HI THERE,

We don’t have to tell you that exercising, nutrition and relaxing are the key elements to feel comfortable in your own skin. Nutrition becomes even more important if you have specific goals for yourself. A couple of years ago it came to our attention that there were no healthy products on the market which supported woman with a healthy lifestyle. Lots of protein products contain unnatural additives, taste terrible and looked as if they were designed for Arny (Arnold Schwarzenegger) himself! Not something that we – and lots of woman with us – were happy about. Thats [sic] why we launched FITSHE in 2015.

Lots of women believe that consuming protein will lead to unwanted muscle mass development or weight gain. Luckily, you know better nowadays! It is imperative to feed your body what it needs! And it is with protein that you support your body in the after-effects of your training. If you lead a busy and active life, protein becomes essential. Additionally, protein is extremely satiating. If you give your body what it needs, you will notice it will ask much less of you.

This is the text that we found on the “about” section of the website of Caroline Glasbergen (FITSHE 2018), one of the fitness enthusiasts we interviewed in the Netherlands. She didn’t just consume fitness products: she also created and sold a new protein product, FITSHE, which the website describes as follows:

Your life is full enough as it is:

– Your career

– Social events

– Family

– Constantly developing yourself

– And finding the time to exercise regularly, on top of everything!

We demand a lot from our bodies and expect to always be able to rely on it. But have you ever taken the time to contemplate what you give your body back?

After an image of a greenish substance, looking like a protein shake, the text reads, “PUSH PLAY,” under which it declares:

We are convinced that an active lifestyle does not mean to limit yourself. In other words, while we truly believe stepping outside of your comfort zone and challenging yourself is crucial for your personal growth, we think being kind to yourself and blow of [sic] some steam every once in a while is as important to become the best version of yourself. So do both: push AND play.

In their ethnography of food science, Errington et al. (2013) report on a meeting with a young British professional named Deborah Maxwell, a similarly entrepreneurial peer of Glasbergen’s. Maxwell had developed Big Shotz, an “attractively packaged supplement-loaded fruit smoothie” (Errington et al. 2013, p. 108) which she designed for daily use. She told the anthropologists that in developing Big Shotz (GroceryTrader 2008), she targeted the young and healthy:

college graduates, in their twenties, generally fit, employed, on the run, and essentially responsible just for themselves. Such people likely eat a croissant for breakfast, a pizza or kebab for lunch, and then go out with friends for wine and a meal in the evening. They know that they are failing, and they never or only rarely have an optimal, perfect day. They can easily afford the daily cost of 1.50 £ for the convenience of Big Shotz, grabbed on the way to work. (Errington et al. 2013, pp. 110–111)

Maxwell had big ambitions for her concept, envisioning multiple types of Big Shotz, including Sport Shotz, Sleep Shotz, and Sex Shotz (Errington et al. 2013).

Glasbergen and Maxwell had developed supplements that consumers could use as tools to keep up with the hard work of living up to their aspirations and surviving in the urban environments in which they lived. Indeed, the demands of service sector labor, the strain of night work, the excitement of weekend raves, growing concerns about environmental toxins, and the endless circulation of images of lean and muscular bodies all fuel the demand for these types of products.

Supplementing dates back to the early twentieth century, when chemists learned they could isolate vitamins from organic materials and medical researchers started experimenting with vitamins to treat nutritional deficiencies, such as scurvy, a disease that was first noted on trade ships in the seventeenth century. Sailors spent months on boats, without fresh fruit and vegetables, which caused anemia, bleeding, and often death (Kodicek and Young 1969). After World War II, the emerging food industry incorporated vitamins into staple foods such as margarine, milk, and flour, no longer to treat deficiencies, but to boost the health of entire populations. As engineered food production evolved, manufacturers started adding vitamins to their products to boost their health value. Today, breakfast cereals that are oversaturated with sugar are advertised as being a good source of vitamin D, and reconstituted orange juice is touted as a source of vitamin C.

But supplements have only become a mass global commodity in the past 30 or so years, the period in which our interlocutors grew up. Price (2016) writes that a key factor in the growth of the supplements industry was the regulatory success of US Senator Hatch (Republican from the state of Utah), who designed the 1994 Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act, which eased the regulation of supplements.1 Under this act, all supplements are assumed to be safe, unless the US Food and Drug Administration detects evidence of harm, which usually means after many consumers have been exposed to the product. This lax regulation led to a more than tenfold increase in the number of supplements on the market in the United States, from 4000 in 1994 to 55,000 in 2012 (Cohen 2016).

But before this regulation came into effect, the new subdiscipline of nutritional science called “functional foods” was founded in the 1970s and 80s (Eussen et al. 2011), to examine the health benefits of manufactured foods and food supplements. The evidence that is produced within this discipline is used by manufacturers to inform their products with health claims. Apart from protein shakes that promise to “give something back” to our bodies, we can buy probiotic yoghurt to improve gut health, Omega 3s to have smooth skin and healthy veins, and magnesium for better sleep. While popular culture has embraced these opportunities for enhancement, some scholars are more critical. Among them, Scrinis (2013) raises concerns about the trend, which he characterizes as thus: “Food corporations have colonized the nutriscape, flooding the food supply with nutritionally engineered products and marketing claims and accentuating the nutritional anxieties and nutritional needs of consumers” (p. 8).

