I was interested in watching the series Apple Cider Vinegar, because I had loved its protagonist, Kaitlyn Dever, ever since she starred with Beanie Feldstein in Booksmart (2019) by Olivia Wilde. I had quoted her in my article about the TV program Coastal Elites.
What I wasn’t expecting was to realize how important the message of this fictionalized retelling of a true story could be for people who are dealing with cancer today. Watch trailer. As an entertainment journalist I was invited by Netflix to participate in a virtual press conference, where I learned more details about the series, then I followed up with my own research.
Kaitlyn Dever plays Belle Gibson, an Australian social media influencer who falsely claimed to have cured a malignant brain tumor through a regimen of healthy recipes detailed in her app The Whole Pantry launched in 2013 and a cookbook published in 2014.
She had copied the playbook of Milla Blake (played by Alycia Debnam-Carey), based on Jessica Ainscough, who had been diagnosed with a cancerous sarcoma in 2008 at age 22 and refused the medically recommended treatment of having her left arm amputated, searched for an holistic alternative and believed she had found it in the Gerson Therapy, which prescribed juices and coffee enemas. She then became a celebrity, along with other “Wellness Warriors,” publishing the book Make Peace with Your Plate in 2014.
We did not get to speak with Tilda Cobham-Hervey, playing Lucy, who is dealing with breast cancer, and is the wife of one of the two journalists who exposed Gibson’s deception in the book The Woman Who Fooled the World: The True Story of Fake Wellness Guru Belle Gibson. In real life neither of the authors, Nick Toscano and Beau Donelly, are married to a cancer survivor, but Lucy could be based on Kate Thomas, a cafe owner they knew. In the series, after undergoing chemotherapy and losing her hair, Lucy starts following Belle on Instagram, then travels to a spiritual retreat in Peru where she takes a psychedelic trip on Ayahuasca.
Lucy’s journey resonated with me, because in 2021 I had interviewed Monica Gagliano, featured in the documentary Aware: Glimpses of Consciousness, for the Golden Globes website, and wrote another article for Cultural Weekly about her book Thus Spoke the Plant, where she talked about experiencing the Ayahuasca rituals in Iquitos, Peru.
I should note that the events fictionalized in Apple Cider Vinegar took place in 2013-2015, when I became aware of books claiming that certain diets could cure cancer.
In 2015 the movie Steve Jobs was released, directed by Danny Boyle from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, starring Michael Fassbender. Although it only covers the years 1984, 1988, 1998, we were reminded of how the Apple co-founder lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011 at age 56, and that, when he was first diagnosed in 2003, he delayed surgery by 9 months to try alternative treatments.
In 2015 new Dietary Guidelines were released by USDA, including the recommendation that sugar intake should be limited to less than 10% of daily calories.
There is no doubt that eating a diet rich of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, limiting sugar intake, and exercising are beneficial to your health, as are spiritual practices like yoga and meditation. Unfortunately none of these methods appear to get rid of cancerous cells, and we are stuck with the conventional medical treatments of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy. See here a list of unproven and disproven cancer treatments.
The series title refers to the wellness world belief that drinking apple cider vinegar is a cure for many ailments, however not for cancer.
On March 5 a federal judge blocked Trump’s cuts in medical research at the NIH (National Institute of Health), which includes cancer studies.
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