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Thread: Gwyneth & Goop

  1. #1
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    Gwyneth & Goop

    Gwyneth Paltrow Thinks You Need $60 Sex Dust
    BY LAUREN CARUSO, SENIOR DIGITAL EDITOR, JANUARY 22, 2015, 5:35:00 PM



    Today in Things Gwyneth Paltrow Thinks You Really, Really Need (TM): Sex Dust. $60 Sex Dust, no less. The woman who is downright obsessed with chopped salad (her words, not ours) is going crazy over a brand called Moon Juice. GP featured a four-ounce jar of the stuff on Goop this week and was nice enough to supply her readers with a recipe for Sex Bark(!), so you’re not just pouring it down your throat all willy-nilly.

    In the brand’s words, the purpose of Sex Dust, an “aphrodisiac warming potion,” is to help “send waves of blood to all the right places.” It’s made from an herbal tonic called he shou wu, which Google says helps delay graying hair and knee replacements. Gwynnie promises that it’ll promote “enjoyable sex and fertility for both men and women.” Oh, and it’s low-glycemic, just like its cousin Spirit Dust. Thank goodness.

    According to the Goopster, "The spirit dust feeds harmony and extrasensory perception through pineal gland de-calcification and activation, while the hemp seeds feed the brain, nourish the eyes, stimulate blood cells, and beautify hair and skin." Just in case you’re feeling extra ****ed off from the long line at Dean & Deluca. Just kidding. There’s never a line at Dean & Deluca.

    All jokes aside, the woman always looks like she just emerged from a cashmere cocoon made by a thousand gluten-free hummingbirds, so maybe she’s onto something.
    Sex Dust
    A lusty adaptogen to ignite, excite and cultivate the sexual flow in both men and women. This ancient, warming elixir sends waves of sensitivity and power to all the right places, as it supports your primordial energy and vital essence. A holistic approach to deeply nourished sexual vigor, supports not only the bedroom flow but your highest creative potential.

    Add one teaspoon to 8oz of any hot or cold liquid. Delicious with nut milk water or tea. 15.5 servings per jar. Don't be afraid to double dose!

    Wild Crafted Ingredients: Ho Shou Wu, Cistanche, Cacao, Shilajit, Maca, Epimedium, Schisandra, Stevia

    Quantity 1 $60.00
    More on Gwyneth and TCM here. More on Ho Shou Wu here.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  2. #2
    Greetings,

    Wasn't He Shou Wu trashed a few years ago as being toxic to the liver? I guess it comes down to who is selling it and who is making money off of it.

    Why spend that kind of money on something you can make yourself for so much less?


    mickey

  3. #3
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    It's all in the marketing, mickey

    If I could get celebrity starlet endorsement like these, I could sell qi beaters like hotcakes.

    But seriously now, the creator of Moon Juice Sex Dust claims she never went to college. I wonder now if she even went to TCM school. What qualifies one as a 'health master'?

    ‘I never went to college a day in my life’: The woman behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s mind-altering ‘sex dust’


    Gwyneth swears by moon dust, but what is it? Getty Images

    By HANNAH FERRETT
    03:39, 16 Mar 2016

    GWYNETH Paltrow swears by adding a teaspoon of moon dust to her daily morning smoothie, but what is the mood-boosting powder and who created it?

    Moon dust is the brainchild of Amanda Chantal Bacon and comes in six varieties - sex, spirit, action, brain, goodnight and beauty. Each blend is supposed to radically enhance one area of your life, so whether you need help in the sack or are more concerned with a good night's sleep there's one for you.

    Amanda explained: "Gwyneth and I are successful in our fields. We have disposable income and choose to use the adaptogens [plants with holistic effects], herbs and plants several times a day.

    “We don’t say you have to have mucuna [a medicinal herb] or you will be fat, sick and nearly dead. We are just a resource for this stuff, and maybe you just sprinkle some raw herbs on a bowl of spaghetti.

    "I never went to college a day in my life. I just took art classes, travelled the world, and worked.”


    Looking to boost your sex life? Perk up with the powder Getty Images

    Amanda is a health master, with two of her Moon Juice shops already open in Los Angeles.

    Although she hasn't been to university, she's been obsessed with clean living since she was a kid and was so ill she was regularly sick.

    She said: "I had severe respiratory problems at a very young age, and I coughed so much at night that I threw up.

    "I went on antibiotics and did the whole Western rigmarole, but one day in a health-food store an ayurvedic [holistic] doctor heard me coughing and told me to stick out my tongue.

    "Within minutes he said to stop eating sugar, wheat and dairy, and I was completely healed in a matter of days."

    That wasn't the end of her problems though, with the moon dust guru suffering a slew of health issues when she hit her teenage years.

    With mood and learning problems as well as pre-diabetes, Amanda began to look into her diet. She claims to have completely healed herself by using herbs and supplements.


    Rachel McAdams is also a fan Getty Images

    She added: "I find that I’ve been able to transcend all of those diagnoses."

    Amanda doesn't have any qualifications in nutrition or medicine, but has a herbalist on hand to help her come up with the powders. They are influenced by Eastern cultures and have been a major hit with other celebrities too, such as Hollywood actresses Shailene Woodley and Rachel McAdams and star Zoe Kravitz.

    Fans claim the dusts improve their hair, skin and nails, but anti-ageing expert Dr Lionel M Bissoon is not so sure. He remains "a bit skeptical" about their promises, querying whether they contain enough active ingredients to have much impact.


    Zoe Kravitz has hit the moon dust too Fame Flynet

    Amanda's dedication to her diet has been questioned before. After her food diary, which contained many herbs and supplements, was published in a magazine many poked fun at it - but Amanda insists the teasing is actually positive.

    She argued: "When you strip away the bad manners, the questions that are coming up are valid and intelligent: ‘Does it work? Is it safe? Is it too expensive?'"
    Gene Ching
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  4. #4
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    True that, Gene! Moon Juice has a very well composed marketing presence that would convince the targeted female audience that they absolutely need this product.

    Regarding the formula itself, it is interesting, though I doubt the "dust" is enough to get much of an effect, though some folks are very sensitive.

    He Shou Wu builds blood and essence.

    Cistanche is Rou Cong Rong - a moist Kidney Yang tonic - libido is linked the Kidney function (esp the Yang) in TCM. This herb is also good for keeping your poop regular, cause, you know, nothing kills the mood like missing your daily BM.

    Shilajit is an Ayurvedic substance that is basically an ooze that comes from the rocks in the mountains of the Himalayas. Contrary to the Wikipedia entry, it has been shown in several studies to have adaptogenic, cardioprotective and immune modulating effects.