Public health experts do not advise the regular consumption of vitamins and supplements for lack of evidence on their health effects, pointing out that some studies even suggest that such effects may be negative, including increased rates of heart disease and cancer among people who take vitamins (Offit 2013). For example, researchers from the University of Copenhagen reviewed 14 randomized trials involving 17,000 healthy volunteers who were using vitamins A, C, and E to prevent intestinal cancer. The researchers concluded that the trials did not provide evidence that the vitamins protect against intestinal cancer; on the contrary, they seemed to increase overall mortality: death rates were 6% higher in the group taking vitamins (Lonn 2005).

Some medical researchers, moreover, share concerns about the unknown health risks of elevated amounts of specific functional ingredients in diets and the possibility of interactions with medicines. In pharmacies, possible drug interactions are checked for, but pharmacists usually do not know all the supplements their clients are taking (Eussen et al. 2011). There are also regular reports of food supplements being mixed with synthetic drugs to enhance their efficacy (Rocha et al. 2016).

Given the possible harms of supplements, it is surprising that drug regulatory authorities do not require medical evidence of their safety before allowing the products on the market. In the European Union, the United States, Indonesia, and the Philippines, supplements are legally considered to be food items, which means that they cannot be marketed for the treatment of disease. But, by claiming they promote gut health, better sleep, and muscle development, manufacturers can circumvent this limitation.

Having grown up in the supplements era, our interlocutors had been socialized into taking vitamins. Their mothers likely gave them multivitamins to augment their meals, and taking supplements had become part of their habitus (Bourdieu 1992), defined as the system of predispositions, which include perceptions about the need for as well as acts of consuming these commodities. Living in urban environments, our interlocutors were anxious about the combined effects of pollution, stress, and the lack of nutrients in their fast food diets of noodles, burgers, and pizzas. They used vitamins and supplements as protective shields to ward off negative environmental influences and lifestyles, and as insurance for future health. Supplements and vitamins were one part of their general health practices, alongside exercise, sleep, and good food. The fact that vitamins and food supplements appear to be natural made them even more attractive to our interlocutors. What harm could a food supplement have? Surely, they reasoned, there’s nothing wrong with adding some nutrients to your daily routine.

The focused ethnographies presented in this chapter show how our interlocutors embraced vitamins and foods supplements to stay healthy and to confront the challenges of their busy lives. And it makes clear that, as the vignette at the beginning of this chapter suggests, young people also participated in selling and making of such products. What do young people hope to achieve when turning to supplements and vitamin-fortified products? And what can we learn about their lives by examining their supplementing practices? The chapter illustrates how in “doing” chemicals, young people are more than just consumers. Also involved in the selling and creating of supplements, they are co-producers of an urban way of being in the world in which supplementing has become a normal part of everyday life.

In this chapter, we zoom in on several of our fieldwork sites where we observed supplementing. We start in Puerto Princesa, the Philippines, where Gideon Lasco observed mothers giving their sons a popular multivitamin to help them grow. These vitamins were also used by young people who felt that, in a culture that idolizes height, they could still grow taller. In the same town, we found young professionals using expensive multivitamins for stamina, while also distributing them through multilevel marketing .

We then shift our attention to the use of supplements in fitness clubs . Amanda Kalangit studied supplementing among young women in Manado, Indonesia, who worked out in gyms to achieve the ideal lean and muscular body. Then, we examine the marketing of supplements in the Netherlands, including a product called FITSHE, marketed to women. In the conclusion we consider the core questions of this chapter: Why were young people seduced into using supplements, and why did they make and distribute them? What do these engagements with supplements tell us about what is at stake in their lives?

Hight Is Might

Enter any pharmacy in the Philippines and you will appreciate the popularity of Cherifer, a multivitamin that figures prominently on the shelves, usually placed behind or close to the cashier. Cherifer is offered in various forms: syrups for children and tablets for teenagers. Jane, a 24-year-old pharmacy assistant, explained to us that Cherifer was usually bought when salaries were paid out.

Lasco (2017), one of our ethnographers, reports:

Vitamins are seen as a potent way of making children grow taller. In particular, “growth supplements” like Cherifer, with their promise of “reaching your growth potential” and “tangkad-sagad” (height to the fullest) have captured the imagination of parents and children alike. (p. 71)

Lasco, a community health physician, became aware of the importance of vitamins in child-rearing when he observed that most of the questions he received in his practice revolved around them. Mothers didn’t ask questions about food, but they did ask advice on Cherifer.

In one of Puerto Princesa’s pharmacies, Lasco met Ellen, who regularly bought Cherifer for her children. Costing US $0.43 per tablet, she pays US $13 for Cherifer tablets for her 19-year-old son, and US $9 for the bottles of Cherifer syrup for her younger son. When Lasco presented his calculations to Ellen, she justified it as an “investment” and repeated the advertising slogan of Star Margarine from her own youth: “Iba na ang matangkad” (it’s really different if you are tall). She explained that she and her husband’s short stature was a liability to her sons, and that they might have a hard time finding a job, as many come with height requirements (Lasco 2017).

Being tall is not a trivial aspiration in the Philippines. Job advertisements often list height requirements, including those for military service. The Navy and the Coast Guard both demand a height of 5’ (152 cm); hotels and restaurants often require men to be at least 5’7” (170 cm) tall and women to be at least 5’3” (160 cm). Surprisingly, height requirements also exist for caregiving and pharmacy assistant jobs.

