The more time I spend reporting on the fringes of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement symbolized by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the more fascinated I become in its self-contradicting dualities. Here is a slogan that encapsulates a wide array of very different beliefs, assumptions and policy stances, headlined by a man who spent 14 years as a heroin addict, a former pro-choice environmental activist who suddenly happened to became a whole lot more conservative and Christian the moment he hitched his wagon to Donald Trump’s political movement. Perhaps as a result, MAHA’s full constellation of beliefs tends to reflect both the “before” and “after” of RFK Jr. Some are actually rooted in long-researched and confirmed scientific consensus, of the sort you would expect to see a career medical professional recommend. Just as many MAHA tenets, on the other hand, seem to spring from wild conspiracy theories, new age pseudoscience, online health grifters and message board babble. This can make the substance of MAHA quite difficult to pin down: Some of its stances are essentially the stuff of garden variety granola liberals, while others are directly contributing to the outbreak of deadly, preventable diseases throughout the United States. MAHA is all of these things at once … but even its proponents don’t buy all of it. The only person buying everything that comes out of RFK Jr.’s mouth seems to Mr. Brain Worm himself.
“Not all self-described MAHA people believe every word of it” could probably go without saying, but the actual degree to which they separate on key issues seems to be quite dramatic, especially judging from polling of that demographic. To put it simply: People who say they identify with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again platform typically agree quite strongly with the Secretary on the need for greater regulation and transparency in the American food industry, a suite of beliefs that is also widely popular on a bipartisan level. But when it comes to the vaccine skepticism and alternative medicine that RFK Jr. has pushed for literally decades, even his own self-described supporters are far from convinced. And this liability, along with the ability of Democratic politicians to directly tie RFK Jr. to both unpopular beliefs and disease-ridden headlines, calls into question whether MAHA will ever be an effective political identity for those running for office, although some are forging ahead anyway with marketing themselves as “MAHA candidates.”
Let’s break down, then, the deeply conflicted identity of MAHA.
The recent release of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans document, updated every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, was an interesting moment for MAHA on a cultural level, in terms of how the ethos interacts with and is characterized by the news media. Because the movement is so intrinsically linked with the likes of RFK Jr., a deeply unlikeable man who loves to eat roadkill and whose influence contributed to disasters like a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed more than 80 people, left-leaning members of the media seem to be inherently primed to characterize all aspects of his platform as negatively as possible, regardless of their actual content. This resulted in the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans receiving coverage in the immediate wake of its release that zeroed in on only the most contentious aspects, or mischaracterized them entirely, like The New York Times headline proclaiming that “Kennedy Flips Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat.” This is, frankly, an intentionally dense reading of the so-called inverted pyramid, seemingly written with clicks in mind more than anything else.
In many ways (but certainly not all), the new Dietary Guidelines are in fact the most crunchy, liberal-coded version of the document that has ever existed. The entire right side of the “pyramid” is now dedicated to fresh fruit and vegetables, placing more obvious visual importance on vegetable consumption than any previously existing version of the document. The Dietary Guidelines also go out of their way to constantly tell the reader to avoid added sugars, a perspective rooted in scientific consensus, which links excessive sugar consumption (a staple of the American diet) to conditions like diabetes and heart disease. The same goes for refined/processed grains, which the Dietary Guidelines consistently recommends should be excised in favor of whole grains. None of these are contentious views; they’re generally the stuff of left-leaning, Goop-adjacent mommy bloggers and actual doctors.
Nor does the document’s admittedly outsized obsession with protein (not particularly supported by science), which has leeched out into a fast food industry now utterly obsessed with protein, specifically instruct its reader to go out and start pounding steaks to get that protein. Rather, it acknowledges the many potential sources of protein, including poultry, fish/seafood, dairy, legumes, nuts, seeds, and yes, red meat. It is telling that an organization like the American Heart Association would ultimately come out cautiously in favor of the guidelines, something they wouldn’t do if, as the likes of NYT implied, it was simply a directive to clog one’s arteries with cholesterol. There is at least some degree of nuance here.
