These scoundrels of corporate wellness, with their “relentless focus on health and happiness.” How dare they!

The phrase comes from a RealBusiness blog post by Jason Hesse, not from “The Wellness Syndrome,” (link withheld for cause) the book that triggered his comments, so it is conceivable that I’m being unfair to the book. But I read the review of it from the Guardian this morning too, and I’m feeling safe enough to proceed.

The authors, Andre Spicer and Carl Cederström, are Europeans business professors of clear political bent (which, I concede, is something usually said by someone with a different political bent). The “syndrome” of the title is a “creeping cult of corporate wellness,” under which emphasis on health and wellness is alleged to make people feel less healthy and less well.

”’The pressure to maximize our wellness can make us feel worse. We have started to think that a person who is healthy and happy is a morally good person while people who are unhealthy and unhappy are moral failures,’ explains Spicer,” quoted by Hesse.

The Guardian’s review, by Steven Poole, takes up the cause lustily, if illogically, beginning with the opening paragraph:

“To achieve wellness, a person must eat correctly (to the point of faddist superfood obsession or orthorexia)...”

That’s polemics 101: Overstate the case to make it seem unreasonable. No, one needn’t be orthorexic to eat healthily. Orthorexia, in fact, is a name for *unhealthy* behavior, akin to OCDers who wash their hands until they bleed. It started out as a healthy behavior, but was taken too far.

Meanwhile, note the word “correctly,” as if an endorsement of eating healthy exemplifies political correctness. But again, no — although, especially under the influence of Big Food, there’s room for disagreement over what constitutes eating healthy. Strip away the hyperbole, and actual limits remain about what humans can eat healthily.

There also is actual rationale for what goes into our bodies: Undeniably, what we choose to consume is what makes our bodies what they are. That’s fact, not opinion. Not enough Vitamin C? Scurvy. Too much Vitamin A? Toxic. Too much refined sugar? Rampant obesity is only the beginning. People can have opinions about those things, but they happen regardless.

Perhaps I digress, so let’s return to the beginning. No law requires the pursuit of health and happiness, but if that’s going to be one of the dividing lines in the culture war, I know which side I want to be on.