The Wellness Salad Bar: Why Skipping the Hard Work is a Public Health Risk

Much of this book revolves around the idea that wellness trends and practices are often treated like a salad bar; you don’t have to take everything on offer, only the stuff you like. This is the heart of the “spiritual but not religious” culture that surrounds many wellness practices, products, and people. Bucar attempts to show us what we’re missing when we treat these practices, many of them taken from other cultures, and divorce them from their original contexts. While the book is specifically focused on the religious context, it’s impossible to divorce it from the cultural context. 

I came to this book very skeptical; I don't identify as a spiritual person. Therefore, when Bucar states that the book is a guide for “walking the path between dogmatic religion and bland spirituality by restoring religion to a spiritual practice and then applying it to life,” I thought I wasn't the audience for this book. However, as I continued reading, I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about the book's central idea: that religions provide resources for making life better and fuller. Hence, they might also make wellness more meaningful and effective. While I look at wellness through a lens of data and evidence, Bucar looks through a lens of religious tradition—and surprisingly, we both end up at the same destination: a demand for intentionality.

Steel-Manning

Steelmanning is the practice of fully understanding an opposing position and reconstructing it in its strongest, most persuasive form before responding. It contrasts with strawmanning, which misrepresents an argument in its weakest form to make it easier to attack.

Steel-manning the religious context is a central pillar of Bucar’s exploration. She isn't looking at fundamentalism or scandals; instead, she distills these traditions into their most sophisticated philosophies. Through this lens, religion becomes a masterclass in intentionality, self-reflection, and ethical living. As a researcher, I appreciate this intellectual charity—it’s a refreshing break from the "straw-man" arguments that dominate the internet. However, there is a significant "blind spot" in this approach: in the real world, the "best-case scenario" of a philosophy rarely survives its encounter with a crowd.

This is most apparent when we discuss the sense of community. Bucar argues that religion offers a powerful blueprint for communal belonging—a resource modern wellness desperately tries to replicate. But community isn’t a neutral tool; its value depends entirely on what it is built around. When a community is built on "vibes" rather than evidence, the results are often destructive. 

We see this in the anti-vaccine movement, where a shared sense of belonging and "wellness sovereignty", often with religious claims, has created a community whose primary output is public health risk. We are all now subject to the consequences of a community that prioritized the feeling of connection over biological reality.

Bucar repeatedly asks us to interrogate what we are truly seeking in these wellness spaces. When we jump from one trend to the next, we aren't just seeking health; we are searching for a sense of purpose we haven't found elsewhere. The danger is that, if left unexamined, this search leads to a lack of critical engagement. It has actively crept into the clinic, where the hunger for 'meaning' is being rebranded as 'holistic medicine,' often at the expense of evidence-based care. 

Mindfulness

We’re seeing a growing appetite for medicine to be more “holistic” and to address the “whole person,” including their cultural, spiritual, and religious beliefs. Bucar’s prime example is mindfulness.

There is no agreed-upon definition of mindfulness, at least not in the medical literature. By medicalizing mindfulness, we have lost its true purpose. While there is a hunger for doctors to provide holistic care, when we ask a primary care provider to provide spiritual grounding through a 10-minute mindfulness app recommendation, we are offloading deep internal work onto a system already strained by 'quick-fix' expectations.

“Having clarity about the purpose of mindful meditation is important, as is making sure that purpose is consistent with who you are and who you want to be. What is the purpose you are working toward and might it be more complex than reducing your cortisol levels?”

But if this is the case, should mindfulness even be considered in a medical context? While she champions the idea that religion is important to mindfulness, it seems she is really asking for people to be more engaged and thoughtful, and to practice self-reflection, rather than simply diving into mindfulness with the expectation that it will reduce stress. 

Converging on Intentionality 

It turns out that while we use different vocabularies, we are asking the same questions. Bucar uses the lens of religious tradition to demand the same critical thinking that I demand through the lens of science.

This realization made me see a fellow traveler in her, despite my initial skepticism.

“And yet I’m always suspicious when spirituality is presented as a wellness shortcut, which is a key element of marketing: healing through good vibes, without the work of understanding what that means.”

Ultimately, Bucar asks us to be more thoughtful about our wellness practices. While she frames it through a religious lens, it's not unlike what we do at ASCH. She wants us to approach our wellness with more intentionality and less “quick-fix” energy. She wants us to consider what we do, why we do it, and how we do it, from the food we eat to the exercise routines we establish. Similarly, I want everyone to be more thoughtful about what they are seeking, because if they know that, they might be less likely to fall for grifts. Understanding our motivations, not just those of others, is important when navigating the world of health and wellness. 

Bucar’s plea for intentionality may be framed through a religious lens, but its value is purely practical: by understanding our motivations, we become far less likely to be sold a shortcut that leads nowhere.