That said, there are undeniably issues as well. For one, the new Dietary Guidelines bowed to the influence of the alcohol industry lobby and completely abdicated any responsibility for sharing with Americans the latest scientific consensus on how much it is healthy to drink, or the health risks of drinking, and that’s coming from someone who is a longtime alcohol writer. The new guidelines can also be grossly unrealistic to put into practice for some people living in the society in which we currently exist. Do you think any parent is going to be able to follow the directive to never expose children to any added sugars in food products until they’re 10 years old? A child should never expect to encounter candy in any form? That sounds like a great way to raise an entire generation of kids with eating disorders. There are direct contradictions present in the text as well, such as the suggestion that one is both supposed to eat more full-fat dairy products than before, but not raise the percentage of calories you’re getting from saturated fat. With that said, inconsistency has itself long been a hallmark of the Dietary Guidelines.
The point is, as written, the new Dietary Guidelines largely stick to science-backed guiding principles, and people who followed those principles as written would probably have a pretty damn healthy overall diet. The problem, of course, is that all too many MAHA and Trump-adjacent supporters simply pick and choose which parts to believe just as the media picks and chooses which parts to report, and choose to interpret the guidelines as “RFK Jr. says I should eat nothing but steak and butter,” while ignoring aspects like the equally weighted directive to eat your damn vegetables. In this way, it’s often the practitioners and grifters (such as diet influencers), rather than the documents directly produced by the administration, that give MAHA’s food focus a bad reputation with the NPR crowd. Well, that at Kennedy doing things like claiming that a keto diet might cure schizophrenia. I’m not about to try to defend that kind of lunacy.
This quack read some garbage on the internet. RFK Jr. is now claiming a keto diet can cure schizophrenia and eliminate bipolar disorder. His evidence? “I saw a study two days ago.”
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— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@nothoodlum.bsky.social) Feb 5, 2026 at 6:31 PM
This said, many of RFK Jr.’s views on food and nutrition are unabashedly popular with the American public. For instance, the initiative to remove food dyes such as Red No. 40 or Yellow No. 5 and work with the Food & Drug Administration on natural replacements would not only bring the United States more in line with European nations that already regulate those additives, but is widely supported by Americans according to opinion polling. Nearly 9 of 10 Americans say the government should do more in terms of requiring manufacturers to disclose ingredients and additives, and a majority specifically support the removal of common food dyes, which have been linked at least on some level to various negative health outcomes.
In short, there’s often more overlap in the food-centric health beliefs of MAHA and left-wing America than one would assume. They’re aligned in surprising ways, such as RFK Jr.’s frequent condemnations of “ultraprocessed foods” (which the new Dietary Guidelines fail to define), and the City of San Francisco’s landmark lawsuit filed in December against the makers of ultraprocessed foods, seeking “restitution” for health costs associated with poor nutrition. San Francisco attorney David Chiu even noted the odd bedfellow he had essentially gained in Kennedy: “Many of the perspectives of this administration are not backed by science, but this is different. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
Kennedy’s views on vaccines are likely his most publicized, but perhaps surprisingly turn out to be his most widely unpopular with the public. We should be quite thankful for this: If everyone who identified as MAHA had entirely bought into RFK Jr.’s vaccine misinformation over the course of the last decade, then we would be facing an even more historic and deadly series of outbreaks of preventable disease right now than we already are.
Of course, Kennedy’s own commitment to the danger of vaccines has changed quite a bit along the way as well. He first began to espouse hesitancy on the topic in the mid-2000s, before becoming the chairman of anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in 2015, where he quickly began to radicalize further. Even at this point, though, Kennedy was careful to couch his fearmongering tactics in the insistence that he did believe in vaccine science, but merely wanted to audit it for safety, despite decades of clinical trials existing for exactly that purpose. In a 2015 book, Kennedy said the following: “People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible.”
