Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow made the 2010s the decade of health and wellness misinformation

[SidDithers]

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/celebrities-gwyneth-paltrow-made-2010s-decade-health-wellness-misinformation-ncna1107501?fbclid=IwAR2XdHoCTaHM10S0IuDsAoEyhTRVwcneQdrVshx_WKZmgvw496YNxk6W3_c

Celebrity wellness hype contributes to our “culture of untruth” by both inviting an erosion of critical thinking and promoting what is popular rather than what is true.

In 2010, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand, Goop, was just starting to get its goop-y mojo rolling. Tom Brady’s lifestyle company, TB12, wasn’t around, so we had no way of learning about bogus fitness concepts like muscle pliability. And Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company, a fearmongering and pseudoscience-based business that is currently worth over a billion dollars, was still one year away from inception.

But what a difference 10 years has made. Now all of these companies are thriving and many other celebrities, including Victoria Beckham and Kate Hudson, have started similar wellness brands.

Yes, pseudoscientific health claims have been with us for a long time. And celebrities have often embraced them. (Apparently, Greta Garbo never met a fad diet she didn’t like or, at least, try.) But it is hard to deny that things are qualitatively different now. This has been the decade of misinformation. And, in the context of health, celebrities have led the charge.

We’ve had the vagina steam (thanks, Gwyneth), jade vagina eggs (ditto), the vampire facial (Kim Kardashian West), bird poop facials (David and Victoria Beckham), facials made with discarded foreskin stem cells (Sandra Bullock), drinking your own urine (Madonna), placenta smoothies (more Kardashians) and too many crazy diets, cleanses and detoxes to mention. I could go on and on and on.

It seems entirely appropriate that we are closing this ridiculous decade with the too-absurd-to-be-true (but it is true) news that Josh Brolin burned his anus trying the latest wellness trend, “perineum sunning.”

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Sid

[Disaffected]

1. And those who subscribe to this ocean of snake oil

are the ones who help elect our politicians.

Loose, loose....

Quackwatch dot com BTW is a good resource to sort the good from bad.

[Dr. Strange]

2. Speaking of which...whatever happened to the Food Babe?

[Hortensis]

3. Ummm. There's no sale without demand? She spoke to people who

shared her cognitive biases, and they reinforced each other.

Just like a faction who want their leader to lie to them, and a leader with predisposition to the same biases who needs to lie, developing a codependence on eventually elaborated and deep-seated delusions.