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Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop hiring fact checker after backlash over dubious wellness claims

Gwyneth Paltrow is hiring a fact checker for Goop after backlash over dubious wellness claims [Photo: Getty]
Gwyneth Paltrow is hiring a fact checker for Goop after backlash over dubious wellness claims [Photo: Getty]

Self-identifying as a modern lifestyle brand, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop claims it provides “cutting-edge wellness advice from doctors, vetted travel recommendations, and a curated shop of clean beauty, fashion and home.”

Among the infinite list of overpriced body creams and smoothie ‘potions’, lies advice on where to eat in different destinations and “how to achieve the leanest livable weight.”

Often coming under fire for dubious health claims, Paltrow has announced the lifestyle website will be hiring a full time fact checker.

Speaking to New York Times Magazine, Paltrow said the new staff member will begin in September, calling the new hire “a necessary growing pain” for Goop.

Launching in 2008, the website featured gift guides, some of the actor’s favourite products and often-unfounded health advice. Health experts everywhere began criticising the website, regularly confronting the featured health claims.

If you know what vaginal steaming is then you most likely have Paltrow to thank. Featuring the process of steam cleaning her vagina at a spa on Goop, the actor made claims about the procedure that left gynecologists everywhere screaming out in frustration. Describing the steaming as an “energetic release – not just a steam douche – that balances female hormone levels.”

Gynecologists were quick to counteract the claim, stating the vagina is capable of cleaning itself and there’s no way the steam would reach the uterus, as implied by Paltrow.

In the same interview, Paltrow revealed that her brand’s relationship with Condé Nast fell apart after the publisher introduced fact checking to the magazine.

Initially planning to publish the Goop magazine regularly, the relationship ended after two issues with the actor claiming there were a lot of ‘rules’ in working with Condé Nast.

Promoting the health benefits of edible sex bark to make you frisky and using jade eggs to strengthen your pelvic floor, Goop was awarded the “Rusty Razor” by The Skeptic. Crediting the brand’s pseudo-science, the award was a ‘landslide win’ and another check for the growing skepticism surrounding Goop’s health claims.

While the identity of the fact checker has yet to be released, Twitter has been alight with reactions. Some are even suggesting Goop hire Canadian doctor Jen Grunter who dedicates part of her blog to confronting the health claims made by the brand.

Goop may continue to make audacious health assertions, but the entrance of a fact checker this fall should improve the claims, putting health experts worldwide at ease.

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