By Paulina Bargnesi
While scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a thin, athletic woman explaining how the ‘carnivore diet’ has forever changed her life as she shoves a stick of butter down her throat. The average person will watch in awe and wonder how her heart is still beating. However, this video will inspire a fraction of the viewers. These days it seems everyone is trying to lose weight, so taking advice from a woman who looks like she has it all together is a no brainer. For inspiration on what to do during their new health journey, they’ll continue to watch this woman go on and on about meat. She’ll tell them all the right things, like how the food industry prioritizes money over the safety of consumers and how whole foods are the key to healthy living. While most of her videos are devoid of political undertones, there are key giveaways to the true nature of her content. Tucked away in the caption of her videos is the hashtag MAHA.
‘MAHA’ is a banal play on Trump’s ‘MAGA’ slogan, standing for Make America Healthy Again. A search on Instagram or TikTok will send you down a rabbit whole of hundreds of videos about MAHA. Some videos will include people raving about raw milk benefits and the infamous carnivore diet, or denouncing the food dye red 40. These are all talking points of RFK Jr. – MAHA’s poster boy. In fact, the rise in popularity of MAHA can be attributed to Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Before RFK Jr. became the secretary of health and human services under Trump’s current administration, he was a candidate for the 2024 presidential election. He built his whole campaign on taking down big pharma (which really meant decreasing funding for and access to vaccines) and dismantling public health policies. And although he only received 0.4% of the popular vote, he managed to build a loyal ‘fan base’, consisting of “almond” moms, gym bros, and wellness influencers.
MAHA and MAGA share many characteristics. For one, any person who knows a rudimentary level of U.S. history can deduce that America has never been truly great (slavery, treatment of Native Americans, segregation, etc.) nor healthy (lead in water, AIDS, etc.). Additionally, it is easy to mistake MAHA for MAGA because of their practically indistinguishable names, but also their close connections to Trump. Donald Trump has ruined many things in my opinion, but a crime he can not be forgiven for is his destruction of the red hat. Now anytime I see someone with a red hat, I have to do a double take to ensure that MAGA is not engraved on the front. Aside from my personal grievances with Trump, his red hat and MAGA are very iconic.
Trump managed to promise the impossible. In 2016, he promised to build our very own Great Wall rivaling that of China’s. Now with his 2025 presidency starting, he has made little to no mention of building the wall. In 2024 during his campaign rallies, he promised to bring down food prices on day one, which one could argue won him this presidential election. Then, in an interview with Time after winning the election, he claimed it’s ‘very hard’ to bring down food prices, and now during his presidency the cost of eggs is soaring. Yet even with these empty promises, Trump supporters are perhaps stronger than ever for their lord and savior Donald J. Trump. This is because Trump and his cohorts have effectively mastered indoctrination. Trump supporters are more like a community rather than a group of people who voted for the same man. They are willing to defend Trump for anything wrong he has done or will do. It is no wonder why RFK Jr. wanted to jump on the bandwagon with MAHA; he too wants a passionate group of supporters.
Although his fan base seems to believe RFK is a man of strong principles and unwavering conviction, the public figure is more of a snake oil salesman than anything else. He will flock to whichever side of the political spectrum endorses him. Before making the decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, RFK approached the Harris campaign with a deal: I endorse you for a position in your cabinet. At the same time, RFK Jr. proposed a similar deal to the Trump team. And ever the salesman, the former president took the wellness guru up on his offer, as the convicted felon can never miss the chance to strike a deal. As such, RFK made promises to his supporters that he will work with Donald Trump to ensure improvement in America’s nutrition and fight against chronic disease, and thus MAHA was born. And that’s how RFK found himself on a private jet with DJT and several others, forced to pose with a Big Mac in one hand and a grimace on his face as some sort of initiation ritual into the MAGA crowd.
On the surface level, MAHA does raise some important concerns regarding America’s leading causes of mortality and quality of life. They also routinely call into question the integrity of our pharmaceutical industry and healthcare system. However, instead of attacking Big Pharma’s lobbying practices or price gouging, MAHA believes the corruption lies within their development of vaccines and the general practice of research. They prey on the already present distrust Amerians have for our healthcare system and indoctrinate people into believing they have a way to break out of it. They start with a truth and spin it into a web of lies. MAHA has now made some Americans think that autism and down syndrome are the effects of vaccines, when decades of research has proved otherwise.
The effects of RFK and his MAHA movement are far reaching. In 2019, RFK traveled to Samoa, a country already experiencing vaccine distrust. While there, he hung out with another anti-vaccine influencer to help spread even more fear regarding the measles vaccine. By the time he left, mistrust of vaccines grew and a measles outbreak, causing thousands of illnesses and 83 deaths, was left in his wake. Now as the leader of the HHS, RFK Jr. has an even greater ability to stoke vaccine misinformation and fumble public health crises. We can see one consequence of this burgeoning issue with the measles outbreak in Houston, Texas, where 159 cases have already been identified. This number almost rivals the total number of measles infections for the whole year of 2024. Instead of urging folks in Texas to vaccinate their children, RFK further pushed the narrative that nutritional supplements like Vitamin A and D were aiding in the treatment of the measles outbreak. Once again, RFK shows his limited knowledge in science, as viruses can not be cured with vitamins or even antibacterial medications. A simple solution would be to encourage vaccines as a prevention to infection, but that would just be too easy.
The famous Kennedy also revealed how little he knows about human biology with the belief that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule compared to whites because their immune systems are stronger. Instead of addressing the real effect racism has on health outcomes for Black people like high maternal mortality and cancer rates, RFK continues to peddle the same misinformation that causes these phenomena to exist.
Additionally, RFK offers no real solution to the health crises we face in modern day America. Instead of addressing the fact that most Americans are too busy at office jobs to focus on healthy lifestyles, live in food deserts where affordable fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, outdoor spaces where exercise is encouraged are often too far out of reach and individuals are becoming more isolated from society, RFK and the MAHA movement take the opportunity to grift even more. They tout their overpriced natural sweeteners like Agave and refined coconut sugar as alternatives to high fructose corn syrup, conveniently failing to mention the kickbacks they get after sponsoring them. Despite MAHA’s lies, these “healthy” alternatives often have the same effect on blood sugar levels and are certainly not any sort of cure to diabetes.
Lastly, RFK’s solution to our mental health issues in the United States, is the construction of wellness farms, which sound frighteningly similar to the camps Germany built in the 1940s to contain disabled people. RFK believes Americans with ADHD and depression should be forced to work outdoors in these farms, and that through this, they will find the cure to their mental ailments and be free of their drug prescriptions. Yet there is, once again, very little evidence that says manual labor helps alleviate mental disorders or substance abuse.
It’s hard to believe that MAHA has any true allegiance to the wellbeing of the American people. They often spout disinformation about health and advocate for defunding scientific research. With RFK Jr. at the helm of our biggest health agency in the country, who knows what the future will hold.