NEED TO KNOW
Author Amy Odell delves into Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness company Goop in her new book Gwyneth: The Biography
She explains the various health claims and controversies within Goop while creating awareness of the “big wellness” industry
Odell says Paltrow successfully “made wellness a luxury commodity”
In her new book, Gwyneth: The Biography, author Amy Odell dives deep into the star’s world of wellness: the cleanses, the controversies, and those infamous candles.
According to Odell, Gwyneth Paltrow’s interest in wellness, which evolved into Goop’s calling card after it launched in 2008, “began when her dad came down with throat cancer. She was trying to figure out what caused it and she went down a rabbit hole of what we know today as ‘big wellness,’ an industry that demonizes things like toxins and chemicals present in everyday items that we can’t escape. I think that kind of indoctrinated her to this industry.”
In Paltrow’s 2013 cookbook, Odell says, the star shared a prior health scare when she thought she’d had a stroke (she hadn’t), which, along with her father’s diagnosis, led her to seek advice from various experts and gurus.
Afterwards, Odell writes, “She went to see a host of doctors (she referred to them as ‘doctors,’ but not all of them were medical doctors). She was convinced something was wrong with her. They suggested it was a migraine headache coupled with a panic attack … At this point, Gwyneth had been trying to optimize her life for years, overriding ordinary emotional pain — anxiety, grief, anger — through physical interventions like intense exercise and radical changes in diet.”
One of her doctors, Alejandro Junger, Odell writes, suggested an “elimination diet,” which forbade coffee, alcohol, dairy, eggs, sugar, shellfish, potatoes, tomatoes, wheat, meat, soy and more, along with anything processed.
“She’ll kind of be seduced by this gurus and doctors, even though they don’t always have medical training, and she’ll publish what they say in Goop,” notes Odell. “But she kind of moves from one to the next.”
Gwyneth Paltrow/Instagram
Gwyneth Paltrow cooking chicken
As the site’s wellness content grew, products such as jade eggs, to “increase sexual energy and pleasure” and procedures, including coffee enemas, made headlines.
In 2018, Goop agreed to pay a $145,000 settlement for “misleading” claims about the effectiveness of three of their products — including two of their vaginal eggs.
The lawsuit, brought against Goop by ten counties in California, argued that the company made unscientific claims about the health benefits of their Jade Egg and Rose Quartz Egg and their Inner Judge Flower Essence Blend, which they said would help prevent depression.
Gwyneth Paltrow/Instagram
Gwyneth Paltrow
Odell interviewed Jen Gunther, an ob-gyn and critic of the site’s pseudo-scientific theories about the jade egg controversy. “She wrote an article about why the claims Goop was making about it were false,” says Odell. “And then Goop recruited its own experts to write a response and Gwyneth introduced that to the world by putting out on social media, along with, ‘When they go low, we go high,’ which was an odd way of using Michelle Obama’s famous quote.”
Still, the attention only drove more traffic to the site — and the star.
In 2017, Paltrow hosted a health forum, where, as Odell describes in the book, “Guests could then try out ‘sound bath meditation,’ as well as a ’10-minute facelift’ during which an organic sugar thread was inserted into the cheek. (Gwyneth told her staff she subscribed to this, along with a little filler, though she was open about disliking Botox, saying that it made her look ‘crazy’ and ‘like Joan Rivers.’”)
Gwyneth Paltrow/Instagram
Gwyneth Paltrow wearing Goop eye masks
According to Odell, who interviewed over 220 sources, “The early days of Goop were fun, before the medical misinformation became part of it — and you got an odd window into her world and what it was like to have that money, that privilege and that lifestyle.”
Over time, she says, “She made wellness a luxury commodity.”
She hopes the book will bring more awareness to the industry of “big wellness.”
“I think we have to understand that the wellness industry is trying to sell us things — and I think part of the appeal of Goop’s wellness products and content was — I’ll get one step closer to Gwyneth’s beautiful life. But you can’t buy Gwyneth’s life. You can’t buy that privilege.”
Read the original article on People
