What Yuka, Oasis, and Olive Are Really Selling You and the 1994 Supplement Law that Enabled Them
Red Pill, Blue Pill, White Pill, Black Pill
A man in a long coat opens both hands, a pill sitting in each palm, and offers a choice. Take the blue one and it all goes quiet, you go back to sleep and keep the life you already had, continuing life in the simulation and living in blissful ignorance to the world that’s been created for us. Take the red one to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, to pull the wool from your eyes and wake up to the realities that create Our World. The power of this scene transcended the fictional world and has taken up space in our collective consciousness and how we choose to interact with politics, people, and the world around us. In the quarter century since, the internet pharmacists have developed a whole new range of pills for us to choose. Seeing the supplement market has grown and likely will double to $300B by 2028, it’s disconcerting that we consider our ideologies fit into a one-size-fits-all mentality.
Looks, it’s a great scene with plenty of staying power. Plenty of good scenes have handed us images that flared for a season and then dissolved into nothing. This one did something stranger. A quarter century on, the movie itself has thinned into a vibe, half-remembered and endlessly parodied, and the word it left behind has outlasted nearly everything around it.
The thing I’ve been sitting with is why that particular image had societal gravity, when any given movie tosses us metaphors by the baker’s dozen and most of them slide right off. My best guess is that it landed in soil that was already prepared. By 1999, swallowing a small thing in order to change yourself was an ordinary habit, the kind of errand you ran on a Tuesday between the bank and the dry cleaner.
Walk into any strip-mall GNC at the turn of the millennium and the promise was racked floor to ceiling. Ginkgo for the memory your doctor obviously undervalued. Echinacea for an immune system The Establishment was too busy to mention. St. John’s wort, ephedra, melatonin, glucosamine, collagen peptides, a whole wall of capsules each one murmuring that the thing you needed had been sitting here the entire time, over the counter, available to anyone willing to look past the people who were paid to know better. Congress had cleared the legal path for all of this in 1994, and the promise that the fix was a pill stack away ballooned.
The Effect of DSHEA
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 was a landmark framework that reclassified how FDA enforced supplements - seeing them as a subset of food rather than a drug. It put the onus of safety on the manufacturers and the FDA only needs to deem as harmful to pull it from the market. A company no longer had to demonstrate that a product worked, or even that it was safe, before it reached the shelf. This oddly seems like the opposite of what RFK currently is doing by removing the current self-GRAS architecture. Regardless, the agency stopped being the inspector at the door and shifted to only reducing damage after it was already done.
This framework simply changed the back of any bottle in the store. Any statement promoting joint health, or any other proposed benefit, now carries an asterisk: “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration”. Look, the Agency is busy and it’s expensive to run randomized controlled trials, so I’m not saying that all supplements are snake oil. The burden of experimenting is now on us as consumers and thirty years later, we have people “doing their own research” while actually listening to a podcast ad with an MD or PhD sign-off. As Hydroxide put it, “some people don’t want to hear an idea unless they’re sold to” and what the DSHEA also provided was a framework for distrust.
Hiring a New Food Referee
Pulling the gatekeeper away from the door did not make the question go away. Somebody still has to tell you whether the supp in your hand is good for you, and once the agency stepped back, there was a knowledge vacuum. For a while it belonged to the health catalogs and the back pages of muscle magazines. Then it belonged to forums, then to a man on YouTube with a whiteboard and a grudge, and lately it belongs to an app. The post was always going to be filled somewhere because nature freakin’ abhors a vacuum1.
Bringing it back to the Matrix: the pill was never really about a single belief. It is a way of seeing the people who are supposed to vouch for things. Blue-pilled is putting full trust in the panel on the box and having an inherited sense that somebody, somewhere, made sure this cleared a health bar. Red-pilled is deciding that bar was rigged to begin with, that Big Pharma and Big Food has conspired against the health of everyone. Depending on the day, I probably take one or both pills, truthfully. But on a population basis this binary world puts us in a weird space. Hand the same bag of french fries with sunflower oil2 to two shoppers holding those two lenses and you get two different objects. One is a weeknight snack while the other reads poison.
The apps are what happens when you turn the red-pilled lens into a consumer product and bill for it annually. There are at least three of them racing to be the harbinger of truth. Yuka scores the barcode and paints it green or red because we all played Red Light, Green Light in pre-school. No thinking needed! Oasis aims its whole pitch at the government that supposedly failed to protect you, which is a neat trick, since it is selling you the 1994 grievance back as a subscription.
Olive is the newest entrant that flags seed oils by default and gives you no switch to turn it off, which means the app has chosen your camp before you have scanned a single thing, and from then on the scan stops being a question you are asking and becomes a loyalty you are confirming. The app returns a flat verdict, safe or not safe, and points you toward a seed-oil-free restaurant on the drive home. As Hydroxide pointed out in their deep-dive, Olive isn’t really using many nutrition studies, but works with the “Chemical Toxin Working Group, headed by concerned (concerning?) journalist David Steinman. You get his read on Prop 65 for the low price of $14.99 a month
So we did not actually get rid of some mythical gatekeeper in 1994. We dissolved the one we shared, and three decades later we each went out and subscribed to our own. We stopped agreeing on who gets to say what is true in the aisle, and the apps are the most recent proof that we never replaced that agreement with anything except the freedom to pick our own referee.
The Societal Cost
Here is what the sorting costs, and it is easy to miss because it masquerades as empowerment. Good food now means food that agrees with my pill. The grocery store, without anyone deciding this on purpose, became a place you go to confirm a worldview and happen to also pick up dinner. Every aisle has become a referendum on whatever an influencer is at war with that day.
Morpheus offered a pill that took something real from you and never gave it back. You took the red one and you woke up, all the way up, into a world that was colder and worse and impossible to un-see, and the deal was that you could never lower yourself back into the warm bath of ignorant bliss. The app scanners give you the jolt of having seen through the lie, the hidden seed oil, the scary additive you cannot pronounce (THEY’RE PUTTING RIBOFLAVIN IN THE BREAD SAMANTHA!), the contaminant nobody warned you about, and then it lets you keep every ounce of comfort you walked in with. I think the FDA did do a wonderful thing in making supplements more accessible, but it also built an awakening you get to have again and again every time you shop or open Instagram.
And we lost the one thing the old shared gatekeeper, for all its failures, did give us, which was a number we could argue about together. Picture two people in the same aisle, in front of the same box, each scanning it, each reading an opposite verdict off a glowing screen, both certain, neither able to say why the other is wrong, because they are no longer consulting the same instrument. There’s no shared scoreboard anymore or one referee we can argue with.
So the next time you feel yourself reaching for the pill, whatever color it has been this season, it might be worth asking what the reach is really for. Whether what you cannot stand is the institution and its long record of getting things wrong. Or whether what you cannot stand is the older fact underneath it. We are still inside a system with a barcode, a nutrition facts panel and an ingredient declaration, yet we sit in camps of who has the authority to tell us what the health impact is of what we scan.
Shout out to Aristotle!
Check out my three part series on seed oils production, if you dare…