    Cacao is raw chocolate substance, which as you know is an aphrodisiac for women

    Maca is a root from Peru that is very nourishing, stimulating to the nervous system and has p-methoxybenzyl isothiocyanate which supposedly can have aphrodisiac effects as well.

    Epimedium is Yin Yang Huo or ***** Goat Weed... any questions? Oh, TCM cautions against long term use of this substance 'cause it'll harsh your Kidney Yin with too much Yang movement.

    Schisandra is Wu Wei Zi, the 5 Flavored seed - it's known for its astringent qualities and its ability to "calm the spirit" - 'cause, you know... nothing kills the mood more than getting into an argument 'cause you're all tense. This might actually help to moderate the drying effect of the ***** goat weed.

    Not a bad formula, but for 60 bucks... sheesh.

    peace out

    herb ox

  5. #5
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    Deceptive goop

    When Gwyneth's Goopy Jade Eggs get Busted...

    Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop product claims 'deceptive,' watchdog group says
    By Dianne de Guzman, SFGATE Updated 8:08 pm, Wednesday, August 23, 2017


    Gwyneth Paltrow attends book signing at goop-in@Nordstrom at The Grove on June 8, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Goop has come under fire for a number of products the site sells, with a watchdog group criticizing various health claims in the site's product marketing. Photo: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images For Goop
    Photo: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images For Goop

    Gwyneth Paltrow-run lifestyle website Goop is being called out again for its wellness products, after a consumer watchdog group cited more than 50 instances in which the site offered "deceptive" health claims in marketing for its products.
    The group has filed a complaint with the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force to look into Goop's marketing practices.
    Truth in Advertising compiled a list of instances it felt Goop falsely claimed that its products (or third-party products) could "treat, cure, prevent, alleviate the symptoms" for a variety of health issues, from thyroid dysfunction and infertility to uterine prolapse and hormonal imbalance.
    "These [Goop-endorsed products] include crystal harmonics for infertility, rose flower essence tincture for depression, black rose bar for psoriasis, wearable stickers for anxiety, and vitamin D3 for cancer," TINA.org wrote in a blog post on its site Tuesday.
    "The problem is that the company does not possess the competent and reliable scientific evidence required by law to make such claims."
    The group fired off a letter to Paltrow and the Goop group about its findings, asking on Aug. 11 that the company modify how its content, in what TINA.org labelled as "illegal health claims." The group gave Goop a deadline of Aug. 18 to make changes to the product descriptions, before they took its issues with the site to the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force.
    At its preset deadline, the group felt that the changes Goop made were not enough and sent a letter to California regulators.
    In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Goop representative said that "while we believe that TINA's description of our interactions is misleading and their claims unsubstantiated and unfounded, we will continue to evaluate our products and our content and make those improvements that we believe are reasonable and necessary in the interests of our community of users."
    The representative went on to say that the company felt it "responded promptly and in good faith to the initial outreach from representatives of TINA and hoped to engage with them to address their concerns. Unfortunately, they provided limited information and made threats under arbitrary deadlines which were not reasonable under the circumstances."
    Paltrow and Goop's health claims have come under fire for various products over the past few years, since its jump from a beauty newsletter to selling wellness products. Goop made past headlines for promoting $120 Body Vibes stickers that were allegedly made with "the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits," saying the stickers would "rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies." (NASA, in turn, refuted those claims, and a former chief scientist at NASA was quoted as saying, "Wow. What a load of B.S. this is.")
    Goop was also criticized for selling jade eggs, claiming that inserting the egg-shaped stones into a woman's vagina would balance hormones and improve the user's sex life. That information was disputed by San Francisco obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Jennifer Gunter, who said that using the jade egg as directed could lead to bacterial vaginosis or potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.
    The site also drew recent comparisons to radio show host Alex Jones's InfoWars and the two sites' shared love for selling wellness items with questionable health claims.
    Gene Ching
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    Coffee enema + Jade egg = ?

    She may not be a trusted health advisor but I give her props for marketing.

    Why Gwyneth Paltrow Is Not Your Trusted Health Advisor
    The actress’ Goop website promotes health gear and diets. It also has pushed vagina eggs and coffee enemas. That has brought it some harsh criticism.


    Gwyneth Paltrow is widely known for her Academy Award-winning performance in the 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love.

    She’s also popular with many comic-loving cinema fans for her role as Pepper Potts in the Iron Man series.

    Paltrow is also known as the founder and owner of Goop, a lifestyle website that features healthy living content, style advice, and a robust e-commerce section that sells all the products you need to live the Goop life.

    The website, in fact, has become popular enough that it just completed its second Goop Health Summit, held in New York City this past week.

    It’s Goop that’s added the word “controversial” before Paltrow’s long list of accomplishments and acclaims.

    Goop, which started in 2008 as a newsletter Paltrow produced herself, is today a multimillion dollar lifestyle brand with product extensions, licensing agreements, educational summits, and even a print magazine.

    Alongside stories about what florals are best to wear in the winter, you can find vitamin packs geared to helping you work faster and stronger.

    Beside a story about the parasites hiding on a playground, you can find cautionary pieces about asbestos in cosmetics.

    The Goop mission is to help you navigate a world that’s filled with toxic and potentially dangerous products.

    “We take a curious, unbiased, open-minded, and service-centric approach to the work we do,” Goop writes on their website.

    But that “unbiased” approach has left many skeptics in its wake — and with some evidence to back up their suspicions.

    Goop and its controversies
    Take, for example, a $66 jade egg that raised eyebrows and ire last summer. The egg’s promise, the site says, is “to increase sexual energy and pleasure.”

    Goop writes that their “beauty guru/healer/inspiration/friend” Shiva Rose turned them on to jade eggs, calling it a “strictly guarded secret of Chinese royalty.”

    When the egg first hit Goop’s site, the condemnation was swift.

    “We’re never particularly surprised when our stories break the internet, but we were surprised by the reception of the jade egg, which stirred up a formidable debate about the practice,” Goop editors wrote in a piece that followed the egg’s release.

    They then backed up their sexuality boosting stone ovum with letters from fans who said the practice has worked wonders for them.

    Carol Queen, PhD, the staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, co-founder of the Center for Sex & Culture, and author of “The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone,” calls the jade egg “too good to be true.”

    “I’ve been horrified by a lot of her sex-related items because it doesn’t seem that either she or her doctor associates know enough about sexuality, the genitals, etc.” Queen told Healthline. “She also hasn’t chosen to find someone who does know a lot and, of course, if she did, she might have fewer things to sell.”

    Queen says any attention to sexuality and sexual health is likely always a good thing, but the jade eggs — and many of Goop’s other products meant to promote sexual energy — are just a bridge too far.

    “A person can be credulous when it comes to alternative claims, and if they don’t know enough about health and sexuality to begin with, they won’t be able to easily assess whether what they are hearing is correct information,” she said.