The following job advertisement for a food attendant is typical:

High school or college graduate

With or without experience

With pleasing personality, neat looking, and well-groomed

Must be of good moral character, hardworking, fast

Good communication skills

Willing to learn and be trained

Must have basic knowledge in banqueting or in food functions service

Male or female, 18-26 years old

At least 5’3” (female), 5’7” (male)2

Such requirements can be traced to American colonization, in the first half of the twentieth century, when standards of height were introduced (see Table 7.1).

Table 7.1 Salaries and physical requirements of selected civil service positions
Full size table

Note how height (along with English-language skills for prison guards) was related to salary. The taller you were the more you could earn. Candidates who were 5’2” (157 cm) could earn $180–240 annually, while candidates who were 5’6” (168 cm) tall or more could earn up to $900, which is substantially more.

The manufacturer claims that Cherifer helps children grow taller due to what it calls the “Chlorella Growth Factor.” This efficacy is backed up by highly seductive advertising campaigns, including young boys playing basketball, and banners that claim “Height is might” (see Fig. 7.1). Cherifer is endorsed by Kobe Paras, a popular Filipino basketball player, who plays in the team of Cathedral High School in Los Angeles. His mother, a former actress, is an American citizen, so he is too.

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

(Source Photo taken by Gideon Lasco, July 2017, the Philippines)

Cherifer is endorsed by basketball players

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The advertisement in Fig. 7.1 shows Paras’s father, himself a basketball legend of the 1990s, with his hand above his son’s head, showing his “potential” to viewers. Television commercials of Paras and his father use the slogan “Tangkad sagad” (as tall as can be), implying that with Cherifer, one’s genetic potential can be achieved. On Katipunan Avenue, the road to three of Manila’s biggest universities, a very large image of Paras appears on a billboard along with the words “Take your potential to new heights.” A clarification in much smaller print reads: “Achievable with adequate sleep, proper diet, and avoidance of drinking and smoking” (Lasco 2017).

In Puerto Princesa, a teacher at the local State University told Lasco that her seven-year-old demanded that she buys Cherifer for him, after seeing a TV commercial. One of our colleagues from the University of the Philippines in Manila had the same experience. His son, who was quite short for his age, wanted to try Cherifer, despite his father’s explanation that it was not likely to work. When we spoke with high school students in Puerto Princesa, Lizette (19, 4’9”) recalled buying and drinking Cherifer with classmates who considered also themselves too short. During our research in Puerto Princesa, we found that the need for supplementing was reinforced by the city health programs. Four times a year, community health workers went house to house to offer families vitamin A and iron supplementation. A pediatrician with whom we consulted on the issue said that there really was no evidence that the supplements were effective increasing the height of children:

I tell [the parents], maybe that’s really the limit of [the child’s] height… Genes also set a limit, that’s why we compute the mid-parental height. If that’s really the height, we cannot do anything. (Lasco 2017, p. 77)

Some of our interlocutors recognized the limits of Cherifer. One mother (47 years old, with three children) in Puerto Princesa told Lasco: “Whatever their height is, that’s really how tall they will be. One of my sons took Cherifer, but the one who didn’t take it is even taller than him” (Lasco 2017, p. 76). A high school student, when asked if Cherifer is effective, responded: “I think it’s effective because I grew tall.” But when probed about the effects on her peers, she replied, “Maybe for some it’s effective, but not for others. I really can’t tell for sure” (Lasco 2017, p. 76).

Metabolic Potentials

Given the prominence of vitamins in their childhood, it is not surprising that supplementing was a theme in our discussions with young adults in Puerto Princesa. One of our research assistants, Jaime, took one capsule of a supplement called C24/7 every day, which cost him about 10% of his monthly earnings. At the time of our research, Jaime was a lecturer at the local university, and taught many classes to pay for his younger siblings’ school fees. He needed energy, he said, and C24/7 helped him feel healthy, and prevented hangovers (Hardon et al. 2019).

C24/7 is a food supplement produced by Nature’s Way in Wisconsin, United States. Its promotional materials suggest that the capsules contain 14 “super” green foods, 12 whole fruit juice blends, 12 whole vegetable juice blends, and 12 mushrooms, along with 19 different vitamins and minerals. They are advertised as a “new breakthrough,” with “manufacturing allowing all the ingredients to deliver the highest level of anti-oxidants” (see Fig. 7.2).3

Fig. 7.2
figure 2

(Source Photo taken by Anita Hardon, January 2018, the Philippines)

Promotional material for C24/7, obtained from its distributors in Puerto Princesa

Full size image

Oxidation is a metabolic pathway that takes place at the cellular level, where mitochondria convert food to energy. Oxidation generates free radicals, and manufacturers such as Nature’s Way warn that these can cause damage to DNA and cell membranes, thereby potentially causing cancer and premature/accelerated aging. Food supplements often advertise their “antioxidant” properties, but critics point out that the human body is perfectly capable of making antioxidants, and that vegetables and fruits are packed with them. Put plainly, we don’t need supplements to have healthy cells (Price 2016). Still, the promotional claims have wide appeal.

