MAHA wellness culture is coming for teens. Grown-ups aren’t ready.

For years, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement was driven by moms.

Concerned about the safety of childhood vaccines and about chemicals in the food their kids were eating, they helped propel Donald Trump to the White House — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the role of the nation’s top health influencer — with a message centered on fear for the next generation. 

Now, that next generation is here.

The latest MAHA advocates to gain public attention are women in their teens or early 20s. Lexi Vrachalus, 20, posts videos of her seed-oil-free, sugar-free meals, snacks, and shopping trips. In a post around Easter, she made her own Peeps with maple syrup and beef gelatin.

Her message: “You can take back health into your own hands,” she told me. “You have the power to heal your body.”

She and other influencers, like the young filmmaker Grace Price and clean-living maven Ava Noe, are creating videos with a younger sensibility than their forebears — think baking sourdough for siblings rather than talking about kids’ vaccines. And their version of MAHA (that’s Make America Healthy Again, for the uninitiated) is breaking through to American teens.

“I get questions from my younger audience like, how can I encourage my parents to eat healthy?” Vrachalus said. “Or, how can I eat healthy when all my parents do is buy junk food?”

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with young people trying to eat healthy. But educators and misinformation experts are worried about what comes next: Among adults, MAHA influencer culture has served as a funnel for a host of beliefs and behaviors that start with skepticism, veer into suspicion of all authority, and end up with actively dangerous behavior, including a resistance to vaccines that has led to outbreaks of disease.

“There’s this focus on healthy foods and environmental concerns, but running under the surface of some of those more superficial connections is this idea that there’s this cabal,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon. “There’s this kind of conspiratorial thinking that ‘they,’ coded as liberal, are lying to you.”

So far, polling shows that young people are less likely to identify with MAHA than Americans in their 30s and 40s. But MAHA-inflected wellness videos are reaching more teens, and there’s evidence that more young people are falling for health misinformation that they see online. 

In a 2024 survey by the News Literacy Project, 80 percent of teens said they saw conspiracy theories on social media platforms, and a majority of those teens said they were inclined to believe one or more of those theories. The second most common type of conspiracy theory mentioned by teens in the survey (after “aliens & UFOs”) was content around Covid-19 and public health issues.

The rise of young MAHA influencers has educators and other experts asking what they can do to help Gen Z and Gen Alpha Americans — a group already deeply distrustful of institutions and authorities — distinguish reality from toxic misinformation. If teachers, families, and policymakers hope to thread that needle, they’ll have to do more than just respond to false claims point-by-point — they’ll need to address the sources of discontent and disaffection that may be pushing young people toward MAHA in the first place. 

The new face of MAHA

If you had to picture the MAHA coalition, you might think about a group of millennial and Gen X moms, banding together over their opposition to vaccine mandates and food additives. Or maybe you’d call to mind someone like Andrew Huberman or Joe Rogan, male podcasters in their 50s extolling the virtues of supplements and protein to an audience of “Huberman husbands.”

And sure, that’s today’s MAHA — a recent Politico poll found that those most likely to identify with the movement were Americans in their 30s and 40s. 

But tomorrow’s MAHA is coming, and the teen girls and young women emerging as MAHA influencers show us what it might look like. 

Vrachalus, for example, has more than 170,000 followers on Instagram — not as many as established voices like Vani Hari with follower counts in the millions, but a respectable reach for a creator, especially one so young. Vrachalus recently made a video with Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, to promote the new federal dietary guidelines. 

When she was diagnosed with anorexia at 13, a dietitian told her she’d have to eat “junk food” in order to get better, Vrachalus told me. Instead, “I started to research, and I realized that basically everything in the grocery store is ultraprocessed junk food,” she said. 

Today, “I heal my body using real food that God created and designed us to eat,” she said.

Ava Noe, 18, has about 26,000 followers on her Instagram account, @cleanlivingwithava. She hopes to show young people that they “don’t have to be a certain age to take their health into their own hands,” she told me. “It’s never too early to start maximizing your health.”

For Noe, that looks like anything from searching for “clean” food at the grocery store to medically controversial practices like making her younger siblings use fluoride-free toothpaste. 

Meanwhile, some older MAHA influencers feature their young children as a way to get their message out to families. Gretchen Adler, for example, a creator with over 500,000 Instagram followers, recently posted a video in which her 9-year-old daughter explains why she makes her own gummy candy from orange juice and gelatin. Storebought gummies, she says, are “pure trash.”

“I’ll always say to show this to your child,” Adler says of her daughter’s appearances on her feed. “That’s the way that we can inspire these people or these young children, is when they see another child that they can relate to.”

The anti-seed-oil to anti-vax pipeline

Young people may be an especially receptive audience for the message that they can take their health into their own hands.

Gen Z Americans “feel very disillusioned by organizations in society and institutions, including, of course, medical institutions in the wake of Covid,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute and author of The Politics of Gen Z. 

They are more likely than their elders to rely on friends and family or social media for health advice, and less likely to rely on doctors. They also distrust news outlets that could give them fact-checked information about health claims.

