked as Millennials’ least credible information source.
Therefore, while mistrusting all advice given by the traditional healthcare industry, Millennials are boldly taken their health in their own hands. They are connecting with their personal networks, their specialized niche contacts, and a multitude of health-based products like CBD products, in managing their health. It is a spurning of the traditional system and embracing alternative healthcare as a viable option to health and wellness. Mike Adams, also known as the Health Ranger, and a passionate advocate of alternative medicine, says, “By staying healthy, you deny the pharmaceutical industry the profit it expects to harvest from your disease. Now you know why they seek to destroy natural medicine and nutritional knowledge.”
So, how do Millennials propose to stay healthy?
Just as Hippocrates once said, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food,” in modern times, American biochemist, Linus Pauling, said, “Good nutrition will prevent 95% of all disease.” Therefore, Millennials are searching online for the best kinds of food to put in their bodies, and seeking out organic, natural and ethnic products in specialty food stores. In fact, they may well propel the natural food industry into the next generation. They appear to abide by the words of entrepreneurial expert Famoosh Brock who said, “Juices of fruits and vegetables are pure gifts from Mother Nature and the most natural way to heal your body and make yourself whole again.”
With online search making them wiser on how to nourish themselves, Millennials appear to be making healthier dietary and lifestyle choices than earlier generations. A recent study by the marketing research firm, the Halo Group, found that more than 50% of people born after 1978, consult nutritionists, dieticians, family and friends or a personal trainer, about what food choices to make. The report added, “Millennials are turning to the Internet to educate themselves on functional ingredients and how to use them.” For instance, Google search revealed 3.9 million video views of a clip showing the use of healthy ingredients like turmeric, apple cider vinegar, and avocado oil. American celebrity chef, Bobby Flay, said, “Go vegetable heavy. Reverse the psychology of your plate by making meat the side dish and vegetables the main course.”
There is also the fact that, for Millennials, healthcare spills onto different areas of their lives. It is not compartmentalized like a doctor visit or taking medication. Healthcare exists everywhere, while at home eating dinner with family, having coffee with a co-worker, being at a yoga class, or searching for organic produce at the farmer’s market. In other words, there are no borders to healthcare.
And when it comes to treating a malady, Millennials have utmost faith in herbal remedies. This is what the traditional healthcare system has to come to grips with. Just as Hippocrates used willow leaves to treat headaches and muscle pain, and in the early 1800s, scientists found the active ingredient in willow leaves to be aspirin, so, Millennials seek herbal remedies instead of strong pharmaceuticals. Yale neurologist, Steven Novella, said, ““Herbal remedies are not really alternative. “They have been part of scientific medicine for decades, if not centuries. Herbs are drugs, and they can be studied as drugs.”
Thus, to call herbal remedies “alternative medicine” may not really be accurate. If a therapy works, then it is good medicine. If it does not work, it cannot be an alternative. Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Office for Science and Society at Montreal’s McGill University, Joe Schwarcz, said, “There’s a name for alternative medicines that work. It’s called medicine.”