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.
When I was a boy, I often watched Western movies on television. And I was always fascinated by the so-called snake oil salesmen who appeared here and there.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't believe that such scoundrels even existed. But later I saw that it really was. It's obviously a 'Murican "tradition" that has unfortunately spread to the rest of the world. And regardless of the passage of time and the availability of information, fools always fall for such scams.
(Well, desperate people always see such scammers as their last chance. And among them, there are a number who are not stupid or completely clueless. But still...).
In fairness, I am unsure to what extent America is to blame here. This shit seems to exist everywhere - Germany, for instance, has been a hub for crazy quackery for centuries. It may be true, though, that America is, at least to some extent, leading the way when it comes to glitzy marketing.
DeleteI read that China is another hot spot for quackery, thanks to Mao and his "traditional medicine" push decades ago. Just about any quack was given free rein to show "Western doctors" were "persecuting" Chinese quacks.
DeleteFor G.D.
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(Unfortunately, this will be a bit of a long answer, an "essay", but I can't shorten it)
I live in a European country whose northern part belongs to "the most central Central Europe," and until about eighty years ago, this territory was predominantly Catholic-Protestant. After the Germans were expelled after WWII, members of the Eastern Orthodox faith began to settle in this territory, who are now the majority. And even though we lived under the communist system, religion was not forbidden, everyone could practice it more or less freely. (My former country was not in the Warsaw Pact, so communism was not as rigid as in those countries. As a child, I lived with my parents in West Germany for a while.)
I mean, the biggest fraudsters we knew here were only religiously obscure fraudsters. With the occasional witch doctor (very rare) and a benign herbalist who collected plants and made teas and potions "good for every disease, known and unknown". After 1990, when the country opened up (and I must say that it wasn't exactly closed even then), religtards became ubiquitous. And so the so-called religious tourism developed. This means that various specialized tourist organizations organize trips to various monasteries and so-called holy places where people are offered "cures" for various diseases. Of course, every Christian domination has its customers. (And then someone says that the god Asclepius doesn't exist! 😅 He still exists, he just hides under other names, under the names of various Christian saints 😉).
But with the advent of satellite television and especially the internet, things have changed drastically. Various scammers with their "magic potions" and supplements have entered the scene. They were mostly American products (99%) that domestic counterfeiters directly imported and sold in their original packaging. Later, when they themselves acquired certain "knowledge", they began to repackage it and sell it as their own. And even later, of course, they started making domestic "medicines" modeled after American ones. Along with this madness came others. The antivaxx madness, the camtrails madness, the flat earth madness, the "only 6000 years old" earth madness, the anti-Darwinist madness, and so on and so forth. (One example: in the mid-2000s, a minister of education in my country wanted to remove the theory of evolution from biology lessons and replace it with the crudest creationism. Of course, she didn't succeed (but almost!). But what's even more interesting and paradoxical is that she also belonged to a rigid nationalist party that hates everything that comes from the "rotten West", and especially hates everything that comes from the USA.
After all, I know that not everything is always black and white. There are nuances in between. (As for the Germany you mention, the only one that comes to mind right now is Samuel Hahnemann, the "inventor" of homeopathy. But you certainly have more information than I on this subject and can name numerous other frauds.)
I'd sooner take medical advice from Gilbert Gottfried. And he's dead!
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