Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand hosts its first Canadian event this weekend in Vancouver. For a cool $400, attendees will learn all about how to cure what ails them with products of questionable medical efficacy—at best. This is a golden age of science, and real medical information has never been more accessible to the average person. So why are so many people willing to spend hundreds of dollars on supplements like GoopGenes that offer a lot of big words and very little evidence to back them up.
This isn’t new behavior, but it’s something we might have thought we’d get better at sniffing out. But since Goop is valued at $250 million…maybe not. So how should we be treating claims made by wellness products? What’s going on in our minds when we buy them and we do feel better? And how can we learn to apply a more sensible smell test to wellness products?
GUEST: Dr. Jen Gunter, gynecologist, New York Times health columnist