“You’re Buying a Haribo With a Health Claim”: The Wellness Industry’s Biggest Myths
Main image – Elle Sera
Walk into almost any pharmacy or health food shop right now and you’ll find shelves lined with brightly coloured gummies, electrolyte powders and collagen supplements, each promising to help you sleep better, think more clearly or feel healthier.
According to Elissa Corrigan, founder of women’s wellness brand Elle Sera, far too many of them are making promises they simply can’t keep. “The gummy vitamin trend needs to end,” she tells me, without a hint of hesitation. “I’ll say it plainly: you cannot manufacture a gummy vitamin without applying heat, and heat destroys the very vitamins you’re supposedly delivering. You are buying a Haribo with a health claim on the packet and a significant markup.”
Image – Elle Sera
It isn’t the sort of thing you usually hear from someone inside the supplement industry. Yet that’s precisely what makes Corrigan so interesting. Here, I talk to her about collagen overpromising, female libido and why she thinks the wellness industry has an evidence problem.
Wellness has an evidence problem
Before Elle Sera existed, Corrigan wasn’t searching for a gap in the supplement market. She was trying to solve a specific issue.
“I started with a very specific frustration and a Facebook message,” she explains. “I kept seeing ads everywhere for products addressing men’s sexual health, on the tube, on billboards, completely normalised and I couldn’t find a single thing that took women’s desire seriously. Not in a clinical way, not in a wellness way. Nothing.”
Then came a message from a woman asking what she could do about her libido. “Women were telling me they wanted to feel like themselves again, that sex had just quietly fallen off the agenda, not because they didn’t care, but because they were exhausted, hormonally all over the place, running on empty. And nobody was talking about it without either medicalising it or making it weird.”
The more she researched, the more she realised libido itself was rarely the root cause. “What I found when I went looking was that libido was never really one thing, it was a symptom of a whole system being under pressure. Hormones, stress, sleep, energy. You fix the system, the desire often follows.”
That philosophy became the foundation of Elle Sera. “Not a flash-in-the-pan female Viagra, but a serious attempt to address what’s actually underneath it.”
Women’s health still has a way to go
Women’s health has undoubtedly become a much bigger conversation since then, but Corrigan isn’t convinced the industry has necessarily improved as much as people think.
“The market has caught up somewhat, women’s health is having a moment. But most of what’s arrived is still surface level. Pretty packaging, vague claims, no real science. So yes, it’s still getting it wrong. Loudly.”
Worse than that though, Corrigan says that wellness claims in general are still often pretty dubious. “The supplement industry has an evidence problem that most brands in it would rather not discuss,” she says. “Underdosed formulas, borrowed science, claims that don’t survive scrutiny. It’s rampant.”
In contrast, her brand tries to overengineer. “Our collagen – LTC Liposomal Tripeptide Collagen – took four years to develop in a university laboratory with Innovate UK backing. We overspent on it significantly.”
Image – Elle Sera
“The dosages across our range are based on therapeutic levels from independent human trials, not on what’s cheapest to put in a capsule.
And, as she explains, “if it wasn’t delivering what we claimed, I’d pull it immediately.”
“Read the label”
If Corrigan had one piece of advice for anyone buying supplements, it’s this; read the label.
In fact, she tells me that two simple questions are enough to separate many good products from bad ones. “Ask what happens to the active ingredients during manufacturing. Ask what dose you’re actually getting.”
She claims those questions would actually, “eliminate about 80% of what’s currently on the market.”
Alongside gummy vitamins, Corrigan tells me that electrolyte drinks are another trend she believes has drifted away from evidence and towards clever marketing.
Image – Elle Sera
“The everyday electrolyte drink trend assumes a baseline of physical exertion that most people simply don’t have. Unless you’re running marathons or training at serious intensity, you do not need that level of sodium daily. You’re not replenishing anything, you’re just consuming it.”
“The wellness industry has become very good at selling solutions to problems it first convinced you that you had.”
Wellness is growing up
If Corrigan is optimistic about one thing though, it’s the direction consumers themselves are moving. For years, supplements were often sold with broad promises and one-size-fits-all messaging. She believes those days are beginning to disappear.
“Longevity is the word everyone’s using right now, and most brands are using it to mean ‘anti-ageing with better PR.’ What I think it actually means – or should mean – is a more serious, more personalised approach to how women support their health across their entire lifespan, not just when something goes wrong.”
Just as importantly, she thinks shoppers themselves are becoming far more discerning. “Women are getting more sophisticated. They’re asking better questions, reading labels, demanding evidence.”
For brands unwilling to evolve, she believes the outlook is fairly straightforward. “The brands that survive the next five years will be the ones that can actually answer those questions rather than hiding behind beautiful packaging and vague claims.”
“The ones that can’t will get found out. That’s not a prediction – it’s already happening.”
The takeaway
Ask most wellness founders and they’ll tell you that the supplements industry is still something of a wild west. Which is why I always love sitting down with founders like Corrigan; I never leave without learning some new tip for my never-ending quest to find that one supplement that does it all,
In her words, read the label, question the dosage, and finally – be wary of products that sound too good to be true.
That’s the biggest myth Corrigan challenges. Better health isn’t about buying more supplements. It’s about becoming a better-informed consumer.
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