    “Now, the placebo effect is a thing, and if a person believes that the item has a positive effect on their vaginal health, they are touching themselves to insert it, focusing on that area of the body, actually caring for its wellbeing, all this might have some good effects,” Queen added. “The ‘but’ of this statement has to do with the energy the stone supposedly possesses and that’s not a scientifically sound idea. It’s also about the egg itself. It won’t be a comfortable size for everyone. It can be difficult to insert if it’s too big for an individual. It can be even harder to take out. And stone isn’t always a safe material to insert into the body. It can have microfissures that might collect bacteria, for instance.”

    More recently, a $135 coffee enema stirred the unease of many medical experts.

    The enema, named the Implant-O-Rama, was listed as part of the brand’s “Detox Guide.” The other items listed in the guide (scrubs, saunas, and such) look to cleanse every pore, pocket, and pleat of your body, but the enema was the target of much indignation.

    Enemas had a heyday in the alternative medicine world in the early 1900s, but as word spread of the potential dangers, the colon cleanses waned in popularity.

    In fact, in 1919, the American Medical Association condemned the use of colon cleanses. More recently, the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology said in a statement that coffee enemas are “not merely useless but potentially dangerous.” The Mayo Clinic reports that coffee enemas have been to blame for several deaths.

    Despite these warnings, enemas and colon cleanses have seen a robust return as the rise of “alternative” medicine increases in popularity.

    Paltrow’s Goop is perhaps the most high-profile proponent of the practice, but they’re certainly not alone.

    “In the past, we referred to lotions, potions, and elixirs with unproven efficacy as snake oils,” Zach Cordell, a registered dietitian nutritionist and an assistant professor of nutrition at Daytona State College in Florida, told Healthline. “We still have many of these around today, where people will use scientific sounding words, pick and choose what they want to believe, and it will bring people in. If you have a big soapbox to stand on, you are likely to have a larger payout.”

    Despite numerous requests by Healthline for comments on this story, Goop officials did not make a representative from their organization available for an interview.

    What’s Paltrow’s responsibility?

    Alongside these controversial products are seemingly harmless items such as bath soaks and menstrual cups.

    The latter is listed as an alternative to pads and tampons, “many of which are made with harmful chemicals,” the Goop site states.

    “Her celebrity gets people in the door and perhaps the controversy does, too, but she’s just one very high-profile player in a field that has a long history [of] alternative therapies,” Queen said. “Not everything that can be described that way is problematic, nor is it likely that all the things sold on Goop are dangerous. But a customer might want to do a little due diligence on items they’ve never encountered, or ask themselves if there are ways such an item might be unsafe.”

    But Donna Flagg, creator and founder of Lastics & Lastics Body, a body products company, says Goop and Paltrow are only a vessel, not a maker, for these products and their claims.

    “Goop is essentially a retailer, a store. My opinion, with regard to Goop and Gwyneth, is that she is a target for one of two reasons, but more likely it’s some combination of both,” Flagg said. “One, she sells a lifestyle, but more importantly, a philosophy which challenges much of the establishment. That philosophy touches all aspects of our lives. That makes her a broader threat than, say, a company making moisturizers. Through her business, she exposes a lot of companies and their practices who do not want to be exposed.”

    “Two, she is a famous, beautiful, and beloved woman,” Flagg continued. “This gives her tremendous influence among her audience, influence that is authentic, which no amount of money can buy.”

    Flagg adds that these larger companies may try to discredit her influence by promoting the controversies.

    “Generally, the responsibility of claims falls on whoever makes the product,” Flagg said. “Manufacturers formulate, test, and package the products. They are the ones who have the information about their product’s performance, not the retailer. A retailer is a customer of the manufacturers, and treated as such.”

    For their part, Goop writes, “We test the waters so that you don’t have to. We will never recommend something that we don’t love, and think worthy of your time and your wallet. We value your trust above all things.”

    However, their process for selecting items and retail partners isn’t transparent.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
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    Continued from previous post

    What do you do about Goop?

    Cordell says Paltrow and Goop have the large platform to promote their health and wellness products, their body positive messages, and many of their claims because of Paltrow’s star and popularity.

    And, he concedes, the film star and brand promoter does some great things with that stage.

    “I am a critic of some of their practices but admit that some of Gwyneth’s approaches are valid. Her recommendation for body positivity is beneficial, and her approach to lifestyle change is helpful rather than diets, is accurate,” he said.

    Still, Cordell says, some of the claims aren’t sound or even ethical, and that can leave a naïve audience susceptible to the “snake oils” of celebrity health claims.

    “There are some truths and half-truths mixed in with product placement that promise health results that the science cannot back up,” Cordell says. “Along with that, Goop and other celebrity influencers skate a very dangerous line of giving medical advice that is not grounded in science, and providing goods with claims that are unsubstantiated by research.”

    “If a medical provider such as a doctor, nurse, or dietitian were to promote practices with unproven scientific claims,” he said, “there could be consequences, such as coming under review by the licensing board, being sued for malpractice, or losing your license to practice.”

    Dr. Charlie Seltzer, a Philadelphia-based weight-loss expert, agrees with Cordell’s assessment of the advice.

    “In a direct sense, Goop is probably more irresponsible and misguided than dangerous,” Seltzer told Healthline “The cleanse information, which appears to be pretty prevalent [on their website] is ridiculous. There is no real science behind the ideas or claims, and I almost get the feeling Goop is encouraging self-diagnosis.”

    Seltzer says there’s room for “alternative” approaches to healthcare and wellness in today’s modern medical environment, but that information should still be based on sound and vetted information. That, Seltzer says, isn’t coming from Goop.

    “My issue is that people with no real experience or qualifications are giving advice on how to be healthy based on anecdotes and bad science,” he said

    So how do you know what the balance is? How do you find a healthy point on the axis between modern medicine and fully alternative?

    “You should become as educated as possible to make an informed decision,” Seltzer said. “If you don’t want to do that, find a practitioner you can trust and ask him or her. One of my favorite parts of my job is to explain to patients the different approaches to treatment, what the research says, and what are the risks and potential benefits of each avenue.”

    “For the most part, however, the information is just ineffective and a waste of time to read or try to do,” he added. “I’d encourage anyone taking advice from Goop to run it by a knowledgeable, qualified healthcare professional.”

    Readers of Goop’s articles and advice may find beneficial elements among their stories. After all, articles like “10 Brands That Really Care” promotes companies that give back or make their products from sustainable sources. “What to Eat When You Have the Flu” is a rundown of comforting foods almost no one could quibble with — chicken soup made the list.

    But nestled among those innocuous articles are some claims that Queen, and skeptics like her, hope you’ll take with a grain of salt.

