Nikki Reed opens up about the years-long health battle that pushed her deep into the world of wellness.
The 37-year-old actress, who now helps run her own wellness brand, The absorption companywith husband Ian Somerhalder, revealed on The Squeeze podcast that she struggled with a mysterious medical condition for years.
In her search for answers, she turned to wellness products as doctors struggled to figure out what was wrong, but Reed said many of the remedies she was sold simply didn’t work.
Calling out what she sees as predatory practices, she told host Taylor Lautner while appearing on the latest episode of his podcast that the industry is “capitalizing on people’s hopes.”
“The placebo effect is real, but it doesn’t work on me,” she began, referring to the phenomenon where a person feels better from a treatment with no active therapeutic benefit.
Furthermore, Reed explained that during her “crazy health scare,” she consulted top medical experts, compulsively researched, and still came up empty-handed.
“I visited, as you can imagine, amazing doctors because I’m an information seeker. I look for the best doctors I can and have really researched for years,” Reed claimed.
Despite her efforts, she added: “I couldn’t figure it out and it drove me crazy, but what drove me just as crazy was the amount of stuff I was sold that didn’t work.”
She didn’t hold back in her criticism of the booming nutritional supplement and wellness market.
“Not only do they not work, but it’s an industry that exploits people’s hopes because they hope it works,” Reed said.
“They take these things and they spend their hard-earned money on this massive belief that they will be better off from an industry that exploits them,” she concluded.
