Wellness Goes to Washington
On Instagram, the wellness women don’t seem like a political movement. Their pictures scroll by like snapshots from heaven. Angels with luminous skin offer glimpses into their lives—earth-toned vignettes of gleaming countertops and root vegetables. You can look like us, feel like us, their chorus goes, if you follow our rules and purchase our powders.
Here, an influencer named Kendra Needham, known to her 369,000 followers as the Holistic Mother, recommends a red-light-therapy gadget for pain and thyroid problems. There, Carly Shankman, who posts as CarlyLovesKale, evangelizes about the healing powers of hydrogen-rich water and a probiotic oral-care regimen. Courtney Swan, the host of a health-trends podcast called Realfoodology, links to a menstrual-cycle-tracking app and her own line of immunity boosters in minimalist-chic packaging.
Scrolling through these accounts, I try to reassure myself: I eat vegetables and exercise. My body is fine the way it is, sturdy and practical like a short-bed pickup truck. But I am susceptible to retail therapy, and, boy, are these ladies selling—products, yes, but also anxiety that perhaps you haven’t been doing wellness very well at all. Linger long enough on any of their pages, and you will start to feel afraid: of seed oils, children’s cereal, hormonal birth control. Above all, you will grow more suspicious of doctors and scientists.
Cultivating such feelings has been key to the merger between Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters and the wellness world that has resulted in the formation of the “Make America healthy again” campaign. Although many Americans are skeptical of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of America’s most famous political family, as the potential next head of the Health and Human Services Department, his supporters see him as the supreme commander in the battle against Big Food and Big Pharma. Kennedy is not merely a man who has stumbled into the spotlight; he is a leader with a legion behind him.
Trump’s election win has been quickly written up as evidence of his campaign’s success in reaching young men via podcasts and the right-wing mediasphere. What that narrative misses is how Instagram became a rallying point of “crunchy moms” for a contest in which the predicted wave of women for Kamala Harris never materialized. Influencers such as these wellness women brought hordes of voters to Trump.
People who have, until this point, mostly been outsiders beating against the barricades of the health-care establishment, have at last been let inside. Now MAHA leaders see a chance to usher in their version of a wellness revolution.
[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]
The wellness movement has always been about individual autonomy and responsibility—an effort to take charge of one’s own physical and mental health, through diet change, the use of specialized products, or the adoption of new habits. The appetite for such health-care individualization is tremendous: Earlier this year, McKinsey estimated the global market for what it calls “consumer wellness” products at $1.8 trillion—making it roughly twice the size of the pharmaceutical industry. The sheer scale of the movement suggests “a culture of people feeling very out of control in their own lives—and fearful of people who they deem as being in control,” Mariah Wellman, a communication professor at Michigan State University who studies the wellness movement, told me.
In September, I went to Capitol Hill to cover an early MAHA event, a roundtable on “American health and nutrition” involving “health experts” moderated by Ron Johnson, the Trump-aligned senator from Wisconsin. Kennedy attended, alongside a dozen other leaders in the wellness biz, most of whom did not have relevant degrees but did have a product or a program to promote. Realfoodology’s Swan and Vani Hari, the Food Babe, were there; so was Alex Clark, a podcaster for the conservative-youth organization Turning Point USA. Also present were the close Kennedy advisers and sibling co-authors of a new book about how to hack your metabolism, Casey Means, a former ear, nose, and throat surgeon, and Calley Means, a former food and pharma lobbyist who now runs a wellness company.
The panelists had a combined Instagram following of more than 16 million people, including many in my high-school and college circle. I get it: People want to be healthy, and America has a serious health problem. We spend nearly twice as much on health care per person as any other wealthy nation, yet our rates of obesity and diabetes are higher than most other countries’. People feel seen by the wellness world, and often scolded by conventional health-care providers’ advice: Exercise more; eat your greens; get your shots.
