Whole Foods is selling dangerous anti-vaccine propaganda in its checkout aisles
Source: Insider Date: December 10th, 2019 Author: Maddie Stone More than any other major grocery store, Whole Foods has made healthy living central to its brand. Based on the Amazon-owned supermarket's tremendous popularity, it's a strategy that has worked. If you look past the colorful organic produce displays and sustainably-sourced seafood counter, however, you'll start to notice incongruities. There's nothing particularly healthful, for instance, about the homeopathy aisle — a section of Whole Foods' Whole Body Department that sells 19th century pseudoscience masquerading as cold and flu remedies — or the shelves filled with supplements and probiotics making claims that often don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. But all of this pales in comparison to the disinformation Whole Foods is selling in its check-out aisle: magazines with articles promoting vaccine skepticism. Insider recently found several magazines that have run articles raising unfounded concerns about the safety or efficacy of vaccines. These messages are not only out of line with the mainstream medical consensus, they are actively dangerous, according to public health experts. Scattered amongst the breezy magazines devoted to healthy cooking and pet care are titles like Well Being Journal, a bi-monthly publication sold at Whole Foods stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, among other locations. It has published articles that tout medically unsupported homeopathic therapies as "non-toxic" alternatives to vaccination. Others promote the debunked link between the MMR vaccine and autism. One particularly egregious article in a 2017 issue, adapted from a defunct anti-vaccine [...]