Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website shows she is no free radical but a costly quack

WHO needs a GP when you’ve got GP — Gwyneth Paltrow and her wellness website, Goop.com, offering unsolicited health advice, asks Susie O’Brien.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop has come under fire in the US.

STEP aside, Paleo Pete Evans. There’s a new public health quack in town.

Who needs a GP when you’ve got GP — Gwyneth Paltrow and her wellness website, Goop.com, offering unsolicited health advice?

Thanks to Goop you can live the Gwyneth lifestyle, which seems to be wholly dependent on accepting cassava root as the new “it” alternative flour and buying a $4000 pair of pink leather overalls.

In Goopland you don’t eat nuts, you spend $176 on an automatic nut-milk maker. And after school you don’t give your children strawberries, you spend three hours making them “fruit leather” instead.

But what else can you expect from Paltrow, who’s known for saying things like: “When I pass a flowering zucchini plant in a garden, my heart skips a beat” and “I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin”.

Paltrow’s website is a curious brand of high-end fashion and new-age hokus pokus.

Gone are the days when the followers of ’70s-era spiritual healers wore clothing made of crocheted body hair.

Now, thanks to Goop, they’re more likely to be sporting the perfect $620 “pant with leg dart”. And they’re likely to be spending up big on bizarre items with completely bogus health claims.

Well, I’d rather smoke crack than put a jade egg up my privates to increase my sexual energy and pleasure. (Isn’t that what alcohol was invented for?)

Goop’s Jade Egg, retailing at $83, is supposed to help women “connect the second chakra (the heart) and yoni for optimal self-love and wellbeing”.

The website tells us the eggs are “pre-drilled for string add-on, for which it’s recommended people use unwaxed dental floss”. Thank goodness there’s no returns policy on this item.

Not surprisingly, Goop has come under fire in the US, with the Truth in Advertising lobby group referring it to federal authorities. They claim Goop makes unsubstantiated and deceptive health and disease-treatment claims to market its products. Who can blame them? The items they object to include Unicorn Skin (10-pack for $75) to increase cell turnover, coffee that cures cancer and Moon Juice to help you stay calm.

Indeed, Goop is packed with products that claim to treat depression, anxiety, autism, infertility, arthritis and uterine prolapse. It’s a sign of today’s wellness climate, where medicine and science are under suspicion, and untrained quacks peddling dodgy products are seen as the trustworthy ones.

Chef Pete Evans promoting his paleo lifestyle. Picture: Justin Brierty

Paltrow struck back, saying she wanted to “highlight alternative studies and induce conversation”. And sell a crap ton of expensive goods in the process, it seems.

Last year, 500 US women paid up to $1500 to attend the Goop Wellness Summit to hear all about cosmic flow and healing modalities, and to get fed water intravenously in the carpark.

It was a brilliant opportunity to help women part with their hard-earned money without any obligation to use rationality or reason at any point in the day. As one participant pointed out, never has so little cost so much.

But what else should we expect from a website that promotes the scientific benefits of going barefoot because it increases blood flow and cures arthritis, insomnia and depression? Apparently, going shoeless also “neutralises free radicals”.

Clearly, this is wrong. Paltrow is no free radical — you’ve got to pay heaps of money to access her branded goods. Don’t be fooled. This wacky wellness trend is not about autonomy and it’s not about health. It’s about selling products such as $45 sex “dust” and magical energy healing stickers ($150 for a pack of 24).

Some of the stuff on the website is just plain nuts. Goop even has an article describing hairdressers as “wound healers”, a haircut as a form of “psychic protection”, and hair as an “energetic antenna between realms”. Naturally, the article ends with products to buy, including $80 essential oils. At that price, the hairdresser is surely the one doing the wounding.

One article on Goop overviews the milk of 11 “non-bovine mammals”. It concludes camel’s milk “is pretty much the closest you can come to a human mother’s milk, particularly in terms of immune-boosting proteins like lactoferrin and immunoglobulins”. Camel’s milk didn’t go so well for Pete Evans, I seem to remember.

Just to press the point, there’s no medical consensus that crystal harmonics will treat infertility. Earthing will not cure arthritis. Goop vitamins will not address anxiety and memory issues. (Although you might worry where all your money has gone). And buying Trauma Repair Flower Essence Blend won’t “soothe emotional trauma” just as it won’t repair the trauma of getting conned into parting with $30.

There you have it: the scoop on Goop. Sounds like we all need to consciously uncouple from Paltrow and her site’s loopy claims.

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist

@susieob

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