To get C24/7 at a discount, Jaime became a member of the Alliance in Motion (AIM) Global, a Philippine company which distributes C24/7 through multilevel marketing . In fact, the product was not available in ordinary pharmacies but was sold by distributors who were encouraged to reach out to new clients and recruit new members for the company. Distributors were encouraged to share their own experiences with the products to increase sales, and to tailor C24/7 to prevailing metabolic concerns, selecting from a long list of declared “benefits” of the supplements (see the list on the right-hand side of the image in Fig. 7.2, which includes: promotes longevity, prevents cancer from any origin, controls blood sugar, enhances sexual vitality, and reduces fatigue).

Jaime entered the multilevel marketing scheme because he needed the stamina promised by the capsules. Other young people were attracted to the scheme because it provided them an opportunity to make a living. Buying a membership came with an initial stock of C24/7 at discounted price, which they sold in order to earn back their investment. They attended training seminars at AIM Global headquarters to learn how best to sell the products. “Be your product” is an important principle of AIM Global’s sales strategy. “The best drug pusher is a drug user,” said one of the trainers. Trainers encouraged the distributors to use their own experiences to persuade others to use C24/7, and invited distributors onto the stage to provide testimonials. Twenty-eight-year-old security guard Jess, for example, told the audience how he had been married for eight years and he and his wife had not yet conceived when a friend told them about C24/7. His wife became pregnant shortly after she began to take the supplement (Hardon et al. 2019).

We observed AIM Global trainers talking a lot about prevailing health problems. They pointed to the rise of chronic diseases and cancer, and referred to the high costs of treating these diseases. Their statements suggested a state of emergency: “There are many more diseases now than ever before!” “There was no cancer in the past, but there are now all kinds of cancer!” “We are all prone to illness, and our diets cannot protect us” (Hardon et al. 2019, p. 435).

Before and after pictures, shown at the training sessions, depicted patients experiencing amazing recoveries from cancer and other illnesses after taking C24/7. They were offered as a kind of proof, to convince the distributors of the supplement’s potential. In an article on this high-stakes strategy, we wrote: “The trainers ask, ‘How much is chemotherapy? How much is kidney dialysis per session? Will you be able to pay for it?’” (Hardon et al. 2019, p. 435).

The strategy also invokes powerful health authorities. For example, the products’ packaging includes the logo of the US Food and Drug Authority (FDA). Trainers, in the seminars, referred to the World Health Organization’s advice to consume five portions of vegetables and fruits each day, and then asked: “Who among us has the money to buy six different vegetables and fruits every day?” This seems a strange message in Puerto Princesa, where so many people still eat vegetables and fruits from their very own backyards (Hardon et al. 2019). The trainers’ messages resonate, however, with Filipinos’ anxieties about whether they are getting enough nutrients. Surveys conducted in Metro Manila by researchers of the Philippines Food and Nutrition Research Institute found that in 2008, 69% of respondents strongly agreed with the statement that the nutrients supplied by food needed to be supplemented, while ten years earlier, in 1998, this percentage was only 42% (Cruz et al. 2011). In a 2016 Euromonitor International report, industry analysts note a staggering growth—10%—in sales of supplements (reaching an annual value of US $137 million). They relate this growth to the promising health claims made by supplement manufacturers, suggesting also that consumers turn to these products for their “value for money” (Euromonitor International 2016).

Taking advantage of the strong family ties in the Philippines, the young distributors we spoke with were encouraged to profile their extended family members to identify their health concerns, and then to tailor their “pitch” to their needs, even though they generally had little to no medical background.

Our fieldwork suggests that becoming a C24/7 distributor is a risky investment, especially for youth who have few resources to begin with. Our interlocutors ran into trouble when clients blamed them for adverse health events, which added to the intensity and stress of their work as distributors. Over time, many of them quit selling C24/7 because their expectation of earning additional income was not met, and because the multilevel marketing labor was very time consuming and complex. When they stopped selling C24/7, they couldn’t afford it anymore, and they turned instead to vitamin C-containing products (Enervon C, Fern C, and the generic ascorbic acid) and multivitamins such as Revicon and Centrum to keep up with their demanding lifestyles.

Building Bodies

Supplements were also very popular in sports, a domain where there has been concern about unfair competition and the health risks related to the use of illegal steroids by athletes to boost their performance. Social scientists have studied the increased use of supplements in gyms, where young men try to achieve desirable masculine bodies that are “lean, muscular, powerful, free from blemish yet rugged, and sexually attractive” (Atkinson 2007, p. 172). Atkinson, who studied this practice among young Canadian men, quotes a 21-year-old man named Cliff, who uses several kinds of proteins (not illegal steroids):

I take what I take because I wasn’t born with the right gifts… I’m not trying to get jacked [muscular], but I want to look strong and be strong, right. Dieting and hard work gets you [only] so far, and then you need an edge to make gains… That’s what it’s about to me, self-improvement and progress. I spend tons of money on supplements, but it’s worth it… I want people to like me for how I look. (Atkinson 2007, pp. 172–173)

Atkinson relates the increased use of supplements by young men to prevailing crises in masculinity, specifically that men are threatened by women’s entrance into the labor market and by changing gender power relations. Another one of Atkinson’s informants, Brad, a 25-year-old, argues:

I don’t want to have a girlfriend with bigger muscles than me. Women today are much smarter and fitter and in control, and guys have to step it up [get bigger] … that’s nature; it’s the law of the jungle. Guys should be bigger, even if we have to work together and share just about every other social role in the world. (Atkinson 2007, p. 177)

Latham and colleagues (2019) have analyzed these self-transformation practices as part of “make-over culture,” emphasizing that it’s not the outcome that matters, but, “making visible the labor of working on the self” (p. 155). Their informants take supplements to “see the results” of working out in gyms.

