Gwyneth Paltrow reveals how her father’s cancer battle encouraged her to get into wellness

Gwyneth Paltrow has described how she became involved in the wellness industry after her late father, Bruce Paltrow, was diagnosed with cancer.

The 51-year-old actor - who founded her lifestyle brand, Goop, in 2008 - took to her Instagram Story on 29 February to open up about her father, who died in 2002 after a lengthy battled with throat cancer. During the Q&A session, she detailed how she got into wellness as Bruce’s cancer battle first started.

“It was actually because my father was diagnosed with cancer when I was about 25 years old and that started to catalyse my foray into understanding food, environmental toxins, food as medicine, alternative stuff like acupuncture,” she said.

“So it started a long time ago, I don’t know, in the mid-’90s because of my dad,” she concluded.

Since launching Goop, Paltrow has often spoken about her wellness routine, which previously sparked some backlash. She faced criticism last year for her “intermittent fasting” routine, which she said included coffee in the mornings, “bone broth” for lunch at 12pm, and vegetables or fish for dinner at 6pm. At the time, fans and dietitians claimed that the actor wasn’t eating enough sustainable food throughout the day, and that she was promoting disordered eating habits.

She later addressed the backlash by explaining that she’s been eating a lot of “cooked vegetables, all kinds of proteins” and “healthy carbs” to lower inflammation, which was a post-Covid symptom she was experiencing. Paltrow emphasised that her routine is based on her own “medical results” and “extensive testing” that she’s done “over time”, so it wasn’t a diet that she was recommending to other people.

“This was a transparent conversation with me and my doctor. It’s not meant to be advice for anyone else. It really just works for me, and it’s been very powerful and very positive,” she explained, before clarifying that she eats more than “bone broth and vegetables” and has many days of eating whatever she wants.

Over the years, Paltrow has continued to be open about how her father shaped her career. She revealed to Town & Country in 2020 that her father’s cancer battle is what led to her launching Goop.

“His treatment was so brutal, I was thinking, almost out of desperation, that we had to be able to do something else to help him,” the Avengers star said about her father’s treatments, which began after he received his diagnosis in 1999. “That’s when I started to research food and nutrition.”

Paltrow - who’s the daughter of Bruce and actor Blythe Danner -  revealed what she misses the most about her father during an Instagram Q&A in August 2023. “I miss my dad so much and I miss his humour. I was just on a walk with a friend this morning, and even she was talking about the things that my dad used to say,” she said in her Instagram Story, shared via People at the time. “His phrases. He was kind of a philosopher, in his own way. And just had the most brilliant one-liners.”

The Iron Man star also discussed how her father supported her throughout her career in Hollywood, as he was a filmmaker himself. “He helped me get through life and [taught me] how to deal with a lot of stuff, and he would have helped me keep perspective all the time,” she said.