    “Jade eggs, wasps’ nests, vaginal steaming, and coffee enemas are all somewhere on the continuum that goes from pretty bad for you to deeply bad for you,” Queen said. “I’d like to see her stick to selling yoga gear, personally.”
    Thread: Gwyneth & Goop
    Thread: Jade Egg
    Gene Ching
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  8. #8
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    Apitherapy


    Woman dies after having bee-sting therapy

    3 hours ago


    SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    Apitherapy is the use of substances from honeybees to treat medical conditions

    A woman has died after undergoing bee-sting therapy, a form of treatment backed by Gwyneth Paltrow.

    The 55-year-old Spanish woman had been having live bee acupuncture for two years when she developed a severe reaction.

    She died weeks later of multiple organ failure.

    Researchers who studied the case say live bee acupuncture therapy is "unsafe and unadvisable".

    It is thought to be the first death due to the treatment of someone who was previously tolerant of the stings.

    The woman's case has been reported in the Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology, by doctors from the allergy division of University Hospital, Madrid.

    She had been having the treatment once a month for two years at a private clinic to improve muscular contractures and stress.

    During a session, she developed wheezing, shortness of breath, and sudden loss of consciousness immediately after a live bee sting.

    She was given steroid medication but no adrenaline was available, and it took 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

    The woman had no history of any other diseases like asthma or heart disease, or other risk factors, or any previous allergic reactions.
    What is apitherapy?
    Apitherapy is the use of substances from honeybees, such as honey, propolis, royal jelly, or even venom (extracted or from live bees), to relieve various medical conditions. One type of apitherapy is live bee acupuncture.
    Although some benefits of apitherapy have been reported, they have mainly been anecdotal.
    Bee-venom therapy has been used for treating conditions including arthritis and MS.
    The theory behind the treatment is that bee stings cause inflammation leading to an anti-inflammatory response by the immune system.
    But the Multiple Sclerosis Trust says "there is no research to show it is an effective treatment for people with MS". They said a 2008 review of non-conventional approaches to treating MS found that there was only marginal evidence for bee-venom therapy.


    GETTY IMAGES

    In an interview with the New York Times in 2016 Gwyneth Paltrow said she had tried apitherapy.
    "I've been stung by bees. It's a thousands-of years-old treatment called apitherapy. People use it to get rid of inflammation and scarring. It's actually pretty incredible if you research it. But, man, it's painful."
    And on her wellbeing website Goop she says she was "given 'bee-venom therapy' for an old injury and it disappeared".
    Last year, Gerard Butler revealed he had been injected with bee sting venom to try to help reduce inflammation from stunt work. He ended up in hospital after he was injected with the venom of 23 bees. He said he felt like his heart might explode and as if he had ants under his skin.
    The doctors found severe anaphylaxis had caused a massive stroke and permanent coma with multiple organ failure.

    The report's authors called for:

    Patients to be fully informed of the dangers of apitherapy before undergoing treatment
    Measures to identify sensitised patients at risk should be implemented before each apitherapy sting
    Apitherapy practitioners should be trained in managing severe reactions
    Apitherapy practitioners should be able to ensure they perform their techniques in a safe environment
    They should have adequate facilities for management of anaphylaxis and rapid access to an intensive care unit
    But they acknowledged that because the treatment often takes place in private clinics, these measures may not be possible.

    One of the report's authors Ricardo Madrigal-Burgaleta concluded: "The risks of undergoing apitherapy may exceed the presumed benefits, leading us to conclude that this practice is both unsafe and unadvisable."

    Amena Warner, Head of Clinical Services for Allergy UK, said:

    "The public need to be very aware of the unorthodox use of allergens such as bee venom. This will come with risk and, in susceptible individuals, can lead to serious life threatening reactions."
    Threads:
    bee stingers for needles
    Gwyneth & Goop
    TCM Fails
    Gene Ching
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  9. #9
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    just asking questions

    goop is finally going to fact-check its bull**** claims
    hazel cills
    today 9:35am


    image: Getty

    goop doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to recommending alternative ~* wellness *~ treatments. The company has endorsed experts who claim that gmos cause depression, bee-sting treatments that killed one woman, and sticking jade eggs up your vagina. And after many, many, many people have called out goop’s dangerous and unsubstantiated recommendations, gwyneth paltrow says she’s finally hiring a full-time fact-checker for goop.

    In a long profile of paltrow and goop over at the new york times magazine, writer taffy brodesser-akner reports that while all of the negative press about the site over the past few years may have generated some nice traffic, paltrow has decided goop needs some extra support:

    After a few too many cultural firestorms, and with investors to think about, g.p. Made some changes. Goop has hired a lawyer to vet all claims on the site. It hired an editor away from condé nast to run the magazine. It hired a man with a ph.d. In nutritional science, and a director of science and research who is a former stanford professor. And in september, goop, sigh, is hiring a full-time fact-checker. G.p. Chose to see it as “necessary growing pain.”

    in other words, it seems like goop is finally going to have to answer for its bull**** wellness claims. It’s also a big deal considering that goop was originally supposed to make their magazine with condé nast and in partnership with anna wintour, but paltrow reportedly backed out of the deal because of the journalistic constraints of the company like...fact-checking! “goop wanted goop magazine to be like the goop website in another way: To allow the goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of q. And a.s published, and that just didn’t pass condé nast standards,” writes akner. “those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies.”

    and whenever an outlet has criticized goop for peddling information that’s false or could hurt people (such as when an advertising watchdog group accused the site of incorrectly claiming many of its products could cure depression, anxiety, and infertility, to name a few), paltrow and her partner elise loehnen respond that they’re not making statements, they’re “just asking questions.” and it doesn’t hurt that the crazier the post, the more people visit the site, which paltrow herself reportedly admitted to a class at harvard:

    “i can monetize those eyeballs,” she told the students. Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: To corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about g.p. Herself and turn them into cash. It’s never clickbait, she told the class. “it’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.” the room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” as if she were yodeling.

    Keep yodeling gwyneth, but now your yodels will have to be legally vetted.
    vagina! Vagina! Vagina!
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
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  10. #10
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    quarter B

    How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million
    Inside the growth of the most controversial brand in the wellness industry.


    Gwyneth Paltrow.Credit Amanda Demme for The New York Times

    By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
    July 25, 2018

    On a Monday morning in November, students at Harvard Business School convened in their classroom to find Gwyneth Paltrow. She was sitting at one of their desks, fitting in not at all, using her phone, as they took their seats along with guests they brought to class that day — wives, mothers, boyfriends. Each seat filled, and some guests had to stand along the back wall and sit on the steps. The class was called the Business of Entertainment, Media and Sports. The students were there to interrogate Paltrow about Goop, her lifestyle-and-wellness e-commerce business, and to learn how to create a “sustainable competitive advantage,” according to the class catalog.

