In one episode of Netflix’s The Goop Lab, you can’t help but wonder if Gwyneth Paltrow even believes in what she’s selling. Ever since Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow created Goop, her infamous lifestyle brand that has since grown into a multi-million dollar business, the company and its boss have been subject to ridicule and skepticism.
It’s hard not to be somewhat suspicious of a group that makes outlandish claims about the benefits of jade vaginal eggs, sells “psychic vampire repellent”, and espouses the health boosts provided by coffee enemas. The announcement that Netflix planned to collaborate with Gwyneth Paltrow on a six-part docuseries raised many questions about the ethics of allowing a major platform to a company that has thrived on misinformation and anti-science rhetoric.
Netflix’s The Goop Lab, which dropped this month, primarily functions as an extended advert for the website and various products it sells, and by and large has clamped down on some of the more ludicrous aspects of Goop. That may be a side-effect of the series having to comply with certain legal standards, as evidenced by the show’s disclaimer that it is “designed to entertain and inform – not provide medical advice.” It’s a weak defense given that The Goop Lab exists to commodify a certain brand of wellness and promote it uncritically to the largest audience possible. One of the main problems with the series, however, is that you can’t help but wonder if Paltrow and Goop even believe in what they’re selling.
The Goop Lab Episode Four Almost Debunks Itself
In the fourth episode of The Goop Lab, titled “The Health Span Plan”, Paltrow and her team investigate biological aging and whether or not it can be slowed down through diet and natural beauty treatments. The basic objective of the episode is to see if Paltrow and two of her colleagues can reverse their internal aging through what they eat – or, in the case of Paltrow, what they don’t eat. The three women choose different diets to see what changes can be made to their overall age in the space of three weeks. Wendy Lauria, the company’s senior vice president of brand partnerships, tried a vegan diet, while Elise Loehnen, the series’ co-host and Goop’s Chief Content Officer, tried a pescatarian diet, which is also referred to as the Mediterranean diet. Paltrow, meanwhile, went for the most extreme diet and took part in a five-day “cleanse” which was essentially a form of intermittent fasting.
The diet, designed by Valter Longo, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, involved consuming between 500 and 800 calories a day, well below the recommended number for a healthy diet. Paltrow is frequently shown throughout this episode looking exhausted and miserable, and even as she insists that she’s feeling good, she comments on how tired she feels and how demoralizing the experiencing is. The other women fare better with their diets but the (lack of) proof in their benefits comes at the end of the episode.
At the beginning of their diets, the women were tested for their biological age, which was performed by pathology professor Morgan Levine and relied on an algorithm based on elements such as metabolism, organ health, and cardiovascular functions. The women were all deemed to be at least a year younger in terms of biology than their actual age. Paltrow’s pseudo-starvation diet allegedly added 1.7 years to her life, yet Lauria’s age didn’t change at all despite the many health benefits of veganism. These details are poorly explained and offer nothing in terms of discussing the known benefits of long-term diet changes. The implication the show gives, even though Paltrow and company are obviously hesitant to say it out loud, is that none of this really works.
The Unusual Beauty Treatments On Goop Lab Don’t Do Much Either
The episode’s self-owns don’t end with diets. The women also undergo some unusual forms of beauty treatments that claim to slow down the aging process through natural means. Gwyneth Paltrow gets the infamous “vampire facial”, a treatment that involves removing the customer’s blood, separating the plasma out, then injecting it back into the skin for supposed anti-aging benefits. The show never mentions that the treatment has widely been called a fad by experts, one where the supposed benefits remain deeply questioned. It’s also worth noting that two customers of a New Mexico beauty salon who received the vampire facial ended up being infected with the HIV virus last year. Promoting potentially dangerous treatments and ideas is, sadly, par for the course with Goop.
Lauria receives a “thread lift”, wherein threads are essentially hooked under the skin to suspend the soft tissue of the face, while Loehnen undergoes facial acupuncture. While the latter is a treatment recognized as effective by the World Health Organization, neither seems especially effective by the episode’s end. When the three women are asked to describe how different they look, none of them sound that convinced and the results aren’t noticeable to the audience. It would have been one thing if they had simply gotten to the end of this “journey” and said that the changes were minimal or unproven, but The Goop Lab insists on asserting that everything is great. For a series that claims it wants to inform its audiences, its ethos is built on actively doing the exact opposite. No mention is given for extenuating circumstances either, such as the fact that Paltrow and her colleagues are mega-rich and have access to the finest beauty treatments on the planet.
The Goop Lab is never skeptical about the things it discusses and promotes, even while they insist that they’re a relatively neutral party simply trying to ask questions. This is awkward enough when they’re getting behind anti-science ideas and treatments with dangerous possibilities, but it just ends up being cringe-inducing when it’s obvious that they don’t seem especially enthused or convinced by what they’re shilling. Episode four is a remarkable display of what happens when someone’s self-awareness is completely lacking. Of course, just because their own suspicions seem obvious to the audience, that doesn’t negate the potential damage caused by Netflix and Goop giving uncritical platforms to ideas and figures with the power to cause real harm to those who participate in them.
