Amy LaRocca
Appearances
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Goop has a history of promoting alternative healers using the popular platform to amplify their techniques. Goop answers with an innocent, just-asking-questions stance, but it presents a danger far more real than the shameless attention grabs.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Jennifer Gunter, a San Francisco gynecologist, has become famous for dissembling the myths Goop pushed via her blog, wielding the lasso of truth, and later on a substack called the Vagenda. It started with a response she published in 2015 to Paltrow's recommending vaginal steaming to balance female hormone levels.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
It's one of the core beliefs of patriarchy, that women are dirty inside, Gunter wrote. And yet, Goop presents this as female empowerment? It's bad feminism. And it's bad science. She took Goop on for a number of disproven theories about underwire bras causing breast cancer, about the benefits of coffee enemas. Dear God, no, Gunter wrote in her book, The Vagina Bible. I just can't even.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Caulfield, for his part, argues that Paltrow is perhaps not the best messenger for ideas about beauty and health. The fact that individuals who have won the beauty gene lottery are setting universal beauty standards is a bit like using NBA power forwards to inspire people to endeavor to be tall.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I think what makes Gwyneth Paltrow dangerous is that people really listen to her. And as we talked about earlier, is that in the absence of advice from experts, she becomes an expert. And I think that's where it gets dangerous. I think people also forget that she's selling beauty products. And that's her motive.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Because a lot of the early positioning of Goop was we're just here to ask questions, it obfuscates the we're here to sell things, which is actually what they're there to do. So, for example, I remember reading something in Goop in the early days of the Goop blog, and it was about cancer-causing chemicals in your shower.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And basically, if you read this piece, you would just think your shower was like a cancer box. Like you were just going into your shower to get cancer. You're not going in there to wash your hair. You're not going in there to wash your face. You're going in there to give yourself cancer. It was in the water. It's in the shower curtain. It was in your shampoo. It was in the shampoo bottle.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I mean, it was terrifying. You'd never shower again if you read this article. And at the bottom of the article, you could click to buy a water filter. You could click to buy shampoo that was safe, that was in glass bottles, that cost $120. And the link to buy it was right there. It was a Goop product. And it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever read.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And you would just finish this and think, God, I must really hate myself. And I must really not care about my family if I'm not going to buy this water filter, if I'm not going to buy this shampoo and this beautiful glass bottle. What kind of person wouldn't?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah. I mean, she really deflects. She really says she uses a lot of like, you know, don't shoot the messenger kind of stuff. And I'm just asking questions and I'm just here to point these things out. And she really never takes responsibility.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah, I mean, it's enormous, right? To start with the positives, her openness, her willingness to talk about it. I think a lot of her biggest contributions around mental health and her willingness to really bring things that had been previously off limits for, you know, into the conversation.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
When it comes to physical health, it's a little bit more complicated because she has been willing to go off the mainstream and promote some kind of out there things that have been disproven.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And it's so interesting, right, because Jenny McCarthy says, well, at first I thought this couldn't be real because if it was real, it would be on Oprah. And, of course, in saying that, well, now it's on Oprah. Therefore, now it's real. That was a very meta. It was, right? Yeah. So that happens again and again with Oprah.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I talk in the book about her going to see John the Healer in Brazil, who's someone who's in prison now.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yes, John of God, who's a healer in Brazil who would rape patients, claiming he was putting his healing energy inside of them. And Oprah really was willing to push the envelope, and it came with really mixed results. So her openness sometimes led to, you know, some pretty complicated stuff that I personally wish had been better vetted because her influence is so tremendous.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You know, more and more I do because the state of health care is so jagged in America that if you're someone with the influence of Oprah Winfrey, you've got to know that people are really listening and that it's very likely that people are not getting adequate health care through traditional channels.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Dr. Oz, yeah. He was brought in front of Congress for doing this. He went on his television show and talked about a miraculous green coffee pill that could make anyone lose weight. And he described his guest as a naturopathic doctor. He wasn't a doctor. He was a marketing executive representing a company that sold green coffee extract. And Dr. Oz stood to benefit Dr.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
