Gwynnie’s advice? I’d rather sip a Cup-a-Soup
OH TO live in Gwyneth Paltrow’s world. It’s a place where green smoothies run from the taps and every day starts with a mugwort steam clean and a large glass of goat’s milk. Or so I imagine, anyway.
In recent years Paltrow, who once won an Oscar for Shakespeare In Love, has set herself up as a health guru. She advocates things such as being stung by bees on purpose (‘to get rid of inflammation and scarring’), drinking nothing but goat’s milk for eight days at a time (‘it fights parasites’) and something called a V-steam (‘an energetic release’) best left to the imagination. Or not.
She runs her own lifestyle website, the sickly sweet Goop, and has trotted out a number of cookbooks over the years. Yet this week she came a bit of a cropper when it was revealed that her book My Father’s Daughter – along with a number of other recipe tomes – is failing to dish out basic advice when it comes to cooking chicken. Indeed, she has apparently incurred the wrath of health experts with chicken recipe advice that overlooks the risk of salmonella and campylobacter.
Dearie me. Because who has time to worry about the basics when you’ve got endless glasses of goat’s milk to chug down every day?
Let us not forget, this is a woman who once declared ‘I would rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup’, and said she’d ‘rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can’. For heaven’s sake, woman. Get yourself a bit of perspective and a ham sandwich.
The thing is, I don’t even particularly dislike Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s like goat’s milk. Pale, slightly sour and with no discernible health benefits.
What I do object to, however, is the constant stream of individuals who, just because they have walked a few red carpets and posed on the cover of a magazine, insist on telling us how to lead our lives. Whether it’s politics, kale consumption or Cup-a-Soup, you can’t go far on social media without another jumped-up celebrity who thinks they JANE Birkin says she now finds the Birkin, the famous Hermes handbag named after her, too heavy. Lucky you, Jane. At a cool £200,000 a pop, for the rest of us it’s too expensive. know better than us opining on… well, just about everything, really.
And so we have Emma Watson at the Un, lecturing the world on women’s rights; George Clooney holding forth on genocide; Lily Allen espousing the evils of Brexit and most recently, Trinny Woodall on potentially carcinogenic supplements.
Woodall (of Trinny and Susannah fame) has been promoting chromium drops – a supplement that could cause cancer – in order to control carb cravings. Appearing in a Facebook Live video she advocated a strict no sugar, no carbohydrate diet along with the drops declaring, ‘This is the most miraculous thing for me’. Really? Because I’d rather eat a Cup-a-Soup.
LOOK, I understand we all need to make a living and for celebrities such as Gwynnie and Trinny, for whom the movie and TV work appears to have dried up a bit, perhaps rebranding yourself as a health guru seems a good idea.
But this sort of stuff can be dangerous. Most of us don’t have the time, the budget or the inclination to spend our days hunting out expensive ingredients and vitamin supplements and the vast majority of us don’t need them, either.
We’re perfectly capable of bumbling through life without someone with no qualifications telling us what we should and shouldn’t eat.
If Gwynnie wants to spend her days with a mugwort steamer and Trinny simply can’t live without her dubious supplements, then all well and good.
Go nuts, ladies. But please, keep your odd health practices to yourself, and spare us the sanctimonious twaddle that goes along with it.