At the same time, young people are concerned about their health, experts say. “I have seen students become more inclined towards trying to think about wellness because they need to, because they’re not doing well,” said Phillips, who has taught university students for 18 years. “College students used to be some of the most carefree people in the world, and that just isn’t what is true anymore.”

The result, some say, is a population especially primed to listen to MAHA messaging delivered by influencers their own age. “These are beautiful young people that are promoting it, and they’re thinking, old people don’t know what they’re talking about. Here’s this cute 22-year-old who’s explaining this to me,” said Bertha Vazquez, who runs Generation Skeptics, a program that trains teachers to respond to misinformation.

However, experts worry that some MAHA content could be harmful, not helpful, for young people’s health. Such content often promotes the idea that consumers need to be vigilant about their food to avoid “toxins,” or that products can be divided into “real food” and “not-real food.” 

“That black-and-white thinking is very dangerous for people that have vulnerability to eating disorders,” Zoë Bisbing, a psychotherapist specializing in disordered eating, told me. 

Vrachalus isn’t convinced that opposing processed food promotes disordered eating. “Our great-great-grandparents, they didn’t have Oreos, they didn’t have ice cream,” she said. “I just don’t think that our great-great-grandparents had eating disorders because they didn’t have fake food.”

But eating disorders aren’t the only concern experts have raised. Some fear that exposure to MAHA content could push young people toward harmful behaviors that Kennedy and other movement leaders have supported, from using beef tallow as sunscreen to avoiding vaccines or chemotherapy. 

 “When they do get a dangerous virus, or they do get cancer, or they do have a child, the big concern is that they will not get the vaccines and the standard care,” Vazquez said.

Vrachalus and Noe don’t talk as much about vaccines or avoiding modern medicine as older MAHA and MAHA-adjacent influencers do. “I’m not anti-Western medicine at all,” Vrachalus told me. “If I break my arm, I’m going to the doctor tomorrow.”

But previous generations of MAHA and wellness influencers have cast doubt on proven treatments from the measles vaccine to chemotherapy, sometimes while pushing dietary supplements that are unproven and unregulated, or foods like raw milk that can cause serious illness.

Some young people are already subscribing to this kind of thinking — 18-year-old Shelby Gwinn, who is studying to be a dietitian, recently told the New York Times that “all pills do is cover up a problem instead of getting to the root cause,” and that today she takes 30 supplements to manage her eczema. “I do think the government should step in if a food company is putting absolute trash or chemicals in their food products,” she said — “but then again, I don’t trust the government.”

There’s a long history of wellness movements shading into conspiracy theory, Phillips told me. This anti-government, anti-medicine thinking began to creep into many wellness spaces, including yoga studios, around the time of the pandemic. 

“The messaging is basically this idea that you can’t trust doctors, you can’t trust the medical establishment,” Phillips explained. “They are trying to poison you.”

Getting young people to trust science again

In a polarized political landscape in which many young people are disillusioned with traditional news sources, conspiracy theories can be especially difficult to counter. That’s doubly true since so many young people really have been failed by their doctors, their government, and their world. 

“There are so many different ways that institutions have really genuinely let people down,” Phillips said. “But being able to make those kinds of critiques is different than this kind of conspiratorial attitude towards institutions.”

Teaching young people to think critically about information, whether it comes from an authority figure or a content creator their own age, may involve separating that information from politics. 

Melanie Trecek-King, a biology professor at Massasoit Community College and founder of the website Thinking Is Power, likes to start with European witch trials. She helps her students evaluate the beliefs about witchcraft that led to these trials, the evidence presented against accused “witches,” and the harms — including torture and executions — that false beliefs caused. 

By choosing examples from the past that aren’t personal for students today, she avoids putting them on the defensive. And once they’ve learned the process of evaluating information and evidence, “then they will make the connection in the real world,” she told me.

Not everyone can take a class like Trecek-King’s. But educators say it’s crucial for science communicators to meet young people where they are, whether that means posting on platforms like Instagram and TikTok or responding to questions about health without judgment or shaming.

“We have to be going to the places where people are,” said Jessica Knurick, a science communicator and content creator who has a PhD in nutrition science. Too often, scientific and medical experts take the attitude that “you should just listen to us because we’re us, instead of talking to people on a human level and understanding where their concerns are,” Knurick said. 

Getting expert information to where teens and other young people can see it will require changing professional norms that discourage doctors and tenure-track scientists from being on social media, Knurick said. It will also require finding ways to compensate experts for their time in a social-media economy that doesn’t always reward sober fact-checking.

But more science communicators and groups that serve young people are rising to the challenge. And it’s possible that young people’s tendency to question everything can be part of the solution.

“These MAHA influencers, they’re so confident in their claims, and you’ll never see a scientist like that,” Vazquez said. “Science is never about 100 percent certainty.”

That’s something educators can teach students, Vazquez said: “If someone’s so cocksure of themselves, then that’s a red flag.”