Two focused ethnographies in the ChemicalYouth project examined how young women also work out in gyms, seeking to make visible the results of their labor in the form of lean and muscular bodies. Images of such bodies increasingly appear on posters and on TV, and are shared among fitness enthusiasts online. We begin in Manado, Indonesia, where Amanda Kalangit did fieldwork in a gym catering to young professionals. Gyms used to be only for the elites in Indonesia, but nowadays they also cater to young people who form the emerging middle class. Kalangit conducted participant observations and interviews with ten fitness enthusiasts who held a variety of professional positions: government workers, bank staff, sales promoters, sexy dancers, and police officers. They frequented Zumba and combat classes, and engaged in weight lifting and cardio workouts. They wanted to radiate many things through their bodies—bravery, confidence, and attractiveness—in a rapidly changing urban job market and dating scene. Our interlocutors said that an ideal body is balanced, as explained by Rose, a 24-year-old: “Not thin, not fat, just right, proportional, in proportion to the height, body weight also according to height. Must be healthy, with long hair” (Kalangit 2015, p. 8).

Among these professional women, vitamins and supplements were part of a broader strategy to achieve beauty and health. They balanced eating, sleeping, working, and exercising, attending to both the inside and outside of their bodies. They educated themselves on the nutritional content of food and chose foods that are easily absorbed by the body.

Indicators of a well-balanced body, they explained, are shiny hair, radiant skin, and moist lips. To achieve these, they invested in a range of hair products (shampoo, conditioner, hair masques); skin lotions such as Ever E, Natur E, Nivea, and Victoria’s Secret; as well as facial washes, sun screens, and lipsticks. To achieve health “from the inside” they drank lots of water, and used a variety of traditional and modern products, including tamarind concoctions, vitamin C (Ester C and C-1000), vitamin E (Ever E), glutamine, fish oil, vitamin B complex, and Herbalife supplements, all products that promised to give them stamina and prevent them from becoming sick. They blamed ill-health on irregular eating patterns, a lack of fruits and vegetables, not exercising, and not sleeping well.

Nutrition was key, according to our interlocutors; eating well meant consuming fruits, vegetables, eggs, fish, whole grain breads, and other foods with high nutrition on a daily basis. They substituted bad foods with good ones, replacing whole milk with yoghurt, which was considered to be healthier and lower in fat, and snacking on products with a high nutritional content such as Fitbar. Water was also considered to be of utmost importance. Our interlocutors all referred to the need for a 5–10 minute (bottled) “water break” during their gym practice. The following quotes give a sense of the importance of water:

As for the drink, it has to be plain water, whether the weather’s hot or cold. Especially during gym, during the break I have to drink water. (Wilma, 21)

As early as I wake up, I drink water first because it is most important to neutralize. Because when we sleep our bodies release ions as well, we sweat a lot too, well, we’re weak too, so we have to replace it with mineral water. Especially when we do heavy activities. (Asy, 26)

Water break is the best! Drink until satisfied and also because Aqua is available free here, and also to replace ions and energy that we have spent through sweat. Now to replace the liquid in large quantities, we have to drink enough mineral water too. So that the energy in our body is maintained. (Evelyn, 23) (Kalangit 2015, p. 17)

Key is also taking time for the body to “rest,” especially when they have eaten food which is “excessive” or “rich tasting,” such as chocolate, coto (a local soup), pork, and fast food. The importance of good eating when frequenting the gym was explained by 23-year-old Evelyn, a bank employee:

The most important menu is that of breakfast because it is to start the day and therefore must be nutrient-rich, when you choose your breakfast. Breakfast is indeed lighter in the portion, but it must be really healthy. The point is that there should be nutrients in it, because that is the most important thing, especially because I do gym activities, so I need everything to be extra healthy. I used to not have breakfast, and if I [did] so I would have an upset stomach. Since I [began] using the gym equipment, I have to have breakfast, because if not, I will definitely be limp all day long, and cannot go to gym after work. (Kalangit 2015, p. 11)

What stands out in the accounts of these female health enthusiasts is the balancing of healthy foods and supplements, and the combination of achieving health by consuming substances orally and by applying them on the skin, hair, nails, and lips. In doing so, our informants aimed to achieve total body health, which stood in contrast to the muscle-building make-overs of male gym-goers in Canada and Australia.

Fitshe

The final ethnography presented in this chapter is by Lisanne Claessens,4 a youth ethnographer who delved deeper into the make-over culture of young professional women in Amsterdam, showing how they not only consume health-related products but also, like their peers in Puerto Princesa, engage in marketing and designing such products. Unlike those in Puerto Princesa, the youth in Amsterdam didn’t have access to vegetables and fruits in their backyards. Our ethnographies found supplementing to be very popular, as indicated by this post by Heather Williams (2013), on the blog “All Women’s Talk”:

I’m a huge fan of green superfood powders and honestly, I find it to be a hobby to try new ones out. Most people who have never used a green superfoods powder just don’t understand the point. I get that; I used to be one of them. Until I started using some pretty amazing green superfood powders, I was of course healthy, but did have lower energy levels overall. I implemented certain green superfood powders into my diet after a friend recommended that I try some. I was learning to love smoothies for the first time in my life, so I thought I would give those oddly smelling, green powders a try. Even though some of them smelled weird, I got creative at flavoring my smoothies to get around the taste after I experienced how great they made me feel. Not all green superfood powders out there are as good as others. Check out my favorites that haven’t only changed my smoothies, but also my energy, digestion and immunity. None of these powders have any sugar, gluten, dairy, GMOs and most are organic and 100% raw.