    She moved to the teacher’s desk, where she sat down and crossed her legs. She talked about why she started the business, how she only ever wanted to be someone who recommended things. When she was in Italy, on the set of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” she’d ask someone on the crew about, say, where the best gelato was. When she was in London, on the set of “Shakespeare in Love,” she asked a crew member where to find the best coffee; in Paris, she asked an extra where to find the best bikini wax; in Berlin, the massage you can’t miss. She wasn’t just curious. She was planning this the whole time.

    The first iteration of the company was only these lists — where to go and what to buy once you get there — via a newsletter she emailed out of her kitchen, the first one with recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins. One evening, at a party in London, one of the newsletter’s recipients, a venture capitalist named Juliet de Baubigny, told her, “I love what you’re doing with Goop.” G.P., as she is called by nearly everyone in her employ, didn’t even know what a venture capitalist was. She was using off-the-shelf newsletter software. But De Baubigny became a “godmother” to Paltrow, she said. She encouraged her vision and “gave permission” to start thinking about how to monetize it.

    At first, Goop — so named not just for her initials and for, you know, goop, but because someone along the way told her that all the successful internet companies had double O’s — appealed to an audience that admired G.P.’s rarefied lifestyle. Martha Stewart (for example) was an aspirational lifestyle brand, true, but the lifestyle was so easily attainable once Stewart took her wares to Kmart and Macy’s.

    G.P. didn’t want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop’s ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn’t mean you shouldn’t have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn’t mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.

    By the time she stood in that Harvard classroom, Goop was a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information, and soon it would become a TV-show producer. It was a clearinghouse of alternative health claims, sex-and-intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There was no part of the self that Goop didn’t aim to serve.

    “I want to help you solve problems,” G.P. said. “I want to be an additive to your life.” Goop is now worth $250 million, according to a source close to the company.

    The students nodded studiously as she spoke about her clothing line and CPGs and “contextual commerce” and open rates and being “cash positive” and “radical wellness” and how she likes to hire “smart people with founder DNA” and working mothers: “That ***** will get things done.”

    For all the students’ questions about those newsletters and their use of all kinds of three-letter acronyms, it felt to me as if everyone was missing the point. G.P.’s business began in 2008 and was incorporated in 2013, but it really started when she was being hunted by the paparazzi and living in such a lonely, high-altitude world that she could basically be friends with only Madonna. Or even before that when, as a 19-year-old, she would run lines with her mother, the actress Blythe Danner, and Danner noticed that it was all too easy for her, that there was something preternatural about her talent (an assessment one of her former co-stars also said to me almost verbatim). Or maybe even before that, when some combination of her parents’ DNA formed a genetic supernova that would allow for her name to appear in the same paragraph as the word “luminous” 227 times when searching in a LexisNexis database.

    The outside world began to creep in. The students asked second-date questions about the topics she has been criticized for, starting with charges of elitism. Someone asked how she planned to engage with people of lesser incomes. She said: “It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational. Not in price point, because content is always free.” The things they were making — the clothing, yes, but also the creams and oils — couldn’t be made cheaply. “Our stuff is beautiful,” she said. “The ingredients are beautiful. You can’t get that at a lower price point. You can’t make these things mass-market.”

    They nodded, mesmerized, stars and dollar signs in their eyes. They took notes, but why? When G.P. said “aspirational,” she wasn’t kidding. Her business depended on no one ever being able to be her. Though I guess it also depended on their ability to think they might.

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    Gene Ching
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  11. #11
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    Continued from previous post


    Goop products, including the Dry Brush, the Jade Egg and the Rose Quartz Soothing Face-Massage Roller, on display at Goop’s wellness summit in Los Angeles in June.CreditMatt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

    The minute the phrase “having it all” lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces. It was a way to reorient ourselves — we were not in service to anyone else, and we were worthy subjects of our own care. It wasn’t about achieving; it was about putting ourselves at the top of a list that we hadn’t even previously been on. Wellness was maybe a result of too much having it all, too much pursuit, too many boxes that we’d seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed.

    Before we knew it, the wellness point of view had invaded everything in our lives: Summer-solstice sales are wellness. Yoga in the park is wellness. Yoga at work is wellness. Yoga in Times Square is peak wellness. When people give you namaste hands and bow as a way of saying thank you. The organic produce section of Whole Foods. Whole Foods. Hemp. Oprah. CBD. “Body work.” Reiki. So is: SoulCycle, açaí, antioxidants, the phrase “mind-body,” meditation, the mindfulness jar my son brought home from school, kombucha, chai, juice bars, oat milk, almond milk, all the milks from substances that can’t technically be milked, clean anything. “Living your best life.” “Living your truth.” Crystals.

    Goop’s first newsletter left G.P.’s kitchen in 2008, right when the economy was collapsing around us. It wasn’t just the homes people no longer owned and the jobs people no longer had. It was the environmental crisis. It was the endless exposure of corruption. Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?

    These phenomena gave an easy rise to Gwyneth Paltrow, who was at first curating teas and lingerie and sweaters she thought you’d like. But people were looking for leaders, and she was already committing public displays of ostentatious wellness: She showed up at a movie premiere with cupping marks on her back; she let bees sting her because I don’t know why. Suddenly Gwyneth Paltrow, the movie star, was a major player in an industry that was big business.

    Other celebrities followed. Jessica Alba’s Honest Company was worth more than $1 billion at its peak, but it really offers mostly cleaning and beauty products. Miranda Kerr has a line of organic beauty products. Amanda Chantal Bacon’s Moon Juice, a line of supplements, is a ship launched directly from Port Goop. None of them aim to treat every single aspect of the human as wholly as Goop does. Nothing is as elemental an extension of its source as Goop is.

    The Goop campus in Santa Monica consists of four squat gray buildings, where in June a diverse group of about 200 young, exuberant, well-dressed people were working hard to plan the coming weekend’s event, the In Goop Health wellness summit. G.P. sat at her desk behind the glass walls of her office, which was spare and also decorated in shades of gray. Her golden hair fell over the paper she was reading. She was wearing a tank top, shearling-lined white Birkenstocks and Goop x Frame wide-legged palazzo jeans. Back when she wore them at Harvard, I’d never seen anyone else wear them. Now she was making them, and everyone else I knew was wearing the same style.

    We ate salmon hand rolls. She was trying to be low-carb today, but it wasn’t happening. There was too much going on. The wellness summit, a daylong immersion in Goop-endorsed products, panels, doctors and other “healers,” was a “heavy lift for the team.”

    “It’s intense, man,” she said. She reached behind her to her bookshelf, which held about a dozen blue bottles of something called Real Water, which is not stripped of “valuable electrons,” which supposedly creates free radicals something something from the body’s cells. “It’s insane, and then I have to do a lot on the day, and I really don’t like speaking in public, and I have to keep getting up in front of a crowd.”