from the sale of this green coffee extract. And of course, there was no proven medical benefit and it wasn't going to help people lose weight. So he will do things like that.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And there was actually a British medical journal that ran a review and it found that at least 50% of the advice given on his show was not backed by scientific evidence or was in fact contradicted by publicly available evidence. And that a lot of the advice he gave that was solid was like really basic, like smoking is bad for you. So he wasn't giving great advice on his show.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And it wasn't particularly deep that it was bad advice. And so his colleagues at Columbia University co-signed a letter saying, asking that, and he did ultimately lose his affiliation with Columbia. It just was too much.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I mean, his mentor at Columbia described him as one of the most talented surgeons he'd ever worked with, but profiting so baldly off of information that was so demonstrably incorrect just wasn't, it was too much, no matter how talented a surgeon he was.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah, I always think about this salon that used to be in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel called the Kenneth Salon. And everything sort of smelled of hairspray and you wanted your hair to not move and your lipstick was waxy and women wore all this foundation and makeup. And the beautiful woman was assembled there. And how far that is from the beauty ideal of today and this wellness ideal.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Everything is supposed to be natural. Your hair is these long beachy waves and your skin is supposed to glow from within. I think a lot about the corset and how women don't wear corsets now, but you have this internalized corset that's made of your ab muscles. which is really hard to get. And it'd be one thing to be like laced up and, you know, tied into it.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
But like, you've got to get it through doing a lot of core work. And so it's not that you aren't shellacked, but the shellacking is interior.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Well, it's enormous. And one way that it's sometimes helpful to think about wellness is to think wellness is a luxury good. I covered the fashion industry for 20 years. And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was...
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
It's all youth. And I remember when I used to go to the gym, they would talk about, you know, getting thin or your bikini body. They won't say that anymore, right? They'll say strong or healthy or fit. But we know what they mean. And we know what they mean when they say glow. Not old.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I think we do. And I also think body positivity, which I was sort of excited to see on the rise, took a deep dive with the introduction of smaglutide and GLP-1 therapies. We were seeing, you know, you hesitate to say a lot, but like a scooch more body positivity on the runways and in fashion advertising, even sort of on retail sites, you would see more diversity in models.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
That's been scaled back. The Ozempic and its imitators and competitors have really just knocked that right back to where it started pretty quickly.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
So I think that to say we're in a moment of body positivity, I think we were approaching one and we just reared right back. And I think, you know, yeah, we talk about ageism, but I think that the emphasis on youth is just so powerful.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
When HIMSS first came on the scene, it was so fascinating because it was being sold as the first men's wellness company. That was kind of the pitch. And so, of course, I was like, hmm, what is the first men's wellness company? And its first product was generic Viagra. Women are getting wellness and it's like it's going to make you young and healthy.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I started to get intrigued by the many ways in which wellness was being sold using the same language and techniques that I'd watched luxury products be sold to women for 20 years. It was almost like women were being sold their own bodies back to themselves. And the wellness industry is something that women are confronted with and asked to navigate on some level every single day.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You've got to take care of your family, and you're poisoning them, and you've got to protect your children, and you've got to – and men were like, wellness? Here's some variety, baby. And I was like, wow, that's a totally different marketing angle.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
One of the other things that immediately when I started to look at men and their relationship to wellness was that men use this totally weird tone when they talk about wellness, like baby talk. And I was like, this is bizarre. Like the marketing of the men's erectile dysfunction drug on hymns in the beginning, it was like, ain't no one have time for bad sexy time, I think was the tagline.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And I was like, what? Why can't men use adult words to talk about erectile dysfunction? And it just blew my mind because it was like women are dealing with this all the time, all day, all night. And it was like men will only log on to these sites at three o'clock in the morning or in the privacy of their own home. Like it was like they had to be treated like little children, right?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And that they would only do it under the cover of darkness kind of thing. And even when I spoke to the founder of HIMSS, it was like, oh, yeah, my sister said you need these products. And I said, OK, well, you've got to order them for me. And it was like all deflection. So that was like a very interesting beginning to that story.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And then the other angle that men sort of started entering this was this biohacking angle where you had men in largely based in Silicon Valley taking on this approach that like, well, we can hack these very complicated systems. How hard could the human body be? Can you describe a little more what biohacking actually is? Yeah, for sure. So it's a very basic idea, right?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Which is that if you can treat any system as something that can be perfected, why should the human body be different? So if you think of the example of a cup of coffee, I drink this coffee, I get more energy, my output improves. And you just take that and you extrapolate out from there and you're able to take data. I weigh myself. I get a certain number. I eat 10 cookies.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
