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goop's former chief content officer has changed her mind about cleanses
elise loehnen promoted a lot of cleanses during her time as goop. now she says she "was not in a healthy relationship with my body."
elise loehnen joined goop as editorial director in 2014, and worked her way up to chief content officer (cco). she also co-hosted the goop podcast and "the goop lab" on netflix. adam rose/netflix
controversy has been a part of gwyneth paltrow’s wellness brand goop since the beginning. some of canadian gynecologist dr. jen gunter’s prominence can be attributed to the funny and informative blog posts she wrote debunking goop’s advice, starting back in january 2017. and goop is also no stranger to lawsuits about jade eggs and better business bureau investigations into moon juice.
even paltrow has been open about how the company can profit from bad press: these events are not public relations disasters but “cultural firestorms,” she told a harvard business school class in 2018. “i can monetize those eyeballs,” she said.
given all of that, it’s hard to know how exactly to respond to paltrow’s former second-in-command, who now says cleansing “distorted” her body image and relationship with food.
elise loehnen joined goop as editorial director in 2014, and worked her way up to chief content officer (cco). she also co-hosted the goop podcast and “the goop lab” on netflix.
“elise has been my counterpart in building this business for the last seven years, and without her, goop in this iteration wouldn’t exist,” paltrow told women’s wear daily when loehnen stepped down in october 2020.
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but in a video she posted to instagram in late march, loehnen said that since she left the company, she’s “decided to foreswear all cleansing” — a practice that’s historically been a big part of goop’s repertoire.
“to me, it had become synonymous with dieting and restriction, and i felt like i was not in a healthy relationship with my body,” she said. “i was always trying to punish it and bring it under control.”
loehnen did recently do “a short five-day cleanse” which went well, she said, but she was less strict about what it entailed than she would have been before.
“i’m just trying to get to a place where i can, again, be in conversation with my body,” she said. “those conversations had become distorted.”
the problem, critics say, is that loehnen played a major part in distorting those ideas for other people. as chief content officer, she would have designed the plan for the brand’s output, and was the person responsible for the content goop released.
loehnen made cleanses common
and under loehnen’s leadership, cleanses were commonplace, and were promoted regularly on goop’s platform. in 2015, canadian doctor and professor timothy caulfield wrote about goop’s clean cleanse, a twenty-one day, usd$425 program intended to “restor[e] the body’s own natural ability to heal itself.” (paltrow has claimed it adjusted her “sky-high adrenals,” unclogged her liver, and cured an intestinal parasite that was missed by traditional medical doctors.)
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“the idea of detoxing is faulty on so many levels that it borders on the absurd,” caulfield wrote in his book “is gwyneth paltrow wrong about everything?: how the famous sell us elixirs of health, beauty & happiness,” excerpted in salon. “despite the remarkable popularity of the practice, there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that we need to detoxify our bodies in the manner suggested by the cleansing industry.”
‘the idea of detoxing is faulty’
our kidneys, liver, skin and other organs naturally remove toxins from our body, caulfield explained. in fact, there’s no reputable evidence that cleanses have any benefits. in fact, if done repeatedly, they can actually slow your metabolism.
a source allegedly told buzzfeed news that goop is “surprised” by loehnen’s remarks, as she was a “proponent” of cleanses who “pushed forward” on them during her time with the company.
“loehnen wasn’t just interested in wellness; she was obsessed with it,” journalist taffy brodesser-akner wrote in a lengthy profile of paltrow and goop published in the new york times in 2018.
when loehnen joined the website, “goop began publishing extended q. and a.s with doctors and healers like alejandro junger, a cardiologist who created an anti-inflammatory regimen and recently talked on goop’s podcast about frog venom as a psychedelic for healing,” the piece says. (junger is also the founder of the clean cleanse.)
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but when goop briefly partnered with condé nast, an established media brand, that posed a problem for loehnen, the nyt piece said. condé nast required that the “healers” profiled by goop were fact-checked, and that scientific claims were backed up by peer-reviewed studies. as a result, “the stories loehnen, now goop’s chief content officer, wanted to publish had to be quickly replaced at the last minute.”
on the digiday podcast in early 2020, months before she left goop, loehnen disagreed with the assertion that the company promotes health misinformation.
“pseudoscience is when you present something and say, ‘the science shows that this can cure cancer,’ which we would never do,” she said. “we label all of our content, and a ton of it is from western doctors, from ph.d.s at leading institutions, and it’s part of the scientific canon at this point. typically research is a decade ahead of where doctors are in terms of how long it takes to make it into practice. … but we’re never saying, ‘oh there’s all this conclusive evidence.’”
some people are glad loehnen is speaking out against cleanses, even if it comes years later.
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