In the past decade, the phenomenon of “superfoods” entered the Dutch public arena, and it has shaken up public discussions of health and wellness. Despite the relatively short time frame in which this concept has emerged, it has gained immense popularity, especially among young, highly educated people. There is no official understanding of what a superfood is exactly, but it is generally used to describe “raw,” unprocessed, and often times “ancient” products that are said to have extremely high doses of nutrients. Food and health blogs, such as the one cited above, are popping up all over the internet, becoming widely used and trusted sources of information. Such sources champion user experience as a kind of evidence, instead of advising people to seek out the expert knowledge of scientific researchers and medical doctors.

Paying close attention to various health practices and the consumption of (super)foods, chemicals, supplements, and vitamins, Claessen’s project analyzed how young people decided what their bodies needed in Amsterdam, where her interlocutors experienced urban life as a negative factor that needed to be balanced through health-focused practices. Claessen argues that the sense of being in control over one’s health correlates directly with the feeling of being in control over one’s life. City life, according to her interlocutors, was demanding, and it required one to be knowledgeable of one’s body in order to perform well. It was therefore not only important to make good choices, but to make good choices for you.

Claessen examined the use of superfoods and supplements by becoming a salesperson at the Vitaminstore, a growing Dutch company with 26 branches across the Netherlands and five in Amsterdam alone. The Vitaminstore sells its own brand of vitamins and supplements, categorized into three groups, each marked with its own color: health (green), sports (blue), and beauty (pink), see Fig. 7.3. In the store where Claessen worked, customers could also order fresh juices, choosing from more than 40 mixes of fruit, vegetables, herbs, yoghurt, coconut cream, and superfoods. Working behind the juice bar required no additional training, but employees were provided with a textbook that listed all of the superfoods and powders that customers could choose to “boost” their juices.

Fig. 7.3
figure 3

(Source Photos by Lisanne Claessens, February 2015, the Netherlands)

Vitaminstore products: Huid Haar Nagel (Skin Hair Nail) on the left, and Super Magnesium, on the right

Full size image

Working behind the juice bar enabled Claessen to communicate with customers, asking and answering questions. She sometimes referred customers to knowledgeable colleagues and listened in on their conversations. It was an environment where workers and clients exchanged experiences of things that they have tried out and shared stories of success and failure. In these face-to-face interactions, boundaries between food and medicine, and sickness and health, were blurred, and in many ways were similar to what went on in the multilevel marketing of C24/7 that we described above.

Claessen’s mentor at the Vitaminstore, Sara, was trained as a professional dietician, but she developed an aversion to her discipline. While she enjoyed learning about metabolism, organs, physiology, and chemistry, she became dissatisfied with how the body was approached, that is, as an engine whose fuel intake needs to be moderated. What bothered her most was that a training in dietetics left her helpless in meeting what people seemed to need from her.

Sara got her degree as weight consultant but did not establish her own practice until she had completed several courses of orthomolecular healing and a few years of work at a Vitaminstore, learning about vitamins and supplements. She changed her “personal brand” to “Sara, Health Coach and More.” With this new title, she was able to expand her target group along with expanding her expertise in guiding people in the labor of self-improvement. Sara’s appearance, she said, reflected on the product she sold, becoming like an advertisement that displayed her ability to transform others:

If I take nutritional advice from someone who doesn’t look healthy, then that’s not really credible. Even though that person might be perfectly able to explain to me what is good for me, and at the same time doing his own thing. It should be possible, theoretically. But to me is doesn’t feel right. (Claessens 2018, p. 13)

You have to “practice what you preach,” she asserted. Her blog post on magnesium reflects how she integrated her own experience into her advice:

I don’t focus much on supplements because I prefer to get my nutrients from whole foods, but for the past few months I have been hearing a lot about the mineral magnesium and how it is an antidote for stress. I’m not particularly more stressed than usual, but I’ve always struggled with anxiety before bed so I thought I would look into this “relaxation mineral.” While researching, I was surprised to find so many benefits of magnesium and what it can do to the body. I’ve been adding more magnesium rich foods into my diet and started taking a supplement a month ago and I can already feel a difference. (Larsen 2014)

Sara recognized that not everyone can afford to dedicate large amounts of time and resources to self-care in the way she did. Instead, she emphasized, she worked for her clients, testing products and lifestyle regimes on herself. In doing so, she argued, she spared her clients the time-consuming practice of figuring out what would work for them.

At the Vitaminstore Claessens met Caroline Glasbergen, as she was pitching FITSHE to Sara, calling it “a brand for women leading an active lifestyle.” Sara, Caroline declared, was the ultimate FITSHE woman: “I never dreamed to meet someone like her. Beautiful, smart, successful and truly an expert in her field.” Caroline had developed this product for young professionals with demanding social lives, many of which may have a family to maintain and a career to pursue. FITSHE, she explained, is the first Dutch after-work-out protein powder on the market targeting women.