    The summit is great, don’t get her wrong. All three so far have sold out, with tickets ranging from $500 to $4,500, the highest of which included two dinners with G.P. plus two nights at Casa del Mar. But lately she has been wondering if the summit does everything it needs to. She worries that she’s just serving the same customers over and over. She met a woman who took a very long bus ride from she thinks rural Pennsylvania to the Goop summit in New York in January. “Seventy-nine percent of our American customers aren’t in New York or Los Angeles,” where these summits are held, she said; they’re in secondary markets.

    So how do you bring them in? There have been pop-up Goop stores everywhere from Dallas to Miami. There would be a digital pass to the summit. But you can’t taste a plate of ancient grains and avocado in citrus dressing on a computer. You can’t feel someone push warm oil with a jade roller over your skin through an iPad. You can’t eat a piece of chocolate that will supposedly not just regulate your hormones but restore your sex life — chocolate! — on your phone. You can only watch some panels and one-on-one conversations. So she’s thinking they might take the thing on the road. Can you believe this? She was incredulous. She still remembers sitting in her kitchen in London, celebrating a day when $45 had come in because of an advertising partnership.

    The newsletter was at first kind of mainstream New Age-forward. It had some kooky stuff in it, but nothing totally outrageous. It was concerned with basic wellness causes, like detoxes and cleanses and meditation. It wasn’t until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking: advice from psychotherapists and advice from doctors about how much Vitamin D to take (answer: a lot! Too much!) and vitamins for sale and body brushing and dieting and the afterlife and crystals and I swear to God something called Psychic Vampire Repellent, which is a “sprayable elixir” that uses “gem healing” to something something “bad vibes.”

    That was the year after G.P. met Elise Loehnen, 38, a former magazine editor who had been ghostwriting for G.P.’s friend, the extremely extreme personal trainer Tracy Anderson, in whose business G.P. is a minority stakeholder. Loehnen wasn’t just interested in wellness; she was obsessed with it. Wellness, she argued, isn’t just about a spa you’re going to or a cleanse you’ve started or a diet you’re on. It’s how local your food is. It’s how the chickens you eat all went to the right schools. It’s the water you drink. It’s the cures you never thought possible. It’s the level of well-being you didn’t even know to ask for.


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    Gene Ching
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  12. #12
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    Continued from previous post


    Paltrow and Elise Loehnen, Goop’s chief content officer, at the wellness summit.CreditEmma McIntyre/Getty Images

    G.P. was so excited by the way Loehnen thought. Over the last few years, as wellness went mainstream, G.P. allowed her two sides — the G.P. who was known to sit without underwear over mugwort steam to regulate her hormones and the G.P. who wanted the $2,132 straw pocketbook from Sanayi 313 that is, to be clear, made of straw — to finally be one.

    With Loehnen as editorial director, Goop began publishing extended Q. and A.s with doctors and healers like Alejandro Junger, a cardiologist who created an anti-inflammatory regimen and recently talked on Goop’s podcast about frog venom as a psychedelic for healing, which, O.K.! Steven Gundry, a cardiac surgeon, believes that lectins, a protein in some foods, are dangerous for people with autoimmune diseases. (There are a great many people who do not believe this.) Anyone from an acupuncturist to a psychic to an endocrinologist to a psychologist addressed questions that the modern woman couldn’t seem to find answers to: Why am I so unhappy? Why am I so tired? Why am I so fat? Why don’t I want to have sex anymore?

    There were stories that talked about bee-sting therapy (don’t try it; someone died from it this year) and ashwagandha and adaptogens and autoimmune diseases — an autoimmune disease at every corner, be it thyroid disease, arthritis or celiac disease; trust them, you have one. Last year, G.P. gave a platform to her friend Shiva Rose, a healer who talked about inserting a jade egg into the vagina, which she says concubines did and which she claimed could help prevent uterine prolapse. This did not go unnoticed! They sold a brush that would help your lymph flow, a salt shampoo that would detoxify your scalp, a water bottle with rose quartz in it that would infuse your water with positive energy.

    Goop knew what readers were clicking on, and it was nimble enough to meet those needs by actually manufacturing the things its readers wanted. When a story about beauty products that didn’t have endocrine disrupters and formaldehyde got a lot of traffic in 2015, the company started Goop by Juice Beauty, a collection of “clean” face creams and oils and cleansers that it promised lacked those things. When a story about “postnatal depletion,” a syndrome coined by one of the Goop doctors, did even-better-than-average business in 2017, it introduced Goop Wellness, a series of four vitamin “protocols” for women with different concerns — weight, energy, focus, etc. Goop says it sold $100,000 of them on their first day.

    The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

    With assaults coming from all sides, Goop began to dig its heels into the dirt, not only because dirt is a natural exfoliant and also contains selenium, which is a mineral many of us are lacking and helps with thyroid function. Now Goop was growing only more successful. Now Goop was a cause, and G.P. was its martyr.

    In February, G.P. invited me over to dinner at her house, which lay heart-stopping beneath the Los Angeles palm trees and an impossible sky. She wore a white shirred-neck dress by Tibi that would be advertised in the Goop newsletter the next week as she stood in front of her stove, steaming clams and grilling bread in her devastating kitchen. She wore no apron and cooked the meal herself right in front of me. She wore no apron and cooked it herself right in front of me and drank a whiskey on the rocks.

    A woman who has worked for G.P. for a long time stood beside her, cooking an entirely separate dinner for G.P.’s children. The meal we would eat — the clams and the bread — took only a half-hour to make, but G.P. said it could have taken only 15 minutes if we weren’t talking so much. It is a recipe out of her fourth cookbook, “It’s All Easy,” which she wrote in the wake of her divorce from Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay. Suddenly, as a single mother, she wanted to create recipes that followed her particular set of food values but that she could execute quickly.

    G.P. asked what I would like to drink. I asked for a glass of red wine. G.P. gave the nod to someone over my left shoulder. I turned to see Jeffrey, the same man in a shawl-collar sweater who opened the door for me earlier. He nodded back.

    “Is he your butler?” I whispered to her when he was out of earshot.

    “No, he’s a house manager,” she said. She doesn’t know what she’d do without him. “He’s the best. He’s from Chicago. He’s so incredible. He helps me with everything.”

    Chris Martin walked in and sat down at the kitchen island and introduced himself. He saw my tape recorder and immediately told me that though I seemed nice and trustworthy, he had no interest in being part of my article, so please keep anything he says out of it.
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  13. #13
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    Continued from previous post


    Goopglow, advertised as ‘‘skincare you can drink.’’Credit Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

    A very good-looking young boy appeared. “Hi, lover,” G.P. said. The boy, whom I recognized as her youngest child, Moses, immediately came to my side, made socially appropriate eye contact and shook my hand. “Hello, nice to meet you,” he said. Moses is 12, about the same age as my older son.

