The final 'Apple Cider Vinegar' mystery is:

WTF IS WRONG WITH ANTIPODEANS AND THEIR WELLNESS OBSESSION?

The first time I met someone with dubious alternative health information it was a tall and handsome man from New Zealand. I’d noticed him earlier in the day, at a party, where he glowed with physical fitness and what I later understood to be poor mental health. He arrived on a first date at my apartment, bearing Ezekiel bread and requesting I change the Breeders CD to “world music”. Raised on Britpop, I was like, what does that mean, “world music”? The world is large, and the countries largely incompatible with each other. As Patricia Lockwood wrote in her wonderful memoir ‘Priestdaddy’: “‘Imagine’ by John Lennon is my Mother’s enemy in song form. Imagine there’s no countries? Then we’d be France!” On our first trip away together, I developed tonsillitis and my newly anointed lover insisted I should gargle with pure hydrogen peroxide. It did burn off the white pustules on my throat - and also made my tonsils bleed.

I thought of him for the first time in a long while because, like everyone else I know with access to television, I recently tore through the Netflix wellness scam miniseries ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’. There are spoilers ahead, so turn away as if the next paragraph were a beet and turmeric juice that had been left unrefrigerated on a Brisbane beach. ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ is the true story of Australian wellness influencer, Belle Gibson, who amassed a massive following on instagram by claiming she had cured her brain cancer through healthy eating. She spun her audience into a hugely successful app, pausing to win a woman of the year award from Cosmopolitan. Before being exposed by journalists at The Age newspaper for not having cancer, and for having fleeced the fundraising account she’d set up on behalf of a child who did have brain cancer.

In a parallel story, Belle’s mentor who she’d worshipped and emulated becomes her arch rival. This woman self treats her (real) lymphoma with coffee enemas and juicing. When her mother is also diagnosed with cancer, she insists on treating her with the same “protocol”. At this point the term ‘Protocol’ is so entrenched in and emblematic of Alternative Health culture, it would be an excellent name for one of those nasty outback Horror films Australians make so well. If they’d only made it a few years earlier, Elle MacPherson could have walked the red carpet on the arm of the world’s leading struck off Anti-vaxxer.

Mother and daughter are locked in a folie a deux and the father/husband has to look on as both die well before the projected life span for the disease if they’d done chemo. The series is superb. It is humane. It extends a curiosity and empathy to all the characters, even the “evil” one. I understood where the Mother and daughter had gotten themselves down the rabbit hole because I lived in L.A for ten years - I tried colloidal silver and did colonics and paid for acupuncture on my cat (result: yay acupuncture, an animal can’t fake a response, and it did cure his asthma).

I’ve met a lot of wonderful Australians and New Zealanders, some of them are my friends, some are even my extended family. But I also met a bunch of orthorexic actresses and models who had not a kind word to say about anybody except Buddha. Living in L.A as I did for a decade, isn’t living in Australia, it isn’t being cut off in a bubble from the rest of the world with no external feedback. My friends and I never got into competitive healthy living, never harnessed wellness as a source of superiority. We ate chocolate covered pretzels in the parking lot of Trader Joes after a hike as often as we stopped for a ginger shot. The colloidal silver and acupuncture never precluded my use of western medicine whenever I needed it.