Different versions of the wellness movement have permeated both the left and the right, and social media has drastically expanded its reach on both sides. COVID-19 exploded that influence: Masking rules, school closures, and vaccine mandates led to plummeting trust in doctors and scientists as well as frenzied “do your own research” expeditions.
Republicans, in particular, have benefited from that surging distrust. This summer, in Texas, I attended Turning Point’s annual gathering of young conservative women, where party activists and commentators mingled with anti-vax homesteaders and sourdough-making tradwives. They sold supplements and detox guides, and chanted for Trump. It was a precursor to the MAHA movement, which solidified in August when Kennedy officially endorsed Trump. Although Kennedy had also apparently been willing to endorse Vice President Harris in exchange for a role in her administration, his ultimate alliance with Trump makes more sense. Both have branded themselves as disruptors of the status quo: Down with expertise, up with matching hats. And both Kennedy and Trump are promising cure-alls for the country’s most grievous ailments.
The typical MAHA Instagrammer, according to Wellman, is a middle-to-upper-class mom between 20 and 40 years old, with a similarly situated audience of followers. For most of these influencers, their scope of expertise knows no limit. Kendra Needham, who calls herself a “holistic health practitioner,” posts information about mammograms, pink eye, autism, and natural remedies for curing your child’s toe-walking. On her landing page, she also recommends a $47 tick-removal kit.
Like Needham, most MAHA influencers are skeptical of vaccines and critical of America’s pediatric-vaccine schedule. They allege that medical professionals oppose their ideas because they have been bought by Big Pharma, and that nutritionists are in bed with Big Food. They argue that, as Wellman summarizes it, all of the money in U.S. politics “has led to the takeover of our public-health system, and that has led to increasing numbers of cancer and diabetes and heart disease and obesity.” The wellness women are constantly reminding their followers that they understand the strain mothers are under—the overwhelming pressure to look good, feel good, and keep their families healthy. In their posts, they offer messages conveying solidarity. “You got this, mama!” they say. “It’s so hard to unlearn everything you’ve been taught.”
How Kennedy would actually translate wellness into action at HHS remains to be seen. The Make America Healthy Again PAC, which isn’t affiliated with Kennedy but is led by former Kennedy campaign advisers, is light on policy specifics and heavy on hopeful ambiguities about ending the “chronic disease epidemic” and “removing toxins from the environment.” That vagueness is likely an intentional effort to make Kennedy, a longtime anti-vax crusader, more palatable to skittish Republican lawmakers as they ponder his confirmation. But the MAHA influencers see no need to tread so lightly.
For months, they’ve liberally peppered presidential politics into their messaging, and laid out their expectations of Kennedy and the other Trump appointees charged with fixing America’s health. Online, a groundswell has formed around a few key priorities: restricting food additives such as high-fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes, and seed oils; tap-water safety; and childhood vaccines. Their understanding is that “we’re going to get rid of everything,” from toxins to government corruption, Wellman said.
And they couldn’t be more excited to get started. Clark, the Turning Point podcast host, described her vision of an America under Trump and Kennedy: “Organic food in abundance. Breathe free without chemicals falling from the sky. Paychecks fat, people aren’t.” Needham expressed incredulity at the idea “that all parents aren’t filled with so much gratitude right now.”
Kennedy himself seems eager to “go wild” at HHS, per his charge from Trump. Given recent statements, he may urge Americans to cook with beef tallow instead of canola oil and push for the removal of fluoride from tap water, ideas that some cardiologists and dentists say would increase rates of heart disease and tooth decay. Doctors are even more concerned about the consequences of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. If vaccination rates drop, expect a return of highly preventable childhood diseases such as measles. Kennedy has already been linked to a deadly measles outbreak in 2019 in Samoa, where local health officials said he contributed to a disinformation campaign about vaccines.