Less than a decade later, RFK Jr. had come full-circle on the topic, embracing it as part of a far-right cultural affectation seemingly necessary to get him into the Trump circle. In a July, 2023 podcast interview with Lex Fridman, Kennedy was asked the not-at-all leading question, “Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?” His reply was the following: “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” He would later go on to insist that he had never said the above words in later interviews that year, when he wasn’t claiming that Lyme disease had been created as a military bioweapon, or claiming that Tylenol (and also circumcision!) was giving kids autism. As the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has put these beliefs into practice: He handpicked a CDC advisory committee of flunkies that ultimately recommended reducing the number of recommended, routine childhood vaccines from 13 to 7. The six vaccines no longer universally recommended by the government for all children in the U.S. include ones to protect against rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease.
FDA head Marty Makary and RFK Jr. claim #Lyme disease originated from a secret military lab. However, scientific evidence shows that the bacteria causing Lyme disease existed for thousands of years before this lab was established. http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalrap…
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— Skeptical Raptor (@skepticalraptor.bsky.social) Dec 21, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Thankfully, even Kennedy’s core group of supporters seems pretty hesitant to follow his insinuations on this topic. Polling from KFF of self-professed MAHA adherents show that almost 90% of them view vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and polio as “important” or “very important,” with only 56% saying that they specifically trusted RFK Jr. to “provide reliable information about vaccines.” And let me repeat that this is polling specifically of people who call themselves MAHA, almost half of whom say that RFK Jr. can’t be trusted on the topic of vaccines. And even those who do believe he can be “trusted” are still mostly electing to get their kids vaccinated anyway.
Repeated polling from across the country seems to back this up: Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio confirmed as much in a recently published poll that surveyed 1,000 voters across the country’s 35 most competitive Congressional districts, searching for the right messaging on the topic of MAHA. Fabrizio’s polling found broad support for vaccines like MMR, hepatitis and shingles, with even eight in ten MAHA voters agreeing that “vaccines save lives.” At the same time, voters across party lines actively opposed the removal of established childhood vaccine recommendations from the schedule, with only 20% of voters in these critical districts supporting that possibility. Fabrizio was left with nothing to conclude but the following: “High levels of trust in vaccines lead most parents to immunize their children, and skepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky for both parties. While the MAHA agenda is broadly popular in the area food and agriculture, vaccine skepticism stands as an outlier, rejected by most voters even within the MAHA movement.”
This all calls into question the ultimate value or practicality of using the title of MAHA to define a candidate for political office, such as Iowa governorship candidate Zach Lahn, who is backed by the PAC known as MAHA Action. Is the public more likely to associate a “MAHA candidate” with the movement’s relatively popular goals of food regulation and nutritional overhaul, as Lahn is attempting to paint himself as an opponent of industrial agriculture? Or its deeply unpopular embrace of vaccine-centric pseudoscience the first thing that instead comes to mind? Are there even any voters out there who are truly making their electoral decisions at the ballot box based on a factor like which candidate is better on the labeling of ultraprocessed foods, or is this the kind of issue that is always going to be relatively inconsequential compared to basic questions of economics or civil liberties? Is a MAHA candidate just asking to be made into a boogeyman at a time when measles infections are exploding thanks to vaccination rates that have slipped below the 95% mark generally noted as necessary for herd immunity?
Democrats certainly seem to believe there’s a weakness here to be exploited. They point to the likes of New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, who won a blowout victory in November while hammering her Republican opponent on his Kennedy-tied health beliefs, saying that he was “taking his cues from fringe activists, conspiracy theorists and the likes of Donald Trump and RFK Jr., whose extreme policies will result in reduced access to vaccines and more of our children catching preventable illnesses.” One wonders, could RFK Jr.’s vaccine obsession become political poison for the Republican Party come November, if measles or whooping cough are still erupting into the weekly headlines?
Here’s a preview, perhaps, of the kind of attack we could be seeing from all over this autumn, courtesy of candidate Annie Andrews, a pediatrician (!) challenging Sen. Linsey Graham in South Carolina:
“RFK Jr. has only been in this position for less than 11 months, but the damage he has done already will take us decades, as health care professionals and public health professionals, to recover from-even if he were to resign today.”
