Every celebrity these days thinks he or she is the next Martha Stewart. Gwyneth Paltrow has Goop, Blake Lively has Preserve, and Reese Witherspoon has Draper James. And people are eating it up – they swear by Gwyneth’s juice cleanses and Blake Lively’s taste in coffee tables.
The thing is, it is very rare for celebrity advice to have any kind of grounding in reality. Gwyneth Paltrow in particular has received mockery for recommending very expensive items or otherwise assuming her readership is composed entirely of millionaires. One of the things she hawks is a designer iPad case for almost $800. Mine cost $17 at The Source because I am a normal person.
And speaking of not being grounded in reality, she recommends that women steam their nether regions to balance female hormones and clean the uterus. Never mind that shooting steam up your business won’t affect your hormones and your uterus is already clean, seeing as how it resides inside your body. Should I reach into my chest and clean my heart as well? She’s also said she doesn’t believe anything natural (in this case, the sun) can be bad for you.
I will never understand the trust people have in celebrities. They go on juice cleanses and stop eating white foods just because Gwyneth Paltrow, who pretends to be other people for a living, says to. I’ll take recommendations from people I know, but that’s only because they know me and I can trust that what they say isn’t BS. Celebrities don’t care about me or my well being, and they certainly haven’t researched any of their health claims.
Well, that’s not totally true. Angelina Jolie has written about her decision to have a preventative mastectomy and, recently, to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed because of her high risk of cancer. Jolie carries the BCRA1 gene, which sharply increases her risk of those cancers. Each time, she wrote a story for the New York Times about her decision, which prompted many women to get tested for the gene, even if they didn’t have a family history of cancer. Jolie encouraged women to get tested, especially if they had close family members die of the disease. The difference with Jolie’s health advice and Paltrow’s is that Jolie’s is based in science and can legitimately help many women who may not know that genetic testing and preventative surgery is an option for them. I have no doubt it prompted women with a low chance of having the gene to get tested, but so what? She likely helped many women.
Celebrities have a great soapbox and audience and can do great things with that. But so many celebrities choose to give health advice based on quack science and recommend products on the assumption that everyone has two grand to blow on a shirt.
But at least Paltrow is relatively harmless and her recommendations will, at worst, cause you to be hungry for a few days as you go on a juice cleanse. But Dr. Oz has admitted, under oath, that a lot of his recommendations to lose weight and whatnot have no basis in evidence.
There’s a blog that gathers firsthand accounts of how following Dr. Oz’s advice has harmed them (one woman said her father stopped taking a certain medication because he said it wasn’t necessary, later suffering ill effects from it). Because of his influence, scammers are using his name to sell dubious products. A British Medical Journal study found that half of his recommendations were either based on nothing, or based on wrong information. This is all fact, and yet people continue to buy whatever he says to buy. He has said that his show is not a medical show, despite the fact that he’s called Dr. Oz and “Doctor” is in the title. What makes it worse is he actually is an educated and talented heart surgeon, but chooses to focus his time on peddling “miracle” remedies that don’t work at all.
I don’t know why this is something I have to say: maybe don’t base your health on what celebrities say? I literally can’t understand why someone would trust that a celebrity knows what’s best for them. There’s nothing wrong with looking into alternative medicines, but do your research into the science first.
