Do not try this at home
Jen Gunter is warning against bad “health advice” from Gwyneth Paltrow again. What is it this time? Injecting coffee into your colon. Say what? Yes, that’s the advice.
t seems January is Gwyneth Paltrow’s go-to month for promoting potentially dangerous things that should not go in or near an orifice. January 2015 brought us vagina steaming, January 2017 was jade eggs, and here we are in the early days of January 2018 and Goop.com is hawking coffee enemas and promoting colonic irrigation.
I suspect that GP and her pals at Goop.com believe people are especially vulnerable to buying quasi-medical items in the New Year as they have just released their latest detox and wellness guide complete with a multitude of products to help get you nowhere.
To help get you nowhere or worse.
Goop.com is not selling a coffee machine, it is selling a coffee enema-making machine. That, my friends, is a messed-up way to make money. I know the people at Goop will either ignore the inquiries from reporters or release a statement saying the article is “a conversation” not a promotion and that they included the advice of a board-certified doctor, Dr Alejandro Junger, but any time you lend someone else your platform their ideas are now your ideas. That is why I never let anyone write guest posts for my blog. And let’s be real, if you are selling the hardware to shoot coffee up your ass then you are promoting it as a therapy – especially as Goop actually called the $135 coffee enema-making machine “Dr Junger’s pick”. I mean come on.
Why would anyone decide a coffee enema is a good idea? A good enough idea to promote to other people and accept money for? Why stop at coffee? Why not 50-year-old brandy, turpentine, grapefruit juice, piss, water from the bottom of a stagnant pond? If it’s liquid, up the bum it goes? Bound to be beneficial in some way?
How are they pretending to justify it? By making up something called “mucoid plaque” that is unknown to science, and saying coffee is needed to get rid of it. I wish I were kidding.
Apparently, the term “mucoid plaque” was coined by Richard Anderson, who is a naturopath, not a gastroenterologist, so not a doctor who actually looks inside the colon. I looked “mucoid plaques” up in PubMed. Guess what? Nothing colon-related. There is not one study or even case-report describing this phenomenon. Apparently only doctors who sell cleanses and colonics can see them. I am fairly confident that if some gastroenterologist (actual colon doctor) found some crazy mucus that looked like drool from the alien queen that she or he would have taken pictures and written about it or discussed it at a conference.
…
So here are the facts. No one needs a cleanse. Ever. There are no waste products “left behind” in the colon that need removing “just because” or after a cleanse. If a cleanse did leave gross, adherent hunks of weird mucus then that would be a sign that the cleanse was damaging the colon. You know what creates excess, weird mucous? Irritation and inflammation.
There are serious risks to colonics such as bowel perforation, damaging the intestinal bacteria, abdominal pain, vomiting, electrolyte abnormalities and renal failure. There are also reports of serious infections, air embolisms, colitis, and rectal perforation. If you go to a spa and the equipment is not sterilised, infections can be transmitted via the tubing.
You know, Paltrow could perfectly well just market Luxury Bath Salts and similar with a big markup because it has her Name on it, just as Ivanka Trump does. Nothing says she has to go and invent weirdo mucous and quack remedies for the non-existent mucous to make $$$. There’s no need for her to tell people to shoot coffee up their asses, and it’s seriously bad advice, yet she does it. It’s kind of Trump-level awful.
“It’s kind of Trump-level awful.”
Surely not that bad. I mean, President Tweetlefrankenstein has his standards, and tries on most days to live up to them, whatever they are. But going by this, Paltrow seems to have a proctological fixation of a most unTrumpian kind.
Which reminds me of the old response of the husband to the wife who has been nagging him to buy her a mink coat: “If Mother Nature had intended you to have a fur coat, she would have given you one.”
If all this shit is so important, Mother Nature would have added something along the lines of a cistern and chain to the lower end of all vertebrate digestive systems.
So why didn’t she? Surely she did not have to keep it in her too-hard basket until Paltrow hove into view.
If you really want to keep your colon clean, there’s a perfectly easy, cheap way to do it – eat more broccoli. Roughage is better for your colon than coffee….
But nobody is going to give Gwyneth Paltrow hundreds of dollars for broccoli. Come on now.
Would madam like cream and sugar with her enema?
Not defending them, but coffee enemas have been done for a long time. Enemas were all the rage in the early 1990s and coffee enemas were a popular one (spawning many jokes about people not know which end the coffee is supposed to go in).
According to Wikipedia, they don’t do anything good, but they can cause these side effects:
So…much more effective than I would have expected! Just not at doing anything good.
I don’t know why, but for some reason Gwyneth Paltrow always struck me as nice but not very smart. I’m surprised to find out in recent years she’s actually a horrible person (because, come on, she can’t be this stupid and so must know this stuff is bunk and that she’s taking advantage of people).
I was, er, relieved not to find instructions for a broccoli enema. What I did find will make me mentally scarred for life, but fortunately had no physical effects.
I don’t know – people seem to have a stunning ability to believe that any old bullshit is Real. They must have, or they wouldn’t flock to Goop. If the buyers can believe it then Paltrow can.
Skeletor, would a nice person saddle their kids with names like Apple? Even Moses is a push, but Apple?
I saw an interview of Paltrow where she was asked about the weird shit GOOP peddles and she claimed to not really know what they get up to. I have no idea whether she was telling the truth, but neither possibility makes her look good. Either she’s taking advantage of people’s gullibility to make money, is extremely gullible herself or just cynically puts her name on whatever-she-doesn’t-care-website because it gives her a nice profit.
Enemas, and the even more drastic ‘colonics’ have been a quack fad for a couple of centuries and more. The bogus notion of ‘auto-intoxication’ and ‘focal infection’ should have been debunked by Pasteur and Koch. But they sailed on into the 20th century.
Coffee enemas were a big component of quack cancer treatments, especially ‘Gerson Therapy’
‘… patients receive enemas of coffee, castor oil and sometimes hydrogen peroxide or ozone.’
Not much explanation of WHY coffee, certainly caffeine would be absorbed into the blood stream, leading to some sense of efficacy. But remember a few years ago, frat-boys were doing alcohol enemas, and killing each other with them.
Alcohol enemas? Even I can see that’s a waste of alcohol, and I don’t drink. I suppose it explains the phrase ‘drunken arsehole’.