Netflix / WIRED

Every episode of The Goop Lab – the new infomercial-cum-documentary-series from Netflix – starts with a disclaimer. “The following series is designed to entertain and inform – not provide medical advice.”

Quite. In The Goop Lab Gwyneth Paltrow and her colleagues at the lifestyle brand famous for flogging vampire repellent and vaginal eggs take a whistle-stop tour through the world of alternative medicine, taking in energy healing, cold therapy and dipping into the world of mediums.


While Netflix is at pains to convince us that Paltrow’s series isn’t here to give us medical advice, the show tries hard to project a sense of scientific authority. Episodes feature doctors and academics from Paltrow’s coterie of alternative medicine enthusiasts as well as anecdotes from people who credit alternative therapies with turning their lives around. A sprinkling of carefully-chosen studies completes the outward aura of scientific rigour while neatly avoiding any semblance of balance or critique.

But if you think The Goop Lab sounds bad, then you might want to take a look at what Netflix’s algorithms offer you next. If you look beyond its star-studded films and TV series, you’ll find that Netflix is also home to plenty of documentaries that plumb the depths of pseudoscience. At its worst, Netflix is little more than a glossier version of the stranger corners of YouTube.

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Take What The Health as one example. The documentary from the creators of Cowspiracy was a hit when it debuted on Netflix back in 2017. Ostensibly a critique of the meat and dairy industries, the documentary is a masterclass in cherry-picked scientific studies, distorted data and dressing up polemic as science.

Goop on psychedelics isn’t bad, it’s just boring TV Goop on psychedelics isn’t bad, it’s just boring


At numerous points, the film draws comparisons between eating animal products and smoking. In one passage, the film quotes an ‘expert’ who asserts that eating one egg a day is as bad as smoking five cigarettes. Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the US, responsible for nearly one in five deaths, more than drug and alcohol use, car accidents and firearms combined. Eggs, on the other hand, appear nowhere on that list.

It’s true that eggs are high in cholesterol – and some studies have found that raised cholesterol is associated with a higher risk of heart disease – there is no evidence to support the kind of blanket comparison between eggs and cigarettes in What The Health. The documentary also suggests that milk gives you cancer and that a single serving of processed meat raises your risk of diabetes by 51 per cent – gross distortions of scientific studies which themselves are full of intrinsic flaws that the documentary refuses to get into.

The Magic Pill – a 2017 Netflix documentary on the supposed benefits of ketogenic diets – is equally flawed. Talking heads in the documentary claim that switching to a diet high in fat but low in carbohydrates is a cure for everything from asthma and autism to cancer. Although there is evidence that a ketogenic diet reduces seizures in children, there isn’t sufficient evidence in human studies to support the claims made in the documentary.

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The film – produced by Australian keto-enthusiast and celebrity chef Pete Evans – was so objectionable to the Australian Medical Association that its president urged Netflix to stop screening it altogether. “Netflix should do the responsible thing. They shouldn't screen it. The risk of misinformation [...] is too great,” Tony Dartone told Fairfax Media in 2018.


What The Goop Lab gets right (and wrong) about sex Sex What The Goop Lab gets right (and wrong) about sex

What The Health, The Magic Pill and The Goop Lab are all documentaries that start with a conclusion, and merely go through the motions before ending up at an inevitable destination. As with the 2017 Netflix documentary Heal, which details the supposed benefits of spiritual healing, these films never really interrogate the subjects that they seek to get to the heart of.

At best, these films are honourable failures. Well-meaning attempts to explore the boundaries of how we treat illness and life better lives. But behind the veneer of credibility that Netflix lends its productions, these documentaries end up engaging in the kind of proselytising that we’ve come to associate with YouTube crackpots and not serious TV productions.

And consider this: who is on the other side of the screen? Normal people who might be looking for an answer to their very real health issues. And while Netflix is keen to tell us it is doing nothing of the sort, its documentaries dangle solutions that look suspiciously like ketogenic recipe books and candles that smell like celebrity vaginas. Turns out that Netflix does run adverts after all.

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Matt Reynolds is WIRED's science editor. He tweets from @mattsreynolds1

Updated 25.01.19, 21:10 GMT: The article has been updated to correct the description of the ketogenic diet. The original version of the article described the diet as high in protein and low in fat

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