Few celebrities have rebranded themselves quite like Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become perhaps the first Oscar-winner to pivot into an extremely questionable health guru. Goop, her wellness and lifestyle empire, teems with products of dubious efficacy. One of them — a candle called, simply, “This smells like my vagina” — even nearly burned someone’s house down. Now her advice for how to battle COVID-19 has attracted the ire of no less than England’s National Health Service.
In a recent blog post, Paltrow revealed she tested positive for the disease in the early days of the pandemic. She’s fought long-term effects ever since, saying it left her with “long-tail fatigue and brain fog.” She commiserated with a doctor she trusts, and now she’s on a “keto and plant-based” diet, consumes “lots of coconut aminos,” and chows down on sugar-free kimchi. And if she wants to drink she does so with herbal non-alcoholic cocktails, which you can helpfully purchase on the Goop site. She also fasts until 11am every day and takes “an infrared sauna as often as I can.”
If that sound great to you, then NHS England has some bad news: It’s not that great for you. “We wish her well, but some of the solutions she’s recommending are really not the solutions we’d recommend in the NHS,” Professor Stephen Powis, NHS’ national medical director, told The Guardian. “We need to take long Covid seriously and apply serious science. All influencers who use social media have a duty of responsibility and a duty of care around that.”
Powis added: “Like the virus, misinformation carries across borders and it mutates and it evolves. So I think YouTube and other social media platforms have a real responsibility and opportunity here.”
This is far from the first time public health officials have come for Paltrow’s wellness advice. In 2018 Goop agreed to fork over a substantial settlement over their infamous “vaginal eggs,” which had touted unproven health benefits for those who purchased them. She also recently came under fire for trying to claim that she popularized wearing masks to combat COVID-19. On the other hand, she is set to release a follow-up to her “vagina candle,” this one called “This smells like my orgasm.”
(Via The Guardian)