This week, Lost in Showbiz invites you to ignore the big celebrity stories. Pay no heed to the admittedly thought-provoking headline “Masturbating and a cookie could cost OJ Simpson his parole”. Waste none of your time, or indeed hard-earned cash, on the news that Kim Kardashian is marketing a giant lilo based on her own buttocks: a mere $98 will answer the prayers of anyone who has longed to spend their summer floating around a swimming pool on a giant inflatable arse. Instead, let us concentrate on matters of body and mind, of spirituality and self-healing. Let us journey to Instagram, where the actor Naomie Harris recently posted a photograph of herself engaged in “grounding”: a practice, the star of Skyfall and Spectre suggested, that will cure you of jetlag. “The best way to get in sync with a new timezone is to whip your shoes and socks off and connect with the earth for a good 20-45 minutes!!!” she claimed.
LiS professes itself intrigued. It has never come across a celebrity-promoted waffy new-age theory entirely unfounded in scientific fact that it didn’t like, and this one, also known as “earthing”, seems particularly fantastic. According to “long-time earthing-movement leader” Clint Ober, who explained the practice is based on the principle that the Earth has “an infinite supply of free electrons” from which humans are ordinarily insulated by the fact that they wear rubber-soled shoes. By removing them, “electrons naturally flow between the Earth and the body, reducing free radicals and eliminating any static electrical charge”.
Grounding’s adherents claim it can help cure not just jetlag, but insomnia and chronic pain, and can also speed up healing. Meanwhile, there’s a certain thundering inevitability to the news that, at earthing.com, you can buy an “earthing starter kit” for a mere $199.99 – I know, I know, you could get two lilos in the shape of Kim Kardashian’s arse for that, but will they cure your insomnia? Can one really afford to be parsimonious in the pursuit of wellbeing?
Grounding has been dismissed by sleep experts as without “a shred of scientific evidence at all”, but LiS feels drawn inexorably towards it, never more so when it learned of its other great exponent, which is – and it suspects some readers may be ahead of it here – Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website. Ah, Goop, how LiS loves the very bones of you. It loves your online store, with the drinks trolley retailing for $1,800, ready to be loaded up with hibiscus and yuzu tonic and activated charcoal chai. It loves the fact that a recent report revealed that vast swathes of the stuff you sell as “wellness” products are also available, under different names, on Alex Jones’s Infowars website: what greater proof of their efficacy is there than their endorsement by a man who thinks that the government is controlling the weather, Bill Gates is a eugenicist and Lady Gaga is the goddess of Satan engaged in an attempt to take over the US on behalf of Old Scratch?
It also loves the way you recently came out swinging at people who laugh at your espousal of vagina-steaming and sticking crystals up your yoni. “Being dismissive … seems like the most dangerous practice of all,” team Goop thundered in a feature. “Where would we be if we all still believed that smoking didn’t cause lung cancer?” it continued, a question that rather provokes the response: I dunno, trying to cure lung cancer by taking our shoes and socks off outdoors and sticking crystals up our privates? And it loves the way your angry words about the credentials of your medical experts – “These are the doctors we regularly feature on Goop: doctors who publish in peer-reviewed journals; doctors who trained at the best institutions; doctors who are repeatedly at the forefront of medicine” – appears literally next to a link that takes readers to a feature written by “medical medium” Anthony William, explaining how he was visited as a child by a divine force called Spirit. Ah, Goop, what an incredible resource you are – LiS salutes you in the most fitting way it knows how: taking its shoes and socks off, whipping up a batch of your spirulina popcorn and waiting eagerly by the front door for the delivery of its $1,800 drinks trolley.