    My phone rang. It was the mother of my son’s friend, back home in stupid New Jersey, and I realized she wouldn’t be calling if not for something gone awry. I apologized to G.P. and picked up the phone. The mom told me that my son was insisting that I was supposed to be picking him up. “I’m in California!” I whispered. “I’m with Gwyneth Paltrow!” She said she’d pass the message along and proceed as usual. G.P. said something, but I couldn’t concentrate because I was trying to understand how my 7-year-old didn’t know that I was out of town. Had I not said goodbye?

    A teenage girl orbited herself into the kitchen. She stuck her hand out to me. “I’m Apple. Nice to meet you.” She had a fine, assured grip and a blunt bob and eyeliner and looked like a child version of the Wes Anderson character Margot Tenenbaum, which, of course, she was.

    “What’s wrong?” G.P. asked.

    “I’m so tired,” Apple said, frustrated, rubbing her eyes with her fists. She sounded exactly like her mother, down to the slight, soft nasal on the vowels: hiiii, Aaapple, guuuys, wooow, tiiiiired.

    G.P. stuck out her lips and clucked sympathy.

    “I started watching ‘The Office,’ and I find it so funny,” Apple said.

    “The English one?” G.P. asked.

    “No, the U.S. one.”

    “You have to see the English one.”

    The children followed Martin into another room so that they could practice their musical instruments with him. As Moses left, he asked G.P. if he should leave both doors open so she could hear him play. She said, “Yes. I want to hear you.” Then, to me: “He’s going to play AC/DC. He keeps such good time.” They were going to become musicians, she just knew it.

    She wasn’t going to have more kids. That she also knew. Her business, her age, which is 45 — not impossible, but still. She’d wanted a third. She told me that after she asked how many I had, and I told her I had two children as well, and it was wonderful, but I was sad I didn’t have a third.

    She told me I should rethink it while I’m still young enough. “All I’m saying is it’s not nothing,” she said. “I really wanted another one.” I nodded solemnly. (Later, I cried.)

    Brad Falchuk, a writer and director, who is also Ryan Murphy’s producing partner, entered the kitchen. He and G.P. had just announced their engagement on the cover of the second issue of Goop magazine, whose theme was, conveniently, sex and love. I congratulated them.

    “Thank you,” he said, standing behind her, his arms around her waist and his face buried in her neck. She registered his snuggle and returned it with a return-snuggle body spasm without stopping her cooking actions.

    I heard the first few notes of “Blackbird” and looked up and around for the speakers. I’d never heard such a beautiful version. “Where is it coming from?” I asked. Again G.P. nodded her chin over my shoulder, my right one this time, and I turned around to see Apple on a couch behind me, strumming her guitar. Apple told me she doesn’t like to use a pick. She likes the calluses.

    “Apple, that’s so beautiful,” G.P. said. I turned back to G.P. in astonishment. She smiled. In front of me, our glasses had been filled again.

    G.P. and Falchuk and I ate the clams with the grilled bread in a candlelit dining room with a fireplace off pewter dishes from Match, which I admired. “They’re getting kind of old,” she said. Her dress remained white. Mine had clam juice down the front.

    After dinner, G.P. and I sat in her living room on the floor. I had read that she smokes one cigarette a week. I had brought a pack of cigarettes to test this out. I used to smoke but stopped more than 10 years ago. She had her own pack of Nat Shermans hidden away somewhere and told me that these days it was more like a few times a year. Falchuk sat with us, tan and smiley, but wouldn’t smoke. “I’ve never had a cigarette in my life.”

    “He’s a doctor’s son,” she said. Then, to him: “Will you be mad?”

    He smiled at her and shook his head. Her feet were bare now, and they had a perfect, substantial arch, just as the Romans intended, engineered to support her statue body. I bet they were a Size 8. People make shoes so that feet like those can wear them. We blew smoke up the chimney.

    I drove back to my hotel to find that a family that owned a Mercedes dealership would be hosting an impromptu all-night party around the pool and that I would never get any sleep. I thought about my children, one of whom plays the flute, but unwillingly, and therefore won’t practice. Yes, I thought about my children, only one of whom might shake your hand while the other would sooner spit on it, though they will both reliably do an elaborate orchestration of armpit ****ing while I’m trying to hear myself think. I thought of my mother and father, and an earlier conversation I had with my sisters that day about where to arrange our parents in a room for one of our kids’ bar mitzvahs so that they wouldn’t interact, so raw still are the wounds 35 years after their divorce. I thought of my big, disgusting Size 11 feet, which are wide and flat and have the look of scuba flippers and which designers have shod only begrudgingly. I thought of the third child I don’t have, the one I ache for. The car salespeople danced below.

    I thought about the word “aspiration,” how to aspire seems so noble, but how aspiration is always infused with a kind of suffering, and I smoked another cigarette.


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    Gene Ching
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  14. #14
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    Continued from previous post

    The quarterly Goop magazine was introduced last fall with a picture of G.P.’s bikinied body covered in mud and just one cover line: “Earth to Gwyneth.” She does things like that to demonstrate a kind of self-awareness around what she knows is the rap on her, that she’s a privileged, white rich lady who is into some wackadoo stuff.

    That issue, like the second issue (the one with a cover photo of her and Falchuk and the words “In Deep”), was $15 on newsstands and a product of a partnership with Condé Nast. At first, it seemed like a perfect fit. “Goop and Condé Nast are natural partners, and I’m excited she’s bringing her point of view to the company,” said Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s artistic director and editor in chief of Vogue, when the deal was announced in April 2017. The print product would be a collaboration — Goop content overseen by a Vogue editor.

    It didn’t work out. “They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way,” G.P. said. The parting was amicable. “But it was amazing to work with Anna. I love her. She’s a total idol of mine. We realized we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules.”

    The rules she’s referring to are the rules of traditional magazine making — all upheld strictly at an institution like Condé Nast. One of them is that they weren’t allowed to use the magazine as part of their “contextual commerce” strategy. They wanted to be able to sell Goop products (in addition to other products, just as they do on their site). But Condé Nast insisted that they have a more “agnostic” editorial approach. The company publishes magazines, not catalogs. But why? G.P. wanted to know. She wanted the Goop magazine to be a natural extension of the Goop website. She wanted the reader to be able to do things like text a code to purchase a product without even having to leave her inert reading position and wander over to her computer. A magazine customer is also a regular customer.

    But the other rule is — well, the thing couldn’t be fact-checked. Goop wanted Goop magazine to be like the Goop website in another way: to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of Q. and A.s published, and that just didn’t pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies. The stories Loehnen, now Goop’s chief content officer, wanted to publish had to be quickly replaced at the last minute by packages like the one on “clean” getaways.

