Regulating wellness to protect your vagina - among other things

Did you know there’s no official, regulated definition of ‘natural’? How many ‘natural’ products have you been encouraged to buy without knowing whether natural meant unprocessed, organic, or without chemical ingredients?

The wellness industry really boomed in the 19th century when ‘spa culture’ became a thing. Popular for their alleged healing properties, spas started adding other treatments and tonics to take advantage of people seeking ‘natural’ healing. Wellness is important—health involves more than just physical health, after all—and preventative measures in regards to healthcare help alleviate a huge burden on health systems around the world.

One of the more popular measures are dietary supplements—multivitamins and the like.

This is curcumin.

According to the US Council for Responsible Nutrition 2017 Survey on Dietary Supplements, 50 percent of women reported taking dietary supplements. Dietary supplements comprise a significant portion of the wellness industry, an industry with a reputation for selling lies and misinformation and targeting women. This target market is no accident: women are more vulnerable to this marketing because they have been the target of decades of cultural conditioning.

Demand for transparency in the health and wellness industry comes from the desire to keep ourselves safe: it’s an innately emotional demand from people taking products on faith. We naturally have an expectation that the product we’ve paid for will do what it says, be this a supplement, spa treatment, vaginal jade egg, or skin cream. The normal person without access to the highly specialized medical knowledge and clinical trial data has to trust marketing messaging and trust that the companies selling to them are providing a safe and efficacious product.

Generic herbal pill

In 2015, the office of New York State Attorney General Eric T Schneiderman revealed the results of an investigation into US supplements on the market. It found that not only did some only barely contain the ingredients promised—think St John’s Wort in a St John’s Wort supplement—but nearly four in every five supplements didn’t contain any of the ingredients listed on the label.

Health supplements are just one part of a practice largely based on trust: people buying them may never know the actual effects of the product they’re taking, due to the inherently preventative nature of supplementation; yet, they trust the science and the messaging from the brand and influencers. To discover your faithful consumption of a product may not be doing anything for you, or that it might not even contain any of the ingredient it’s supposed to, is frightening. What else have we been lied to about?

What about weight loss pills? We’ve been led to believe by many a sketchy advertising campaign—hello, detox tea and your aggressive Instagram sponsorship—to expect a magic bullet solution to our weight concerns, simply by popping a pill. Of course, we’re disappointed when they don’t do what they promise—but that doesn’t stop the marketing continuing.

There are actually laws in place to try and protect consumers—as much as marketing people would like to promise the world, regulations exist to keep science the basis of any claims. European Regulation 1924/2006 is known as the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation, which the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) applies to all products sold in the EU to prevent companies misleading a consumer. You can’t make a claim on your product—like ‘vitamin D helps with bone growth and development’—without real, stringent scientific evidence approved by EFSA, and you must use the specific wording provided by the authority. Great in theory, but in practice, retailers have benefited from a lack of enforcement.

There are countless brands and products to regulate and more pop up every day. Authorities around the world tend to lack knowledge of specific sectors and struggle to exercise their authority, often preferring the spot-check method once a concern has been raised with them. This means the authorities tasked with enforcing the regulations tend to only investigate once enough people have complained about something.

It’s easy for a less than scrupulous brand to fly under the radar.

Take vitamins and minerals as an example. If you feel tired all the time, you might think about taking an iron supplement. You begin to feel better and might then think that if a small amount is so amazing, a larger amount must be better. Couple this with a limited understanding of bioavailability—‘not all of what I take gets absorbed, so I should probably take more’—and businesses are laughing. They know that your taking more and more iron supplements is beneficial to their bottom line, so it’s hardly within their interest to refute this.

A chasm appears in the information available to us­—which is promptly filled by unregulated and misinformed opinions.

With the myriad forms of information available to consumers nowadays, it can be difficult to parse through the noise and find ‘the truth in nutrition’. Misinformation, in particular, seems to be in abundance these days—Goop is the ultimate example of exploiting women by selling them all sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense claiming to promote wellness, but this phenomenon started long before Goop.

Snake oil?

It is easy to sell people what they want to hear: bundles of herbs sold during the Middle Ages as a promise to cure the plague; crystals to cleanse your chakras; gummy bears to make your hair grow. Health claims, treatments and products based on magic and pseudoscience are as old as time.

They’re just shinier now.

Let’s look at Gwyneth Paltrow’s­ vaginal eggs—jade or quartz stones supposed to be inserted into the vagina and left there to ‘better connect with the power within’. Yep, for $66 you can buy an egg to stick inside you for no justifiable reason whatsoever.

One lawsuit and $145,000 in civil penalties later and Gwyneth isn’t allowed to say that the eggs can ‘increase vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general’ anymore.

An example of a shiny rock with no health benefits at all

This isn’t because Big Science wants to stop Goop taking their profits: it’s because no egg or pelvic floor straining exercise can change someone’s hormones and there’s no medical thing known as ‘feminine energy’. There’s also the very real danger of developing toxic shock syndrome from leaving a porous egg inside you all night.

If you bought an egg in the US in 2017, you are entitled to a full refund, by the way: just call 1-844-WTF-GOOP. Seriously.  

It’s well established then that the jade eggs will do nothing for your health but claims that the eggs ‘cultivate sexual energy, clear chi pathways and intensify femininity’ remain in the Goop blog archives. Marketing lies abound.

The ultimate in lightening ingredients.

Speaking of blog posts, Huda Beauty ran afoul in 2018 when they advised women to lighten the colour of their vaginas. Forgetting for a moment that they meant labia, not vagina, the blog post recommended smearing on lemon juice, yoghurt, coconut oil, and egg whites as a ‘DIY vagina lightening hack’. Apparently, the blog author was also a ‘leading dermatologist’ too.

Anyone else seeing the danger?

Goop makes its money preying on the female socially ingrained fear of ageing—and does it ever make money. So far, Goop has attracted $82 million in outside investment funding. But the whole business is predicated on fear, using the cult of celebrity to sell nothingness that could lead to serious trouble.

Obstetrician and gynecologist Jen Gunter says it best: ‘Goop is promoted as women’s empowerment, but they’re selling a heteronormative men’s beauty ideal. They’re promoting a lot of magic as medicine. There’s a lot of selling of fear—fear of Big Pharma, fear of Big Medicine, fear of gluten.’

Discussing how this feeds anti-science narratives and contributes to further nonsense like anti-vaxx is a story all its own.

Other than the few people trying to shout above the din, there’s precious little out there to stem the tide of this misinformation and predatory sales techniques.

None of these ingredients should be applied to either the vulva or the vagina, FYI.

Voices like Gunter’s are cutting and honest, but they’re drowned out in the onslaught of marketing messages broadcast around the world in all domains. It’s easy to laugh at women falling for the jade egg promises, but this kind of product is becoming increasingly common as wellness creeps into markets for food, fitness, clothing, travel, and all the trappings of the millennial lifestyle.

This is why we need proper regulation. It may sound like an affront to free speech, but it’s in the interest of the impressionable young girls worried about the (perfectly normal) colour of their vulva and the women who feel unheard by their doctors. Women turn to alternative medicine because they feel let down by the standard offerings, but long story short: it’s a scam.

We need authorities to step up their efforts and take disingenuous companies out of business and unsubstantiated products off the market. We need influencers to be educated and brands to invest in transparency and communication of health benefits and risks. We need female scientists to bring better medication and health treatments to the table and clinical trials to consider women in their drug testing.

While we wait for this to happen, don’t forget to ‘recharge’ your vaginal egg by leaving it in the moonlight. ■

Flourish

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