Just the facts, ma’am

Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “lifestyle brand,” has been kicking around since 2008, preaching New Age drivel, offering such claptrap as “nourish the inner aspect,” schlepping coffee enemas and suggesting that women everywhere forego white foods and steam their vaginas.

Needless to say, Goop has earned itself a reputation for offering erroneous, often unhealthy advice.

For example, it turns out it is not beneficial to one’s genitalia to steam it or insert jade eggs into it.

Paltrow, it turns out, is well aware of this separation between fact and falsehood. After Goop and Condé Nast agreed last year to work together on a publication, the partnership unfolded after only two issues. In a lengthy New York Times piece profiling Paltrow and her Goopy exploits, the actress revealed she didn’t like the additional oversight, because that whole fact-based thing was getting in the way of her company’s holistic vibe.

Paltrow said, “They’re a company that’s really in transition and do things in a very old-school way . ... We realized we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules.” In other words, factchecking is a little too archaic for the gluten-free, organically refined likes of Goop.

Paltrow’s team wanted, to quote writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of Q and As published, and that just didn’t pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like doubleblind, peer-reviewed studies.” For the record, several of the “doctors” quoted on Goop are not actual medically trained or educated.

Paltrow said she didn’t understand the need for fact-checking because “we’re never making statements,” nope, “just asking questions.” In fact, Brodesser-Akner wrote, the company had been thought-showering for a while about “just what is a fact, or how important is a fact?”

Gynecologist Jen Gunter made it her personal mission over the last couple of years to call out many of Goop’s wilder claims. In one blog pose she made a laundry list of quackery: “Tampons are not vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins are not killing us, vaginas don’t need steaming, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) does not cause every thyroid disease and for f--k’s sake no one needs to know their latex farmer; what they need to know is that the only thing between them and HIV or gonorrhea is a few millimeters of latex, so glove that s--t up.”

But, Paltrow informed the Times, she has been able to monetize the traffic Goop received each time one of the website’s claims went viral and was debunked, becoming a “cultural firestorm.”

In the last year, she and her team have relented somewhat, hiring a lawyer to vet all claims made by the site, an external editor, a nutritionist with a PhD and a former Stanford science professor. Oh, and a full-time fact-checker, set to be hired for the fall if you’re eager to become a “necessary growing pain” for Paltrow.