The next day, I weigh myself, and the number is larger. I eat no cookies. The number is smaller. So it's very basic data tracking.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You're starting to see very extreme versions of it. A lot of us are taking part in tinier ways, like you get an aura ring or a Fitbit and you get your sleep stats in the morning and you think, oh, if I have a glass of wine with dinner, my readiness score, my sleep score goes down, that kind of thing.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
But then you have people taking it to really big extremes like taking drugs for conditions they don't have like prediabetes or a heart disease or people wearing hearing aids when they're not hard of hearing because they think it increases their alertness. All sorts of things. And then you have people, these men. Brian Johnson is someone who is getting blood infusions from his 18-year-old son.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I definitely will not buy stuff in the same way that I maybe would before. I've got a really pared down routine.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I've got a pretty bare shelf in the bathroom, and I don't feel tempted to try products, supplements, things like that. I know what I like, and I'm not as easily seducible as maybe I was before. I've given up that hope, I guess.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Of course, the degree of urgency varies wildly, but it's hard to imagine a scenario in which a woman is untouched. on almost a daily basis by wellness. And it's such a complicated and such a vast web, but we're all on this like sort of metaphorical and literal treadmill of self-improvement all the time. And that's how I think about wellness. It's beauty standards.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yes, it really is for my daughters. And I think that was something I realized in the writing of this book because they are coming into their adolescence now and facing all these pressures. And, you know, on some levels, it's really fun, right? And on some levels, it's scary. Like, I don't want them... to waste time or energy on things that I think aren't worth their time or energy.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
But I know they will because that's part of modern womanhood. Not even modern womanhood as that brilliant book that we've talked about has shown us. But I want them to be a little bit smarter about it and understand where these things come from and be a little savvy about And I want them to feel like they have a little bit of control and that they're not just sitting ducks for all these marketers.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I guess that's what I would hope for for them. I don't expect them to be able to withstand these forces. They're just sort of too big and too powerful. Yeah. But yeah, I guess I would like for this generation to have some awareness that they don't have to just improve themselves every day. They can be a little bit more satisfied with what they've already got.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
It's, you know, feeling bad about your neck. It's also the very, very, very real health concerns about ourselves and about our families that we're forced to
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Do you know a well woman? Odds are you do. She is everywhere with her clean, clear skin, sipping from a non-toxic container full of an expensive, mysterious broth. She is the friend who is not religious, but is spiritual. She swears by her transcendental meditation practice.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
She swears by a lot of things, like a very specific whisk for her matcha that she sourced from a very specific, ethical, artisanal website. She is educated, but not rigid in thought. She is a seeker, and she is unashamed of her frailties because she is so actively engaged in finding unique solutions and cures.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You might know her only virtually, but she shares enough about herself for you to understand that she is simultaneously ambitious and content. She has so much advice on how you might be more like her, with her working definition of tincture and her pretty pill case full of pretty pills. She is beautiful, tranquil, fertile, productive. She is pure of intention, heavy metals. Food dies and dread.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah, I think when you look at the fact that we're being asked to spend or being told, really, that we are on this cycle of self-improvement that requires that in order to be this well woman, in order to be the ideal woman, we need to be spending a lot of money and being perpetually dissatisfied with our natural state is something that I think is an exhausting and dangerous idea.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You're always trying to be something more. You're always trying to be a better version. And this book is fascinating. The writer is named Joan Brumberg, and she goes through journal entries of young girls. And it's like, you know... always girls are thinking, how am I going to be a better woman? How am I going to be more attractive, more appealing? How am I going to make people like me more?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
