Gwyneth Paltrow, champion of vaginal eggs, bad lube advice, and honestly too many misguided ideas to keep track of, is now selling vitamins that she says can cure an imaginary disease called “adrenal fatigue.”
Whats her cure?
The vitamins in question are called “Why am I so effing tired?”, A clever ploy to make you think, hmm, I get tired sometimes, so this supplement must be the answer! But—I feel like I have to point this out to the robots and aliens in the audience—humans all get tired sometimes, and for a wide variety of reasons. Almost none of them can be solved with vitamins.
Inside the packet, you’ll find a pretty standard multivitamin and fish oil supplement, plus some powdered plant material that may or may not do anything. (Herbal supplements can actually harm your health in some cases, so I’d want to see evidence that these are safe rather than giving Gwyneth the benefit of the doubt.)
There’s no reason to believe any of these things will make you less tired, which brings us back to the question on the label. Why are you so effing tired? Is it because you’re working overtime trying to save up for jewelled Birkenstocks? No, this is where the imaginary disease comes in. Dr Alejandro Junger, famous for Goop- and Dr Oz-endorsed detox cleanses, designed the packet with a specific cause of tiredness in mind:
“This regimen is designed for people with adrenal exhaustion, or adrenal fatigue—a term that is not commonly used or even recognised by most modern medicine doctors outside of extreme cases. It affects an epidemic-level proportion of people and is usually confused with other conditions. The most common symptoms are: physical and mental exhaustion, difficulty sleeping, weight gain and difficulty losing weight, bad digestion, constipation, irregular periods, frequent colds and other infections, and the worsening of individual underlying medical problems.”
It is not recognised by most modern doctors because there’s no evidence that it exists.
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