Tag: Gwyneth Paltrow

David Gorski, an actual medical doctor, takes a look at Goop and the medical doctors who defend it.

One thing the publicity did reveal is just how much about the money Paltrow is:

This is Paltrow’s peculiar gift — or grift — and it was on full display at “In Goop Health,” her day-long event meant to bring her website’s “most requested and shared wellness content to life.” By last week, all 500 tickets, ranging from $500 to $1,500, had sold out; another event is planned for New York City in January.

Attendees were told via email to arrive at 9 a.m. The summit wouldn’t actually begin for another hour, which allowed enough time to shop inside a cavernous industrial space for Goop-branded products such as water bottles ($35), hoodies ($100) and a “G.”-branded flight pack consisting of four thin nesting canvas bags containing some magnesium packets, a sleep mask, earbuds and moisturizer ($198).

It was the physical manifestation of the day to come: For those willing to spend so much on so little, Paltrow will happily take your money.

This is, of course, what Goop is about far more than anything else, which Colbert’s skewering mocked so well. And there is a lot of quackery, pseudoscience and nonsense. It ranges from “leech facials” (whatever that is—wait, I don’t want to know) to aura photography (basically Kirlian photography, showing that no pseudoscience or mysticism ever completely disappears) to IV drips to earthing to crystal therapy (of course!) to the lectin avoidance diet. (More on this last one later; it suffices for now to say that lectin is the new gluten.) Indeed, the Goop brand was best described as “pure, unadulterated, blood-diamond free, organic-certified, biodynamic, moon-dusted bullshit.”

But it’s not just goofy beauty-product marketing.

Beauty products have always featured a healthy helping of woo, after all. But that’s not all Goop promotes. It also promotes The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, plus other quackery like detox cleanses, naturopathy, colon cleanses, functional medicine, and a whole lot of dubious fad diets. This dubious medical advice is then coupled with fear mongering about “mold toxicity,” the Epstein-Barr Virus as the root of all chronic illness, and the long-debunked claim that bras predispose to breast cancer. So, yes, it might be amusing that Paltrow has claimed that there are all sorts of “toxins” in shampoo (which is, of course, why she says you should buy her shampoos) or that goat’s milk is the cure for what ails you, but she’s fused the usually relatively minor woo associated with beauty and “wellness” with some serious quackery. She’s basically taken beauty woo and weaponized it into something that is no longer just a relatively harmless bit of nonsense for customers with, as comedians Mitchell and Webb once put it, a “vague sense of unease, a touch of the nerves, or even just more money than sense.” It’s gotten serious.

And then the doctors got into the act.

It finally happened about a week and a half ago, when an article by two of Goop’s doctors was published on the Goop website. The title? “Uncensored: A Word from our Doctors.” The two doctors in question were Dr. Steven Gundry, who is doing his best to turn lectins into the new gluten, and Dr. Aviva Romm, who claims that EBV is the cause of thyroiditis, which is the cause of…well, basically almost all chronic diseases. It was basically a hit piece on Dr. Gunter, who is one of the most persistent and widely quoted bloggers criticizing Goop.

And another actual medical doctor, as opposed to a movie star or an offspring of Queen Brenda.

never have I seen such a passive-aggressive, self-righteous combination of tone trolling and mansplaining in a single article. His is merely a somewhat more subtle form of ad hominem attack. One also has to wonder why Goop decided to attack Dr. Gunter specifically and not, say, Prof. Tim Caulfield, who actually wrote a book entitled Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness. Could it be because the editors of Goop thought it would be easier to paint a woman as unreasonable and—dare I say it?—hysterical? Perish the thought! Or why didn’t Goop attack Stephen Colbert? It couldn’t be because he’s the host of a popular late night [show] that might one day be needed to help promote one of Paltrow’s movies someday, not to mention that Colbert could very easily punch back with devastating effect, could it? Perish the thought!

Oh dear, how cynical. I’m shocked.

Dr. Romm invoked a veritable crank bingo of tropes, such as the “science was wrong before” trope (also invoked by Dr. Gundry), before going all “just starting a conversation” on us:

In a time when women are desperately hungry for safe alternatives to mainstream practices that too often fall short of helpful for chronic symptoms, and in the setting of a medical system that is continually falling short of providing lasting solutions to the chronic disease problems we’re facing: I prefer, rather than ridiculing vehicles that are actually highly effective at reaching large numbers of women who want to be well, to seek to understand what women are looking for, what the maintstream isn’t providing; and how we can work together to support those vehicles in elevating their content so that women are receiving the meaningful, and evidence-based answers, they want and deserve, whenever possible.

TRANSLATION: Don’t mock us, even though we peddle absolute nonsense sold with bafflegab. We’re highly effective at reaching large numbers of women who want to be well. Then we well them expensive nonsense.

Or sell them, probably, but “well them” is a good way of putting it. Lie back, relax, and let us well you [for a steep fee].

Read the whole thing.

A Hadley Freeman tweet alerted me to new news from Gwyneth Paltrow.

https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/893350561600471040

https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/893350837464051712

To Architectural Digest we go, to drink our fill of this luxurious general store with its straw hats on the wall.

Gwyneth Paltrow and the Hamptons go together like a Hans Wegner chair in a Scandinavian-style home. That’s why Paltrow, who has a home in Amagansett, finally decided to bring her signature Goop Mrkt out East, and it’s not your typical polished Hamptons boutique. Tucked inside a 20th-century cottage, the store is more like a chic general shop you would find in an English seaside town, which is exactly the look Paltrow wanted to achieve when she enlisted former Soho House designer Vicky Charles, of Charles & Co., to reimagine the landmarked property.

