7 New Wellness Trends That Older Pennsylvanians Remember From Decades Ago

Ashwagandha gummies are chasing a supplement market that Grand View Research values at nearly $840 million a year worldwide.

Pennsylvania living rooms had a version of this in 1950.

It had a different name, a different pitch, but the same promise. The Food and Drug Administration still doesn’t approve any of it before it goes on sale.

These are the new wellness trends older Pennsylvanians remember from decades ago.

Note: This is general information, not medical advice. Wellness trends and product claims are subject to change.

1. Vibration Plate Workouts

Vibration plate machines are the fitness gadget rattling through Pennsylvania living rooms in 2026, with models like the Lifepro Waver racking up tens of thousands of sales through TikTok Shop.

Ten minutes of standing still is supposed to replace an actual workout.

That pitch is decades older than the platform selling it.

A machine called the Relax-A-Cizor buzzed against the skin in American living rooms through the 1950s and 1960s.

Its box promised “An Easy Way to Reduce Hips and Abdomen. No Diet. No Drugs. No Heat. No Massage.”

A federal judge banned the device in 1970 after ruling it posed a serious safety hazard.

The ban held.

Today’s vibration plates do have some legitimate research behind them.

The same report that covered the trend found the payoff is often no better than brisk walking for the same stretch of time.

2. Ashwagandha Gummies

Ashwagandha gummies are chasing a supplement market that Grand View Research values at nearly $840 million a year worldwide.

Brands like Goli sell stress-and-sleep gummies at Walmart, General Nutrition Centers (GNC), and just about everywhere else.

The bottle promises calm, energy, and a little more get-up-and-go for two chewable gummies a day.

A Louisiana tonic sold Pennsylvania drugstores nearly the same promise generations ago.

Hadacol was a vitamin tonic pushed hard on the radio and at traveling stage shows in 1950 and 1951.

Its ads promised to restore “Pep, Strength and Energy” to anyone worn down by modern life.

It also happened to be 12 percent alcohol, listed on the label as a preservative, which made it popular in counties where liquor was hard to find.

The American Medical Association rejected the company’s health claims in 1951.

The Federal Trade Commission investigated Hadacol’s marketing around the same time, objecting to what the ads claimed the tonic could cure.

The pep didn’t last.

3. Meal Replacement Shakes

Meal replacement shakes just got a massive vote of confidence: Danone paid €1.2 billion for the shake brand Huel in 2026, according to Dow Jones.

Skip the cooking, drink the shake, and the pounds are supposed to come off on their own.

Pennsylvania grocery shelves sold a nearly identical shake more than sixty years earlier.

Metrecal launched in 1959 as a powdered diet drink from Mead Johnson.

It became such a sensation that Time magazine was still covering the frenzy a little more than a year after its debut.

Betty Friedan later pointed to Metrecal-drinking women as a symbol of the era’s diet obsession in The Feminine Mystique.

Metrecal never caught on again.

Copycat shakes and plain dieter fatigue cooled Metrecal’s moment by the mid-1960s.

Growing medical concern about very-low-calorie liquid diets in the following decade made the whole category a harder sell.

4. Gut Health Sodas

Gut health sodas like Olipop and Poppi have turned the soft drink aisle into a wellness aisle.

They’re part of a boom that saw new food and drink launches with gut-health claims jump 42 percent worldwide in a single year.

The pitch is that a happier gut adds up to a longer, better life.

A French scientist sold Americans that same idea more than a century earlier.

Elie Metchnikoff proposed in 1904 that harmful gut bacteria caused aging, and pointed to the lactic-acid bacteria in Bulgarian sour milk as a possible fix.

Newspapers ran with it, and by 1905 the sour-milk craze was so big that Metchnikoff wrote a brochure just to walk the claim back.

Nobody listened.

He died in 1916, and the fad faded for decades.

It resurfaced in 1976, when Dannon’s In Soviet Georgia ad campaign put elderly Georgians on American television crediting yogurt for their long lives.

The campaign ran into 1978 and turned the company profitable again.

The same longevity pitch now fills refrigerated cases across Pennsylvania as gut-focused sodas.

5. Red Light Therapy Panels

Red light therapy panels are one of the fastest-growing corners of the beauty industry in 2026.

Brands like Omnilux and HigherDose sell glowing panels as searches for light-emitting diode (LED) face masks rise 34 percent in a single year.

The sales pitch is a few minutes of glow in exchange for smoother, calmer skin.

Before World War II had even ended, Pennsylvania households already tried a version of this.

General Electric marketed home sun lamps through the 1930s and 1940s, promising the same ultraviolet glow would fight off colds and toughen up children through a long winter.

That wasn’t the last comeback.

Storefront tanning salons swept the country in the late 1970s.

By the early 1980s, the trade group representing tanning salons was already telling The New York Times the fad had run its course.

Tanning beds brought the same promise roaring back before the decade was over.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began regulating the tanning industry in 1988.

Doctors at the time treated a suntan as proof of health rather than a warning sign.

The light itself wasn’t fake.

What nobody understood yet was the skin cancer risk, and once that link became clear, the lamps that once sat in the family room disappeared from stores.

Tanning beds took longer to fall out of favor, but the same risk was waiting for them too.

6. Cold Plunge Tubs

Cold plunge tubs have turned into a genuine industry, with the market leader Plunge pulling in more than $100 million in revenue in 2024 alone.

The sales pitch is a ninety-second shock to the system, marketed as a reset button anyone can buy.

A Washington County steelworker was doing this for free decades before anyone sold a $100 million version of it.

Gus Brickner started swimming the Monongahela River as a teenager in the 1920s and kept at it nearly every day, through every season, for more than 40 years.

Winter never stopped him.

On January 24, 1963, he swam through the river’s ice for six minutes and twenty-two seconds in an air temperature of eighteen degrees below zero.

The feat landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records, one of two he would hold for cold-water swimming.

Neighbors started following him into the water every New Year’s Day.

By 1966, a small Pittsburgh band of eight or ten men were calling themselves the Polar Bear Club.

That club still jumps into the Monongahela every January, six decades later.

7. Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is everywhere in 2026, from 16:8 eating windows to one-meal-a-day plans built around apps that track every hour of a fast.

Skip breakfast, eat inside a short window, and the promise is a leaner body without ever counting a calorie.

Exactly fifty years ago, Pennsylvania already lived through a fasting-based diet craze.

Robert Linn, a doctor from Broomall, Pennsylvania, published The Last Chance Diet in 1976, a liquid-protein fasting plan that sold more than two million copies.

Wealthy clients lined up at a Washington clinic for weekly liquid-protein appointments.

Doctors at the time, including a Harvard nutrition specialist, argued the plan was reckless without medical supervision.

Linn was found negligent.