FITSHE, Caroline pointed out, is for women who do intense workout sessions. Her product is designed for women who “go the extra mile,” who “juggle eighteen balls at once,” while maintaining a “fit” body. A graduate in business administration, Caroline started her career in the marketing department of Bacardi, where she learned the technique of experiential branding; from there, she moved on to Unilever. After that, when she started a new job at a small, innovative company in Amsterdam with mostly women her age, she found women who shared her intention to have a healthy lifestyle. In an interview with Claessens she recalled:

We worked a lot, eighty hours a week at least. And everybody was focused on healthy living. We worked in the city center so there was an organic health store where we would buy lunch. We always had healthy snacks at the office. And we exercised with a personal trainer twice a week, all of us together. (Claessens 2017, p. 12)

Besides these communal work-out sessions, she exercised with her boyfriend twice a week; her body grew leaner, and her muscles started to become more pronounced and visible, but she was increasingly tired. Caroline said that her personal trainer introduced her to shakes and explained to her how proteins aid the recovery of her muscles. Being raised, like Sara, in the era of calorie counting, the logic of proteins opened up new understandings of metabolism. “So, there are carbs, fats and proteins, those are the macronutrients and the foundation of your diet. Then there are micronutrients, minerals and vitamins… But proteins are difficult to get enough of. So, I started taking the powder (Claessens 2017, p. 12).”

Caroline designed her own brand of protein powder a year later, specifically marketed for the female body. She explained, “I was sufficiently knowledgeable about healthy eating to realize that there’s a lot of crap in those shakes. Additives and such, to improve taste, texture… I wanted a product to fit my needs” (Claessens 2017, p. 14). She identified her needs as feminine, stressing that it is important for women to have products which are free of “crap,” because their endocrine systems are more sensitive than that of men. What followed was a year of intense research, during which she dedicated all her resources to her enterprise, while engaging her social network as “ambassadors” to promote her brand. Caroline sells her product online in order to maintain control over the distribution process.

Caroline advocates a balanced lifestyle, including exercise and the use of FITSHE, along with “letting go.” On her website she declares:

Since I started working on FITSHE about a year ago, it’s a question I hear a lot: “You don’t eat this, right?” People ask me this at parties for instance, when handing me the platter of bitterballen (deep fried meatballs) to pass to the next person. Then I surprise them by helping myself to one these greasy, but oh so tasty deep-fried morsels. And you should see their astonished faces when I drink a glass (or two) of wine. Apparently being a female health entrepreneur means never snacking, drinking or even dreaming of such unhealthy pursuits. I disagree. (FITSHE 2018)

The Seduction of Supplements

This chapter, along with others in this book, reveals that our interlocutors viewed their bodies as vehicles for achieving their aspirations in life. Supplements seem to be a fuel to keep bodies going. Across our field sites we observed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the popularity of vitamins C and E. Vitamin C is the cheapest and most accessible product, commonly used to prevent colds and coughs and to generate stamina; vitamin E was sought to achieve radiant skin and shiny hair. In addition, we observed a growing trend of consuming protein bars and shakes, especially by young men and women who frequented gyms, to increase muscle mass and shape lean bodies. However, a closer look reveals that such “making over” has less to do with giving into circulating body ideals and more with a pride in the labor that goes into working out and wanting to make results visible.

Supplements come with divergent health and wellness claims, which tend to be unregulated and can be tailored to specific needs. In Puerto Princesa, distributors worked to link a single product to divergent health needs; the product’s multiplicity of health and wellness claims made such tailoring possible. In Amsterdam, we observed how the Vitaminstore chain sold a multiplicity of products, linking diverse vegetable and fruit blends to more than 40 additional products, again tailoring the blends to the health needs of the clients. In both cases young people did the work of linking products to client needs, expanding the market for these products. Our interlocutors also consumed the supplements they sold, and some also designed them, as a way of becoming a convincing salesperson an increasingly competitive, polluted, and precarious urban landscape.

Hard Work

The ChemicalYouth team in Puerto Princesa was concerned about the hard work done by young people who sell supplements through multilevel marketing . We decided to make a documentary to take a closer look, following how Leo (a high school teacher and one of our youth ethnographers) augmented his income by selling First Vita Plus, a food supplement that was competing for clients with AIM Global at the time. The resulting film, Sweet Medicine (Op den Kamp and Pulanco 2017), shows Leo going door to door in his hometown to find customers, often without much luck. His young wife is not happy with the time lost to this low income-generating activity and encourages him to help her sell popcorn instead. Part of the documentary process involved filming the manufacturing of the supplement and testing its nutritional content at a well-established food chemistry laboratory. The whole team, including Leo, was shocked to find out that First Vita Plus was actually not much more than a fruit-flavored drink containing lots of sugar, and that the product had much less vitamin content than promised on its label. After hearing about the sugar content, Leo decided to help his wife sell popcorn in their community.

The documentary was aired at universities in Manila and Puerto Princesa, and at various conferences in the Philippines and elsewhere, and was selected for Distribute 2020, a documentary film festival in Toronto. And it has been used in university classrooms all over the world. To have an even more profound impact, we aim for it to be included in the science and technology curriculum for senior high schools in the Philippines, which we view as an ideal space for social justice pedagogy (Greenberg 2017; Lasker and Simcox 2020). If incorporated into the curriculum, we hope that the documentary discourages youth from investing scarce resources in memberships to multilevel marketing companies. We also hope that they understand that being a distributor of food supplements in such schemes is hard work and unlikely to generate a satisfying return, and that one cannot trust the declared content of food supplements because companies are not held accountable for their marketing claims by governments.

