Gottfried’s grift is a combination of questionable supplements, “detox” plans and “hormone balancing”; her self-proclaimed “expertise includes natural hormone balancing, the brain/body connection, and how to optimize the gene/environment interface”, and if you don’t see “meaningless drivel” in that description, you might be in her target audience. Her website offers a range of personally formulated supplements and shakes, and she does claim that her products have worked “gloriously well on the 10,000+ people” she’s seen in the past 10 years, which is presumably precisely the kind of “evidence” that is valued by the kind of people whose attention she wants to grab. Gottfried designed the GOOP “High School Genes” supplement, which is at best harmless (it has of course been tested for neither safety or efficacy), and she even pushes a protocol she has named for herself, the Gottfried Protocol (needless to say, naming a protocol for yourself is not a good look), which, in true CAM style, rebrands some simple, uncontroversial interventions as “alternative” (or, indeed, “revolutionary”) and mixes it with nonsense; the protocol is described in her book Energized Naturally with the Gottfried Protocol.
As for hormone balancing, it’s of course a scam, and Gottfried has for a while been one of the most central promoters of it. She has written at least two books, The Hormone Cure: Reclaim Balance, Sleep and Sex Drive; Lose Weight; Feel Focused, Vital and The Hormone Reset Diet: Heal Your Metabolism to Lose Up to 15 Pounds in 21 Days, on the issue. As David Gorski points out you’ll get the best view of the contents of those books if you replace every instance of “hormone” with “humor”. As for “detox” recommendations, Gottfried seems to be a true believer; as she puts it: “Detoxing means cleaning out the body, removing toxins, clearing out your jammed hormone receptors, and resetting key hormones [notice the critical use of unexplained metaphors]. Most simply, detox is a tool of functional medicine: remove the obstacles to radical health, and add in the factors that support you. We accumulate junk mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually on a daily basis”. Now, as opposed to many proponents of detox regimes, Gottfried does actually mention some specific chemicals (mercury, perchlorate, and so on), but note that she refrains from claiming that her detox regimes will help you get rid of those specific chemicals (she doesn’t get any more specific than “toxing can help our bodies get rid of the inevitable buildup of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that happens in modern life”). That, of course, is because her detox regimes cannot help get rid of any of those chemicals. Detoxing is nothing but a form of ritual purification described with scientific-sounding and pseudoscientific language. Doctors promoting “detox” are quacks.
And as for the “gene/environment interface” thing, yes: she’s alluding to epigenetics, which is not even remotely what she claims it is, but her customers have heard the term and it sounds sophisticated. Her book, Younger: The Breakthrough Programme To Reset Our Genes And Reverse Ageing, assumes that epigenetics means that wishing something makes it so and that we can easily “reprogram our genes” with whatever woo she happens to be selling. As Gottfried puts it “I believe it’s all about finding the genetic switches that control metabolism, weight, disease and ageing and am convinced that by turning your good genes on and your bad genes off, you can prevent ageing no matter how old you are”. This is …not the case. Now, it has to be admitted that Gottfried does allude to some real research: preclinical findings from in vitro and animal experiments with unclear results on aspects of something complex concerning genes whose roles are not fully understood (details here). And then she does what quacks do with such results: extrapolate beyond ridiculousness to write a self-help book; doing research is much less fun than earning money and when the actual science is in, it will be too late to capitalize on it and the research is unlikely to yield the results you need to make money anyways. After all, her books have earned her not only an affiliation with Goop, but appearances on Andrew Huberman’s podcast and endorsements by flat-earther David Avocado Wolfe.
There is a nice report of Gottfried’s (and others’) presentations at a 2018 Goop Health Event in New York here.
Diagnosis: Quack. Run.
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