Pioneering Wellness-Focused Digital Media Company Well+Good Releases Its First-Ever Cookbook

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In the summer of 2009, journalists Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula launched Well+Good to explore all aspects of the burgeoning wellness scene that was just beginning to take hold. Fast forward 10 years later, their site boasts more than 12 million readers per month and continues its mission of being “a trusted advisor for navigating the ever-expanding (and sometimes confusing) world of wellness.”

The latest addition to this ever-expanding health- and wellness-centered brand is a cookbook, which was released earlier this month. Well+Good: 100 Healthy Recipes + Expert Advice for Better Living features go-to recipes and wellness tips from experts spanning a range of fields, including the likes of Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, actress Lea Michele and personal trainer Kayla Itsines.

The book is divided into chapters focused on specific meals (morning meals, mains, sweets and snacks, etc.), with each recipe indicating if it adheres to specific eating styles (like vegan, Paleo, gluten-free and keto) as well as targeted wellness benefits (like better skin, better sleep, better digestion and better energy). An index in the back offers a quick at-a-glance view of this information for readers with specific needs.

Gelula answered a few questions about the cookbook she co-authored with Brue, as well as what she sees for the future of the wellness space:

Abigail Abesamis: Why write a cookbook? Why now?

Melisse Gelula: Although we’re largely a digital media company, we’ve always wanted to create something for readers at home—and food is the thing that brings us all together. Food, recipes and nutrition information and advice is a huge entry point for our community of 12 million monthly. We all have to eat—we don’t *have* to all go to the gym or buy paraben-free moisturizers. In many ways, wellness starts—or, frankly, can end—in the kitchen.

What “healthy” means has really expanded in this country. We are way beyond the days of a diet soda and chicken breasts. There are just as many gluten-free and dairy-free recipes in the Cookbook as Paleo or vegan recipes, because those are just everyday considerations people make for themselves and their families now.

People now also expect their food to “do something” for them, as in improve their digestion with probiotic yogurt or reduce inflammation by adding turmeric to dishes. The focus on functional foods is something we made really clear and actionable in the Cookbook, with each recipe labeled for its benefits. There are seven expert-written guides in the book that substantiate what ingredients could help with many of these common things we know our community (and beyond) is likely dealing with.

Abesamis: What do you hope for readers to take away from the book?

Gelula: While many people are focused on what to eat or how to eat for wellness (it can be incredibly overwhelming), there’s less focus on cooking for themselves as a way to do it! To inspire people to cook more, you have to remove a bunch of very real obstacles like time, cost of ingredients, complexity and taste—so we’ve curated the book around the go-to recipes of wellness luminaries in the Well+Good community, from Venus Williams and Lea Michele to Gabrielle Bernstein and Mark Hyman, MD. The book contains 100 recipes that these busy healthy people really make.

These wellness experts have solved a lot of these "how to cook healthy" struggles in their own lives: there's a normal number of ingredients for each recipe, nothing too obscure or expensive, and cook time is 20 minutes on average. The recipes are gorgeously aspirational, but super realistic and verified delish—they’re the meals you’d likely be served if you popped in on Daphne Oz or Padma Lakshmi at home on crazy busy Tuesday night.

Knowing what healthy people make to eat in a pinch is the best hack there is.

Abesamis: What was the selection process like for the healthy experts and authorities included in your book?

Gelula: There were a couple ways we hand-picked top experts for the Cookbook. The book is filled with people whose careers we’ve been covering for years, some dating to the earliest days of Well+Good—and their businesses, too. We've known Joey Gonzalez who became CEO of Barry's Bootcamp and Gabby Bernstein for a decade, for example, when she published her first book. Now she’s a NYT best-selling author several times over.

We also wanted a range of “wellness rockstars” across the spectrum, not all foodies, and we wanted to make sure there was a diversity of eating styles.

So there are public figures like Padma Lakshmi and Lea Michele; and leaders in medicine like Robin Berzin, MD and Mark Hyman MD; celeb nutritionists like Kelly LeVeque, Kimberly Snyder and Dana James; wellness entrepreneurs Amanda Chantal Bacon, the founders of Sakara and CAP Beauty, etc.; fitness gurus like Misty Copeland, Kayla Itsines, Anna Kaiser and Simone de la Rue, as well healthy chefs and more.

It's a wellness super-crowd of contributors who eat in diverse, healthy ways.

Abesamis: What are the biggest ways you've seen the wellness space change since you launched Well+Good? Where do you see it going?

Gelula: When we started W+G almost 10 years ago wellness was regarded as pretty fringy—and even fluffy. But sociologically, it’s what Americans needed the most right after the recession when people lost their jobs, savings, homes in some cases. Alexia and I came from a luxury spa travel magazine context, and people were *not* taking that trip to Thailand or Bali or a luxury spa for their wellness then.

At that time, people were hungry for things that they could do closer to home. It’s not a coincidence that the proliferation of wellness and its commercialization exploded in this way—ie: Whole Foods which expanded its footprint during this time, as did spinning and barre brands like SoulCycle and Pure Barre to stores devoted to athleisure like Athleta, to healthy fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen, juice bars, or cafes with avocado toast. All of this happened right when Americans needed more ways to feel better, and they needed it closer to home. Wellness became a lifestyle of necessity, and it’s continued to grow in part because of our overworked, always-connected, insomnia-filled culture.

If wellness went from the far-flung spa to the yoga studios and smoothie bars in our hometown, it’s now ringing your doorbell and your cell phone. Peloton, Amazon, Zeel, Mirror, Samsung Family Hub fridges, and many more are running healthy programming out of our homes, on our appliances and home tech, granting us access to on-demand and streaming wellness. Wellness-embedded home technology will soon just be what we all have. It will just become what we all do someday, we won’t even call it wellness anymore.