    G.P. didn’t understand the problem. “We’re never making statements,” she said. Meaning, they’re never asserting anything like a fact. They’re just asking unconventional sources some interesting questions. (Loehnen told me, “We’re just asking questions.”) But what is “making a statement”? Some would argue — her former partners at Condé Nast, for sure — that it is giving an unfiltered platform to quackery or witchery. O.K., O.K., but what is quackery? What is witchery? Is it claims that have been observed but not the subject of double-blind, peer-reviewed studies? Yes? Right. O.K., G.P. would say, then what is science, and is it all-encompassing and altruistic and without error and always acting in the interests of humanity?

    These questions had been plaguing Goop for a while — not just what is a fact, or how important is a fact, but also what exactly is Goop allowed to be suggesting? In 2016, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus began an inquiry into Goop for deceptive marketing claims about the life-optimizing powers of Moon Juice products, which appeared on the Goop site as a key ingredient in a smoothie that G.P. drank every morning. (Goop voluntarily stopped making these claims.) And last summer, the watchdog organization TruthInAdvertising.org (TINA) sent G.P. a letter that referred to numerous instances of deceptive marketing claims — that the site’s products cured, treated or prevented inflammation, autoimmune diseases and more. Goop replied and adjusted some of its claims in the short period the letter allotted, but TINA found its response inadequate and reported Goop to the district attorney’s offices in both Santa Cruz and Santa Clara. (The district attorney’s offices would not comment on the matter.)

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  15. #15
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    Continued from previous post


    A light-therapy device meant to stimulate collagen production, being used at Goop’s wellness summit in June.Credit Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

    A gynecologist and obstetrician in San Francisco named Jen Gunter, who also writes a column on reproductive health for The Times, has criticized Goop in about 30 blog posts on her website since 2015. A post she wrote last May — an open letter that she signed on behalf of “Science” — generated more than 800,000 page views. She was angry about all the bad advice she had seen from Goop in the last few years. She was angry that her own patients were worried they’d given themselves breast cancer by wearing underwire bras, thanks to an article by an osteopath who cited a much-debunked book published in 1995. Gunter cited many of Goop’s greatest hits: “Tampons are not vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins are not killing us, vaginas don’t need steaming, Epstein Barr virus (E.B.V.) does not cause every thyroid disease and for [expletive] sake no one needs to know their latex farmer; what they need to know is that the only thing between them and H.I.V. or gonorrhea is a few millimeters of latex, so glove that [expletive] up.”

    But something strange happened. Each of these pronouncements set off a series of blog posts and articles and tweets that linked directly to the site, driving up traffic. At Harvard, G.P. called these moments “cultural firestorms.” “I can monetize those eyeballs,” she told the students. Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about G.P. herself and turn them into cash. It’s never clickbait, she told the class. “It’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.” The room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!” as if she were yodeling.

    As of June, there were 2.4 million unique visitors to the site per month, according to the numbers Goop provided me. The podcast, which is mostly hosted by Loehnen and features interviews with wellness practitioners, receives 100,000 to 650,000 listens per week. Goop wanted to publish articles about autoimmune diseases and infrared saunas and thyroids, and now it can, on its own terms — sort of.

    After a few too many cultural firestorms, and with investors to think about, G.P. made some changes. Goop has hired a lawyer to vet all claims on the site. It hired an editor away from Condé Nast to run the magazine. It hired a man with a Ph.D. in nutritional science, and a director of science and research who is a former Stanford professor. And in September, Goop, sigh, is hiring a full-time fact-checker. G.P. chose to see it as “necessary growing pain.”

    It wasn’t as if the appetite for Goop’s content was going away. I’ve spoken to dozens of people who feel better after a detox cleanse, and science can’t really tell them why.

    I once went to an internist twice, complaining of preternatural exhaustion, only to be told that I was depressed and sent home. On the third visit, she begrudgingly took my blood and called me later to even more begrudgingly apologize and tell me I had a surprising case of mononucleosis. I know women who’ve been dismissed by their doctors for being lazy and careless and depressed and downright crazy. Was it any wonder that they would start to seek help from sources that assumed that their symptoms weren’t all in their head?

    In her office, G.P. opened her MacBook. There was a guy this whole situation reminded her of, and she had forgotten his name, but a quick Wikipedia search and, ah, there it was: “Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, German,” she read to me. Semmelweis, once described as a “savior of mothers,” discovered that cases of puerperal fever could be significantly cut by washing hands before surgery.

    Here she shook her head. “This is so sad. This gives me chills.” She continued reading, “In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum where he died at 47 of pyaemia after being beaten by the guards only 14 days after he was committed.” (There is debate about how Semmelweis died.)

    She stood up. Her posture was a marvel. “You ask what is happening when someone says, ‘Have we just thought about this?’ That” — being beaten to death in an asylum — “is what happened to this guy.”

    “Where do you think it ends for you?” I asked her, getting up from my chair.

    She laughed. “When I’m committed to an asylum.”

    I heard a rumor that she drank a Guinness every day of her pregnancies. I heard a rumor that she was staying with Winona Ryder after her breakup with Brad Pitt and that when Ryder was in the shower G.P. picked up a script on her coffee table, read it and took it for herself, and this precipitated all the troubles Ryder had next. I heard that she had an affair with Viggo Mortensen while she was with Ben Affleck. I heard that she had an affair with her “Sliding Doors” co-star John Hannah when she was with Brad Pitt. I have read more than 100 takedowns of her. I read an article that began with the sentence “I hate Gwyneth Paltrow.” I read a book that was literally called “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?” She was too privileged, they said. She had everything handed to her. Martha Stewart told Porter magazine in 2014: “She just needs to be quiet. She’s a movie star. If she were confident in her acting she wouldn’t be trying to be Martha Stewart.” (Recently, on a talk show, Stewart answered a question about G.P.’s company with professed ignorance. “Who’s Goop?”)

    Or maybe it’s just that G.P. disrupted the contract between the celebrity and the civilian who is observing her. In a typical women’s magazine profile, the implicit pact is that the celebrity will not make the woman feel bad by implying that the woman could have what the celebrity has if only she would work: “It’s all in my genes, what can I say!” the celebrity proclaims. But G.P. was different. She would talk openly about the food habits and exercise obsessions that allowed her to look the way she did. “It’s so much easier to sit home and not exercise and criticize other people,” she told Elle magazine in 2011. “My life is good,” she wrote on Goop’s website, “because I am not passive about it. I want to nourish what is real, and I want to do it without wasting time.” People think they want celebrities to speak honestly, but we’re not really that happy when they do.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
    Support our forum by getting your gear at MartialArtSmart

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