In Conclusion

The efficacy of these products is ambiguous: how do we know if it was the supplement that gave us more energy, or made the common cold go away? One might ask: why linger on these questions? Especially when “better safe than sorry” seems to be the adage that drives supplement use. When I discuss the conclusions of this chapter with my daughter, she tells me to include the fact that she takes a multivitamin when she is tired and fears becoming sick. And, that she hasn’t been ill in the past three years. The natural aura of supplements and vitamins adds to their appeal: they are just food. Surely they can’t do any harm. This apparent “common sense” is not, however, supported by rigorous research, and the health claims that shape young people’s use of supplements are not scrutinized by regulatory authorities, unless serious adverse effects emerge.

This chapter shows how health enthusiasts monitored the effects of the supplements that they took more intensively. The female fitness enthusiasts in Manado saw their bodies change, as did young women in Amsterdam who saw and felt their bodies change when they used various products. Diets, supplement regimens, and fitness schedules were adjusted in a total body project; sometimes these are shared online, creating more interest in the bodies displayed and the means through which to achieve them.

This chapter also highlighted how young people are not only consumers of supplements, they also help sell and make them. They do so in malls, drug stores and, increasingly, through multilevel marketing . They also do so in the juice bars that are popping up in cities all over the world, offering busy young people on the go blends of fruit and vegetable drinks, along with carefully selected supplements, catering to the changing health concerns of youth: immunity, stamina, beauty, stress relief. In the selling and creating of supplements, they are co-producers of an urban way of being in the world in which supplementing has become a normal part of everyday life. They co-create the efficacy of supplements as protective shields and body enhancers by giving testimonials based on their own experiences, which they share through social media and in face-to-face interactions. They are workers in the expanding service sectors of post-Fordist economies, in which young people’s youthful performance and affective labor plays a key role (Farrugia 2018; Farrugia et al. 2018; McDowell 2009; see also Chapter 5 where we elaborate on how young people consume and sell skin whiteners in the service sector).

In the past, youth studies have focused on how young people acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies through formal education, which they then put to work in jobs for which they must compete with other youngsters. In such analyses, adulthood is located in this transition into work (Furlong 1992; Roberts 2007). However, in the service sector this shift from adolescence to adulthood is less defined. Young people often start to work before they have finished school, at times to pay for their tuition fees. And they acquire skills and competencies while on the job.

The nature of service sector work is also different from that in manual labor or white-collar jobs. In the interactive work of selling and marketing supplements, young people do both the affective labor of connecting with customers—sparking their interest in the products that the youth sell—and the embodied work of showing what the products can do. By “embodying” these products in their very youthful selves, they fuel an expectation that such supplements are efficacious.

When selling supplements and other chemicals, their work includes tailoring products to the metabolic needs of their customers. In Caroline’s case, this was done by creating a new kind of protein that better fits women’s bodies, which she then sells to her customers. In our case study on the multilevel marketing of C24/7 in Puerto Princesa, we referred to this combined affective and embodied nature of service sector work as “sociometabolic labor” (Hardon et al. 2019). Sociometabolic labor is omnipresent in malls, drugstores, pharmacies, juice bars, beauty salons, and gyms, all service sector spaces in which youth do the work of establishing, maintaining, and negotiating interpersonal relations with customers and embodying the efficacy of chemicals. Such work may involve creating and tailoring chemicals to build muscles, or mitigating bodily disturbances caused by toxic environments and precarious living conditions.

ChemicalYouth Ethnographers

Gideon Lasco is a physician and medical anthropologist. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam and his M.D. from the University of the Philippines, where he currently teaches anthropology His research examines the chemical practices of young people, the meanings of human height, the politics of health care, and the lived realities of the Philippine “drug war.” A Palanca-winning essayist, he maintains a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he writes about health, culture, and society (Fig. 7.4).

Fig. 7.4
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Gideon Lasco

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Lisanne Claessens was a Ph.D. candidate with the ChemicalYouth project and conducted fieldwork with young people in Amsterdam while following them on their journeys to “super health.” Her fields of interest include healthy lifestyles in urban settings and experience-based evidence (Fig. 7.5).

Fig. 7.5
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Lisanne Claessens

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Amanda Kalangit is a student from the Social Anthropology program of Universitas Sam Ratulangi. She did fieldwork in Manado for the ChemicalYouth project, which provided insights and quotes included in this chapter. She wrote her master’s thesis on young women’s body work.

Ian Anthony Davatos was a researcher of the Palawan Studies Center of Palawan State University for the ChemicalYouth project and conducted fieldwork on the chemical hygiene practices of tour guides in the Philippines.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Pub L No 103–417. 103rd Congress, 2nd session, S784 (U.S. Congress 2014).

  2. 2.

    This job advertisement is reproduced from Lasco (2017, p. 129).

  3. 3.

    These quotes are attributed to Dean Morris, master herbalist and director of technical affairs of Nature’s Way. They are printed on promotional material of C24/7 collected in Puerto Princesa in 2015. See also video clip (Aim Global Product Testimonial 2018) for a 2020 statement on the supplement by Morris.

  4. 4.

    These and other quotes from discussion with Sara and Caroline are excerpts from fieldnotes, research reports, and unpublished writings by Lisanne Claessens, who was a Ph.D. student in the ChemicalYouth project (see biographical statement above).