The Top 26 Health & Wellness Trends of 2025

Fitness trackers and smartwatches

Smartwatches and fitness trackers have become essential tools for millions trying to stay active. These devices don’t just passively record steps or heart rate—they actively shape behavior through goal setting, reminders, and gamification.

Whether it’s closing your Apple Watch rings, joining a Fitbit challenge, or tracking recovery scores with WHOOP, users are increasingly relying on data to optimize workouts and stay accountable. Some are even using them to guide sleep and recovery, making them a key part of fitness trends focused on longevity and performance—not just calorie burn.

As wearables become more advanced, they’re also integrating with health apps, stress tracking, and even integrating current AI trends for personalized coaching.

Estrogen therapy

After years of hesitation, estrogen therapy is making a quiet return as one of the top healthcare trends. Once sidelined due to early-2000s studies linking it to health risks, it’s now being reexamined—particularly for its benefits during and after menopause.

Recent research has softened the narrative. While risks remain, newer data suggest that for many women—especially those under 60 or within 10 years of menopause onset—estrogen therapy may significantly improve quality of life. Relief from hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness is often immediate, and for some, it helps restore sleep and cognitive clarity.

That last point is driving renewed interest. Brain fog and mood swings are now widely recognized as core menopausal symptoms, not fringe experiences. Emerging studies link estrogen to cognitive maintenance, making it part of a broader conversation about aging and brain health.

There’s also a demographic force behind the shift: more women than ever are entering menopause. By 2030, the global population of postmenopausal women will exceed one billion. As demand rises, so does innovation. New delivery systems—like patches, gels, and low-dose formulations—are addressing earlier safety concerns and making treatment easier to adopt.

Estrogen therapy isn’t a blanket solution, but it reflects a growing shift in how menopause is understood—not as a decline to be endured, but a phase of life that can be managed with precision.

Mouth taping

The TikTok health trend trend of taping one’s mouth shut at night in order to sleep better and reduce dry mouth, snoring, and throat soreness is gradually making its way to the mainstream, and manufacturers are jumping to cash in with "sleep strips", which are essentially just branded strips of tape priced at enormous markups.

While American consumers are increasingly looking for DIY healthcare solutions, many will also likely have safety concerns about using conventional tape on their mouths at night, fearing they may stop breathing. Companies offering peace of mind can charge a premium — so much so that "sleep strips" are priced at 20-100x more than paper tape on Amazon, despite the two products being functionally the same.

This trend echoes other DIY-inspired personal care trends, like the Theragun and Hypervolt, whose brand-name products can sell for $400 or more, mitigating consumers' fears of being harmed by a (much cheaper) homemade device.

Gut health

Once confined to fiber ads and probiotic yogurt labels, gut health has expanded into something much bigger: a wellness frontier with implications for the brain, mood, metabolism, and more.

What’s driving it isn’t just digestive discomfort—it’s the emerging science around the gut-brain axis. Researchers have found that the microbiome plays a role in regulating neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, leading to new theories about how diet can influence anxiety, depression, and even cognition. That idea—food as a mental health tool—has captured public attention.

Consumers aren’t just adding kombucha or kefir for digestion anymore. They’re reaching for fiber-rich snacks and prebiotic sodas with the hope of improving focus, sleep, and emotional balance. Interest in gut health has become so widespread that it now ranks among the top nutrition trends.

Reddit threads and wellness forums are filled with stories from people who tried everything—therapy, medication, meditation—before adjusting their diet and seeing unexpected mental shifts. Whether those results are placebo or biochemically grounded, they’re real enough to drive behavior.

As wellness continues to merge with neuroscience, the digestive tract has quietly become a site of self-optimization.

High protein

Protein has moved from the margins of bodybuilding culture to the center of the grocery store. Once reserved for powders and bars sold in specialty shops, it now shows up in cereals, chips, and even ice cream—rebranded for everyday life, not just the gym.

Much of the momentum comes from health-conscious consumers looking to simplify. Protein carries a health halo that spans goals: weight loss, muscle maintenance, blood sugar stability, and even aging well. Unlike fat or carbs, it’s rarely villainized. It’s functional, familiar, and increasingly built into routine foods.

Weight management plays a central role. High-protein foods are consistently linked to satiety—helping people feel full with less. This effect isn’t just theoretical; many consumers report that protein-heavy meals reduce the urge to snack and make calorie tracking feel less like a chore.

Convenience is also critical. The rise of high-protein snacks—grab-and-go yogurts, jerky, RTD shakes—caters to people who want healthier options without cooking or planning. It’s food that fits into time-strapped routines without compromising on health goals.

Importantly, the audience has expanded. Once targeted at athletes and dieters, high-protein foods are now marketed to office workers, parents, older adults, and Gen Z shoppers who see protein not as a performance booster, but as a daily baseline, leading it to become one of the top diet and nutrition trends.

