From Green Juices to Netflix: How Belle Gibson’s Story Exposes Our Obsession with Wellness Culture

Inside the shocking true story behind Apple Cider Vinegar

Clean eating, juice cleanses, miracle supplements – our hunger for wellness quick fixes seems endless.

We scroll past them on Instagram, add them to our Amazon baskets at midnight, and evangelise about their life-changing benefits to anyone who’ll listen.

That’s what makes the new Netflix scammer series Apple Cider Vinegar such compelling (and rather uncomfortable) viewing.

Starring Kaitlyn Dever (Dopesick, Unbelievable), it unpacks how Australian wellness guru Belle Gibson built an empire on fabricated illness – and why thousands of us were ready to believe her.

Named after Gibson’s bizarre claim that apple cider vinegar helped expel a tapeworm through her mouth, this six-part drama isn’t just another scammer story.

It’s a mirror to our desperate search for health salvation through social media prophets and their promises of perfect well-being.

The Golden Age of Instagram Wellness

Remember 2013 when Instagram was young, Valencia filters reigned supreme, and everyone’s breakfast suddenly needed its own photoshoot?

Think pristine white marble backdrops, those ubiquitous wooden breakfast boards, and that specific shade of millennial pink that screamed ‘Trust me, I’m authentic’.

No one was asking influencers to mark their posts with #ad back then. No one questioned whether that green juice really cured someone’s ailments.

If someone had told me then that activated charcoal wasn’t actually a miracle cure, I would probably have unfollowed them.

Gibson stepped into this world at exactly the right moment when Holland & Barrett was experiencing a wellness boom and Deliciously Ella was becoming a household name.

Her posts about beating terminal brain cancer through “clean eating” and alternative therapies landed just as wellness culture was taking off.

Belle Gibson’s app, The Whole Pantry, cost £2.99 and was downloaded 300,000 times – that’s nearly a million pounds from people desperate for answers.

When Wellness Becomes a Religion

What makes Apple Cider Vinegar particularly squirm-inducing is how it holds up a mirror to our quasi-religious devotion to wellness culture.

Belle Gibson’s followers didn’t just see her as another pretty face flogging green smoothies – they saw her as a prophet of health.

And honestly, who could blame them?

While NHS waiting times grew longer and private healthcare remained eye-wateringly expensive, here was someone offering hope through avocados and positive thinking.

The language of modern wellness is basically a new religion. Foods aren’t just healthy or unhealthy anymore – they’re “clean” or “toxic”.

Your body doesn’t just get ill – it needs “cleansing” and “purifying”. (Your liver does all the detoxing you need, but that doesn’t sell as many teatox packages, does it?)

The Dark Side of #Wellness

The Netflix series hits hardest when it shows the real human cost behind all those perfectly filtered photos.

While Gibson was posting about miracle cures and collecting £66,000 advances from Penguin Books, actual cancer patients were making life-or-death decisions based on her recommendations.

There’s a particularly haunting storyline about Milla Blake (played brilliantly by Alycia Debnam-Carey), based on real-life wellness warrior Jessica Ainscough.

It’s through Milla’s story that we see how dangerous these beautiful lies can be.

The series shows Gibson studying other cancer patients’ social media posts, nicking their language and experiences like she was revising for a particularly twisted exam.

What Haven’t We Learned?

Fast forward to 2025, and what’s changed? Sure, your favourite influencer now has to pop #ad on their posts, but scroll through Instagram and you’ll still find unqualified wellness gurus giving medical advice.

The green juices might have been replaced by gut protocols and hormone balancing, but the promises remain suspiciously similar.

Thanks to COVID, our collective health anxiety is through the roof.

Pop onto TikTok and you’ll find dozens of wellness influencers offering miracle cures – just swap Gibson’s apple cider vinegar for celery juice or that £50 mushroom coffee everyone’s raving about.

The Wellness Trends That Had Us Hooked

Belle Gibson may have been one of the most shocking wellness frauds, but she was far from the only influencer wellness scam.

Over the past decade, we have fallen for everything from teatoxes to biohacking—each promising to be the missing piece in our health puzzle.

Remember when detox teas flooded our feeds, endorsed by every reality star with a ring light?

The claims were wild—instant weight loss, glowing skin, a ‘flat tummy’—only for us to later learn they were just overpriced laxatives.

Then came celery juice, the ultimate cure-all. Acne? Depression? Autoimmune disease?

One glass of green sludge a day, and all your problems were supposedly solved.

And let’s not forget “hormone balancing” diets, which somehow managed to demonise everything from caffeine to chickpeas.

The cycle is always the same: a charismatic figure, an irresistible promise, and a community desperate for answers.

And each time, we tell ourselves we won’t fall for it again.

Inside the Apple Cider Vinegar Series

The show cleverly breaks the fourth wall, with Dever’s Gibson addressing viewers directly: “This is a true story based on a lie.”

It’s a fitting introduction to a story where truth and fiction blur constantly.

While some characters are composites or fictional creations, the core events – Gibson’s rise to fame, her book deal with Penguin, her partnership with Apple, and her eventual exposure by Australian journalists – are all painfully real.

Particularly powerful is how the series contrasts Gibson’s manufactured illness with genuine cancer patients, including fellow influencer Milla Blake.

Based on real-life wellness warrior Jessica Ainscough, Blake’s story shows the tragic consequences when alternative therapy beliefs go too far.

Beyond Netflix

While Gibson has largely disappeared from public view (though she made headlines in 2019 for bizarrely claiming to be part of Melbourne’s Ethiopian community), her story resonates strongly with current conversations around health misinformation and influencer accountability.

Apple Cider Vinegar arrives at a time when terms like “wellness scammer” and “Instagram fraud” have become part of our cultural vocabulary, from Theranos to WeWork.

Apple Cider Vinegar is not just about one woman’s deception – it’s about our collective vulnerability to these narratives.

In an age of rising health anxiety and medical mistrust, perhaps we’re all still searching for our own Belle Gibson – someone to make sense of it all, someone to tell us that wellness is within our control.

Are We Still Searching for the Next Belle Gibson?

Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar forces us to ask an uncomfortable question: have we actually learned from Belle Gibson, or have we just moved on to the next wellness guru?

Sure, social media platforms have cracked down on unqualified health advice, and influencers now have to label ads.

But take one look at TikTok, and you’ll still find “holistic health coaches” selling detox plans, “functional medicine” influencers warning you about seed oils, and biohacking bros promising eternal youth for the price of a very expensive supplement stack.

We might scoff at Gibson now, but let’s be real, if she had rebranded as a “gut health expert” instead of a fake cancer survivor, would we have questioned her at all?

So maybe the real takeaway isn’t just how easily we were fooled—it’s that we’re still looking for someone to tell us the answers.

Maybe the next Belle Gibson is already out there. The question is: are we ready to believe them?