For a long time, Gwyneth Paltrow was chiefly known to the public as an actress, with her notable credits including Seven, Shakespeare in Love and The Talented Mr. Ripley. These days though, Paltrow has retired from acting and is focused on running her wellness and lifestyle brand/company Goop, which has skyrocketed in popularity over the last decade. However, with that increased profile has come more claims that Goop’s health recommendations are “pseudoscience,” which Paltrow recently took some time to address.
Gwyneth Paltrow launched Goop in 2008, the same year that she debuted as Pepper Potts in Iron Man, and now the company is reported to be a $250 million business. That said, Goops has been criticized over the years from various doctors and scientists for championing products and methods that aren’t scientifically proven. Here’s what Paltrow said to CBS News after being asked what she had to people accusing Goop of promoting pseudoscience:
I genuinely don’t understand where that comes from, because we don’t do that. We’ve never done that. I mean, especially when we started, there were so many modalities and ways of achieving wellness that had no scientific backing, but that have worked in India for thousands of years, or worked in China. So, I think it was, like, a way to take shots at us. But there’s nothing that we talk about that’s actually that wacky.
Among the criticism that’s been directed at Goop in recent years includes Simon Stevens, chief executive of England’s National Health Service, taking aim at Gwyneth Paltrow and the company back in early 2020 following the premiere of the Netflix show The Goop Lab over “dubious wellness products and dodgy procedures.” Two years prior to that, Goop had to pay $145,000 in civil penalties for selling its “vaginal eggs” with dishonest claims. Speaking of those eggs, the CBS News interviewer, Tracy Smith, brought them up as a product that might be worthy of the “wacky” descriptor,” to which Paltrow said:
There’s a whole industry now around strengthening your pelvic floor. We were just early! … We would talk about something and the internet would freak out. And then, you know, six months later or two years later it would be widely adopted.
This isn’t the first time that Gwyneth Paltrow has directly commented on Goop-related criticism. Going back to The Goop Lab, Paltrow said in February 2020 that she and everyone else involved with the brand/company “do what we do in total integrity, and we love what we do,” as well as accused the media of “they’re turning to the tabloidization to get the clicks” regarding the outlets that took issue with how certain topics were covered on the show. In this CBS interview, Paltrow also mentioned going “gluten-free” as another trend that she got in on before it became widely adopted.
It is worth noting that back in 2017, Gwyneth Paltrow admitted that she doesn’t always “ know what the fuck we talk about” regarding Goop, but a half decade later, she’s confident that things are on the right track with this professional endeavor. Still, count on CinemaBlend to pass along any new information concerning Goop, including if it becomes the subject of another controversy. For those interested in catching Paltrow’s last acting performance (to date), stream The Politician with a Netflix subscription.