Fertility services

For the first time ever, more American women have kids in their thirties, driving significant changes in baby and parenting trends. The shift to later births is both a cause and effect of more women in the workforce, and it has increased demand for fertility-related services—one of the largest women’s health trends today.

76,000 women froze their eggs in 2018, up a staggering 15x from 2013. Now, companies like Kindbody partner with companies to offer healthcare benefits like in-vitro fertilization and egg freezing, a much-discussed benefit at big tech companies like Google and Facebook.

Companies have two reasons for offering these benefits. Most clearly, benefits tend to be specifically appealing in a way that cash compensation is not: they invite someone to imagine a specific scenario where those benefits would make a difference in their lives. More cynically, since the cost of recruiting new employees is high, and since some people leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently after having kids, offering healthcare benefits that encourage having kids later can be a profitable choice.

Many HR leaders report that this is particularly impactful for companies that are trying to improve their diversity numbers and that fertility benefits give them both a way to attract more women and a way to reduce attrition. Historically, egg freezing was primarily for women undergoing chemotherapy or radiation therapy but has since expanded into a way to have more control over when to have kids.

Telemedicine and virtual care

What began as a pandemic workaround has quietly become a permanent fixture in modern healthcare trends. Telemedicine—once considered a niche convenience—has been normalized, streamlined, and, for many, preferred.

The shift wasn’t gradual. In 2020, telehealth claims rose by over 3,500%, driven by necessity. But what’s notable is what happened after: instead of returning to pre-pandemic patterns, usage stabilized at rates nearly 40 times higher than before. This wasn’t just about emergency adaptation—it revealed long-standing inefficiencies in traditional care.

For patients in rural areas or without easy transportation, telemedicine eliminates logistical hurdles. For others, it offers a way to fit care into busy schedules without losing hours to waiting rooms. And the savings are real: some reports show telehealth can reduce the cost of a visit by roughly $100.

Critically, satisfaction hasn’t dropped. In surveys, patients consistently report equal—or higher—levels of satisfaction with virtual visits compared to in-person care. The format reduces friction without sacrificing connection.

Telemedicine isn’t replacing all healthcare, but it’s reframing what basic access can look like. In doing so, it’s reshaping expectations—not just for patients, but for the entire healthcare infrastructure.

Ozempic and semaglutide

Originally developed to manage type 2 diabetes, Ozempic has rapidly gained traction as one of the largest healthcare trends for something else: weight loss. Its active ingredient, semaglutide, mimics a gut hormone that regulates appetite—leading many users to report reduced hunger, fewer cravings, and sustained weight loss over time.

The results are notable. Clinical trials have shown that weekly semaglutide injections can lead to a 10–15% reduction in body weight, levels typically associated with bariatric surgery. That degree of effectiveness, paired with relatively low lifestyle disruption, has driven widespread adoption which mirrors the rise of Botox, one of the largest beauty trends, in becoming a quietly ubiquitous treatment.

What’s especially striking is the scale. An estimated 13% of U.S. adults have now used a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic, marking an unusually fast uptake for a prescription medication. In online forums, many users share that they’ve tried multiple diets with little long-term success—and see Ozempic as the first intervention that meaningfully curbed appetite and stabilized results.

While the long-term effects are still being studied, Ozempic’s rise reflects a shift in how weight management is approached—less about willpower, more about biology. It signals growing demand for medical tools that move beyond traditional advice and offer tangible, trackable outcomes.

Rising healthcare demand

Healthcare systems around the world are entering a period of sustained pressure—not because of a sudden crisis, but because of overlapping long-term healthcare trends.

First is demographics. In the U.S., adults over 65 now make up nearly 1 in 6 people, and that number is rising. Aging populations bring higher rates of conditions like arthritis, heart disease, and cognitive decline, all of which require consistent, often complex care.

Layered on top of that is chronic illness. Roughly 60% of U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition. These aren’t short-term episodes—they’re ongoing needs, demanding continuous management through appointments, prescriptions, and monitoring.

Then there’s the aftermath of pandemic-era disruptions. Preventive care—cancer screenings, regular checkups, early diagnostics—was delayed or skipped for millions. That backlog is now re-entering the system, often with worsened conditions that require more urgent or intensive treatment.

Taken together, these forces are reshaping demand not only in volume but in type. Healthcare is no longer about acute, episodic care—it’s about sustained, coordinated support for aging, chronic, and recovering patients.

Support for mental health in the workplace

Support for mental health in the workplace is becoming more common as businesses respond to larger mental health trends that highlight the connection between emotional wellbeing, productivity, and employee retention. Companies are starting to offer things like counseling, mental health days, and stress management workshops. They say it helps prevent burnout and makes the workplace a supportive environment.