The Wellness Industry

Ironically, of the $2 trillion we spend on health care in this country, which represents one-sixth of the U.S. economy, most has very little to do with health.

“Health” is defined in the dictionary as, “being sound in body, mind or spirit,” but what we call “health care” has a very different focus, and would more appropriately be called the
sickness industry.

Sickness industry: Products and services provided reactively to people after they contract an illness, ranging from a common cold to cancerous
tumors. These products and services seek to either treat the symptoms of a disease or eliminate the disease.

Wellness industry: Products and services provided proactively to healthy people—that is, those without an existing disease—to make them feel even healthier and look better, to slow
the effects of aging, or to prevent diseases from developing in the first place.

I stumbled upon the wellness industry in the 1990s, as so many do,
through an experience with my own health. For 10 years (against medical advice) I had put off getting expensive knee surgery. Finally, I started taking a dietary supplement called glucosamine—and within a year the cartilage was repaired. The surgeon was positively amazed when he examined my X-rays; I no longer needed the operation.

This experience piqued my interest; I wanted to find out what else my surgeon and my other medical providersdidn’t know. I also noticed that people were spending more on new things such as exercise programs and fitness coaches, supplements and organic foods, alternative medicine and anti-aging therapies. I began to research this field and soon arrived at an amazing conclusion: This new and emerging industry, which only a decade ear earlier had hardly existed, was already a $200 billion
business.

This represents an extraordinary economic opportunity. The millions of people spending billions of dollars to further their wellness represent a new and growing economic sector who
are eating and living healthier than anyone ever before in history. They are primarily wealthy people who, as they start to have money, start looking for ways they can be healthier—outside the medical establishment. Today, for example, this sector spends over $70 billion annually on vitamins and food supplements.

Who are these people? Mostly baby boomers: prosperous people from the ages of 40 to 60. Baby boomers are the first generation in history who refuse to blindly accept the aging process. They are also a powerful economic force; they represent only 28 percent of our population—yet this group and their spending represents 50 percent of our economy.


Until recently, marketing to baby boomers had been all about how to help them remember what it was like to be young—oldies music, retro clothes, and 50s-styled automobiles. Now, it has gone a step further. Today, boomers are starting to buy things that actually make them younger in terms of having a healthier body, more acute senses and a sharper mind!
And this industry has only just gotten started. Most people don’t even know such products exist, and as more learn about wellness, the sector is exploding.

In 2000, when I first began to study this trend, I was stunned to discover that wellness in America was already a $200 billion industry. Today, only a handful of years later, it has
already doubled to become a $400 billion business! By the year 2010, just five years from now, it will have become the next trillion-dollar industry.

In the last decade, many of the people who had achieved new wealth made their fortunes in computers. In this decade, many more will be making their new fortunes in wellness.


source: Success from Home Magazine Dec 2005
THE EMERGING INDUSTRIES OF WELLNESS AND NETWORK MARKETING
ARE COMBINING TO CREATE TODAY’S —AND TOMORROW’S—NEW WEALTH.
BY PAUL ZANE PILZER