Kennedy’s other wellness-inspired priorities—such as his plan to ban TV advertising by pharmaceutical companies—could have an anti-corporate, pro-consumer appeal. The challenge, of course, is that the party with which Kennedy and his followers have aligned with is, quite famously, opposed to the kinds of regulation and funding these plans would require.
During Trump’s first term, he demonstrated his unwavering commitment to deregulating both the food and agricultural sectors. A similar approach this time around could poison the Trump-Kennedy alliance and alienate the incoming president’s MAHA supporters. Or perhaps, eternally uninterested in policy detail, Trump will choose to indulge them.
For now, the MAHA influencers will continue operating as an Instagram booster club for the Trump-Kennedy agenda. And if Kennedy is ultimately confirmed at HHS, expect them to wield their following to support whichever policy he champions first—especially if he faces resistance. “Prepare for the bad guys to completely gaslight so many American people and convince them to defend their toxic products,” Needham wrote on Instagram. “We saw it happen with c0v!d and we will certainly see it again. We aren’t falling for it.”
[Read: America can’t break its wellness habit]
The prospect of a MAHA takeover at HHS is alarming to the people who have spent their lives studying public health. In recent months, many have launched their own countermovement—despite how Sisyphean that task looks right now.
The MAHA movement, its critics say, obscures the systemic problems with American health in favor of minor details—and profits from doing so. They point to figures such as Hari, the Food Babe, who has long decried various artificial food ingredients and whose recent quest has been to force Kellogg’s to remove certain additives from Froot Loops. The additives in question, four dyes and a preservative, have been linked to health problems in larger doses, though the FDA has deemed them safe in the smaller amounts of a typical portion. Hari’s project has spawned petitions and protests; meanwhile, she promotes her own, additive-free products to her 2 million followers on Instagram.
Americans are not unhealthy because of individual ingredients, Jessica Knurick, a dietician with 186,000 Instagram followers, told me—and other professionals in the field tend to agree. Americans are unhealthy because they consume too many calories, don’t move enough, and aren’t getting enough fiber. And because nutrient-dense foods aren’t affordable for families, and schools are reimbursed only about $4 for every lunch a student eats. Programs that help families access and afford healthy food are constantly being cut—typically by Republican politicians.
“The social determinants of health are never talked about by this movement,” Knurick said. Of course, social determinants don’t sell supplements. “This is not a movement to make America healthy,” Knurick said. “They’re trying to erode trust in health experts”—and their motive for doing so, she argues, is to make money, secure votes for Republicans, and distract from the new administration’s coming bonfire of regulations.
Communicating all of this is a complicated job—one too complicated for Instagram—but that hasn’t stopped Knurick from trying. She and other health experts on Instagram—including the Food Science Babe, a chemical engineer and food scientist whose name is a rejoinder to her wellness nemesis, the Food Babe; Andrea Love, an immunologist and a microbiologist; and the nutritionist Adrian Chavez—have made hundreds of videos and posts in recent weeks responding to MAHA claims, point by point. Getting audience and attention is a tough task, because accurate science communication is nuanced. And frankly, nuance is kind of boring.
Right now, MAHA is on offense—and any criticism of the movement guarantees days of harassment, emailed death threats, and accusations of corruption. “Even though we’re called paid shills all the time, we’re doing these videos in our free time, after we get home from work,” Love, the immunologist, told me. It’s the consequence of MAHA’s ascendance that she and other critics fear most: a society not only distrustful of science and expertise, but actively hostile toward both.
Since Trump’s win last month, the wellness influencers have been celebrating. “It’s our time,” CarlyLovesKale wrote on Instagram. “This is the shift our world needs.” But they are frustrated, too, to be facing so much scrutiny. Resistance is wrong, they say, and questioning their motives makes you complicit. “If you had told me that in 2024 we would have people actively against making America healthy again, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Swan, of Realfoodology, wrote. “If you are against a healthier food system,” she added, “you’re def not on the right side of things.”
After all, the MAHA victors insist they are selling a healthier America. Who wouldn’t want to buy that?