Story At A Glance
- Popular website and lifestyle brand Goop is leading the way on awareness of autoimmune disease, chemical dangers lurking in our beauty products and overcoming trauma.
- The site is also covering promising new research on psychedelic drugs as treatments for opioid addiction.
Goop, the lifestyle brand launched by Gwyneth Paltrow, covers beauty, health, wellness and other topics. We talked to Elise Loehnen, Goop’s chief content officer and co-host of the Goop podcast, to get her thoughts on what Goop does well and what the big issues for 2020 will be.
In 2019 so far, what seems to be some major issues that your readers are really engaging with and really responding to?
I think one of the places where we continue to stand out is around autoimmune disease, which many doctors understand to be a spectrum. Selma Blair is probably the most visible example of this, as someone who went undiagnosed for many, many years, possibly a decade, and now she has very advanced multiple sclerosis. For Goop, it’s really an exploration or sort of sounding the alarm for women about not feeling well. Like, you shouldn’t be having digestive issues, you shouldn’t feel completely wiped out and perpetually fatigued.
We’re, as a company, so focused on the personal care industry and clean beauty and really making sure people understand that industry is not regulated. And there’s no governmental oversight of what is in the product. We’re overwhelming our systems with drugs, environmental toxins, not the most amazing food supply chain, personal care products. And it’s having an impact. And it’s hard with all of those factors to understand or ever prove causation. We know that there’s a correlation. What we try to talk about is to seek help, advocate for yourself, ask questions, push. You don’t want to create additional stress for yourself, obviously, but control what you can in terms of what you’re putting on and in your body.
How do you balance that heavy issue with the lighter tone of your website?
As women, I think that there’s historically been a tendency to put us in a box. There are all these things, historically, that have been arbitrarily mutually exclusive, like you can’t be beautiful and smart, and you can’t be sexual and maternal. All these social expectations around what it means to be a woman. And I think Gwyneth sees it very much as part of our brand to try to shatter some of those walls, like you can be into interesting clothes and want to look good, and still be a serious person who’s engaged in social justice and supporting local farmers. These things are not mutually exclusive, as much as we’ve been trained to believe they are.
What are some of your hopes for Goop’s coverage of health and wellness in 2020?
Just continuing to push this forward. Talking about these conversations and mainstreaming them. We’re not inventing the conversation, we’re not inventing the modality, but we are really good at pushing them forward. One of the first newsletters of Goop was about the personal care industry, and the lack of regulation, the fact that nothing has been passed since 1938. And now, things are moving and happening, and we’re seeing it start to explode in terms of awareness. So, we’ll keep continuing to do the same thing and watch as these ideas that were sort of anti-status quo become part of the conversation.
Is there a message or cause you think will be important in 2020? And do you have any projects lined up to address that?
I think the long-term effects of trauma. I think that we’re going to see a lot more awareness around trauma, whether it’s PTSD for veterans or PTSD for women who were victims of sexual assault. From a content perspective, that means talking to more therapists who are more experienced in the field in terms of how to help women move through it.
We’re working on some video and some other experiences. I think that we’re all collectively trying to recategorize. There are all sorts of trauma that are not easily categorizable. And we all have various types of trauma. And for some people poverty is a trauma. So what does that look like for people? How was that experience in their body? And what are the implications of it? It’s a huge conversation.
I think that what we’ll see is a wider definition of what it means. And it’s obviously deeply personal. We all have different operating systems and amounts of resiliency and personality type to tolerate things differently. It will require some recategorization and without blame.
Who do you think is one of the biggest agents of change for these issues?
Rick Doblin at MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He’s devoted his whole life to pushing to get extended access for some of these drugs like MDMA. They’re very close to extended access from the Food and Drug Administration.
It’s not just as simple as like, going to a rave and taking some MDMA — that is going to do nothing. In fact, it can even make things worse. But the protocol and training therapists all over the country, to help people, I think it’s essential for the opioid epidemic. There’s a psychedelic that is incredibly effective for opioids. Rick has been this tireless, incredible advocate who is eternally optimistic and hopeful, is really leading the conversation on the importance of getting these into the hands of therapists who can help people.
Is there a movie or a book you’d recommend that’s really helped you think about health and wellness issues this year?
I think one book called “The Transformation”. The author, James Gordon, was on the podcast. It is on the topic of trauma. He’s an incredible man. He’s a doctor, he works in highly traumatized areas, whether natural disasters or war zones. And the book is so good because it is full of tools, meditation, breath work exercises, movement and ecstatic style release. And it’s one of the most actionable, tactical books on trauma I’ve ever read.
How do you reply to critics of Goop? For example, critics who say that Goop is supporting or recommending unproven or overpriced products?
I always invite people to come and look for themselves — while we’ve been defined by products like the jade egg, which many women love and swear by for pelvic floor strength, we have one of the most rigorous portals in the industry for ingestible wellness products. Not only do we require the appropriate testing to ensure that the ingredient panel matches what’s actually in the bottle, and that our purveyors meet triple-GMP [Good Manufacturing Practices] standards, but we also ensure that the claims are backed by peer-reviewed science and specific to the recommended dosage.
Follow Elise Loehnen on Instagram and Twitter.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Published on Nov 04,2019