How am I going to be a better version of myself? And so much of wellness is about that. I became very interested in this notion that there is this kind of self that's the ideal self and And one of the ideas I became very fixated on, I started listening to a lot of wellness podcasts as I was doing my research. And so many of them were focused on this idea that you could get back to yourself.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And they were often pitched to women at really crucial points. pivot points in women's lives you've just had a baby get back to yourself you're approaching menopause get back to yourself as if there was some fixed idea of what the idealized self should be and rather than saying these are really important transitions in a woman's life you should roll forward.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You should roll into and embrace the new identity. It was always like, no, no, no, no. There's this fixed point that you should strive to return to. This sense of loss, this sense that you are always lacking and always chasing is really just common language that I think we as women have just
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Absolutely. So I think something about right now is that there's a real sense of loss of faith in the institutions that we expect to guide us and the leaders that we expect to guide us when it comes to things like health. And I think you see that... Like traditional medicine, like a loss in faith. A loss of faith in traditional medicine.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And something that really intrigues me is that you get that on both sides of the political spectrum. So everyone is trying to prepare you for the end of the world. It's just different ideas about why the end of the world is coming and different ideas about why there are no experts. Right.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah. So I think when the pandemic happened, I think a couple of different really crucial things happened.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Number one is you lost the notion that anyone had any idea that what was going on, that we lost the, you know, in the beginning, particularly when we were getting all sorts of information, when we had a president who was telling us to drink bleach, you lost the idea that there were experts involved.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
The questioning of Dr. Fauci, the idea that the advice would change on a daily basis. Wear your mask. Don't wear your mask. It can be on, you know, the virus is on. packages? Do you not need to wipe down your packages? You know, you can get the virus once. No, you can't. You can get it twice. The advice kept changing. And people were very unsure. Was the advice politically motivated?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Was it not politically motivated? And very quickly, you sort of had to rely on yourself. And you were looking for people to tell you with some degree of authority and certainty. So I think that was one example of losing faith in institutions.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah, they really did, right? And so we were, you know, we were like, oh, yeah, I'll do whatever you tell me. I'll take this. I'll eat that. Yeah, so I think—but I think in general, one of the things about— The way healthcare works in America is that people aren't getting a lot of time with their doctors. People often don't know their doctors. People get switched around a lot.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
You don't have what was a traditional sort of relationship with your family GP, right, who might have known your grandparents. That's just not how doctors are working right now. So these relationships that people form to Dr. Oz, Gwyneth Paltrow, people they see dispensing advice on television, on the Internet, take on a lot of significance.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
And that advice, however compromised it may be by profit motives or having their own supplement lines to sell or protein powders or whatever it is, that sort of, you know, gets a little obscured in the idea that that might be someone's most consistent medical relationship, bizarrely.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
Yeah, I mean, look, don't we all want to feel better? And as long as something's really not going to hurt you, as long as you really haven't stretched yourself financially, you know, why not try it? And definitely, you know, all the cold therapy is something that I think, why not give it a try? What is that? What do you mean?
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
There's a great belief in wellness about making yourself very, very, very cold, which you can accomplish easily. In sort of large walk-in refrigerators or in very, very icy bathtubs, all of which, you know, you pay for. You can also go home and turn your shower on very, very cold. And what is that supposed to do for us? It gives you a kind of restart, right? It gets your heart pumping.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
It gets your blood pumping. And you do feel quite relaxed. alive and awake afterwards. And that's the thing. Although there was one time when I went in one and I became convinced that I was so cold that my shin bone had just snapped spontaneously from the cold. And I was like, I don't know if I can stand up. I think my bone has just popped. But it hadn't. I was just that cold.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
But afterwards, you do feel kind of great. And I don't think you've done any lasting harm to yourself.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
That's right. And the hot and the cold and the, you know, the different baths and different cultures. It's very common, right? Like the Schwitz's in Eastern Europe and the Japanese... baths and the Korean baths. I mean, all of these things have been around for a very long time. And it's really often a question of packaging and marketing.
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
I mean, it's enormous. It's tremendous. You can... Talk about the dollars with Goop, although it can be hard to because it's a private company. But her name is really synonymous with wellness. The first question as I've been writing this book, I can't tell you how many people say to me,
Fresh Air
Navigating The 'Wellness' Epidemic
If I say, oh, I'm writing this book about wellness, the next words out of their mouth are some version of Gwyneth Paltrow. Are you writing about Gwyneth Paltrow? And she, for better or for worse, is the face of the industry.