People replying to Freeman’s tweet are providing poignant details of the chic general shop you would find in an English seaside town: the stale cakes, the Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie, the three day old sausage rolls under a heat lamp by the till, the combination of scratch cards, cheap strong lager and dusty tins of Tyne brand beef curry.

For the benefit of @gorskon & other US readers, this is what an actual English seaside town "general store" looks like. pic.twitter.com/dvEkrroMP1

— Val Dobson (@ValDobson) August 4, 2017

Ah the olde worlde charme.

Goop’s own products, curated specifically for the Hamptons lifestyle, create an extra layer of contemporary. In the “mudroom,” guests are greeted with herb bundles hanging from the wall; beach essentials, like a leather-wrapped cooler from Jayson Home; and gardening supplies, including a brass mister and Womanswork gloves. “This particular space was inspired by a room in an English cottage, where you can just kick off your wellies and store your gardening tools,” says Brittany Pattner, Goop’s creative director.

Other items are more farm-focused, such as tomatoes grown from the outdoor garden and fresh-baked bread from Eli Zabar, which will be delivered daily. “It’s all about the easy, breezy life you live out here,” says Pattner. “We wanted to create a really holistic experience of not only curating products, but also providing the right context for those items.” Mission accomplished.

It’s curated specifically for the Hamptons lifestyle.

*goes to visit Goop site*

Gee that looks familiar. It looks like Ivanka. They should team up – Gwyneth and Ivanka, GI for short. Government Issue or GastroIntestinal, whatever.

There are photos of very thin very clean very blond very pale ladies all over, along with photos of the shoes and tops and bags they might like to buy purchase.

There’s a piece on the Illuminati, and another on Ancient Civilizations. There’s an ad for magical fruit juice.

There’s a “detox” section.

Within that section, there’s a section for Detox Shops. Of course there is.

There’s also a very sciency page where a guy called Bruce Lourie answers all the questions about is detox really not bullshit at all are you sure?

Bruce holds a B.Sc. in Geology and a Master’s in Environmental Studies.

Close enough!

Goop fights back, aka A Word from Our Doctors responding to evidence-based criticisms of the woo peddled by Paltrow and the goop team.

As goop has grown, so has the attention we receive. We consistently find ourselves to be of interest to many—and for that, we are grateful—but we also find that there are third parties who critique goop to leverage that interest and bring attention to themselves. Encouraging discussion of new ideas is certainly one of our goals, but indiscriminate attacks that question the motivation and integrity of the doctors who contribute to the site is not.* This is the first in a series of posts revisiting these topics and offering our contributing M.D.’s a chance to articulate theirs, in a respectful and substantive manner.

We always welcome conversation. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do. What we don’t welcome is the idea that questions are not okay. Being dismissive—of discourse, of questions from patients, of practices that women might find empowering or healing, of daring to poke at a long-held belief—seems like the most dangerous practice of all. Where would we be if we all still believed in female hysteria instead of orgasm equality? That smoking didn’t cause lung cancer? If every nutritionist today saw the original food pyramid as gospel?

Uh huh, and they laughed when Beethoven sat down at the piano, but that doesn’t mean that all people who sit down at the piano are geniuses as long as somebody laughed. Some innovators are dismissed at the start; it does not follow that all innovators are right.

Plus describing evidence-based medicine as “a long-held belief” in contrast to the rational innovations of goop is not altogether honest. They’re framing EBM as the Ancient Superstion and woo as the Brave New Rational Discovery.

And then lumping together “empowering” and “healing” is a cheat. Anyone can find anything “empowering,” because that word doesn’t mean much and is infinitely adaptable, but “healing” is another matter. Sometimes healing can just mean feeling better, and psychology can play a big part in that, and some kinds of woo can be useful. In general, though, healing is a matter of technical knowledge, such as how to reduce inflammation or how to deal with bacterial infections or a bunch of other things that take several years to learn to professional standard.

Last January, we published a Q&A with Shiva Rose about her jade egg practice, which has helped her (and legions of other women who wrote to us in response) feel more in touch with her sexuality, and more empowered.

There. Like that. What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? And what does it have to do with medicine?

A San Francisco-based OB-GYN/blogger posted a mocking response on her site, which has the tagline: “Wielding the Lasso of Truth.” (We also love Wonder Woman, though we’re pretty sure she’s into women taking ownership of female sexual pleasure.)

There was a tremendous amount of press pick-up on the doctor’s post, which was partially based on her own strangely confident assertion that putting a crystal in your vagina for pelvic-floor strengthening exercises would put you in danger of getting Toxic Shock Syndrome—even though there is no study/case/report which links the two—and also stating with 100 percent certainty that conventional tampons laden with glyphosate (classified by the WHO as probably carcinogenic) are no cause for concern. Since her first post, she has been taking advantage of the attention and issuing attacks to build her personal platform—ridiculing the women who might read our site in the process.

And that’s just garbage – the doctor they’re talking about so slyly is Jen Gunter, and she was well known long before that post, and she doesn’t do this to “build her personal platform” – she does it to warn people about dangerous nonsense.

Gwyneth Paltrow should be ashamed of this.

*Note the contradiction.

Updating to add Jen Gunter’s response.