What used to be fringe, anti-government sentiment relegated to hippies and libertarians is now the forward-facing platform of the current White House administration and the more popular platform on which the mainstream Republican party campaigns in regards to health, wellness and government regulation.
This rhetoric has seeped into our public consciousness, and now, the White House. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is well on his way to being secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
I am a firm believer in alternative medicine as well as more holistic practices, so to speak. I enjoy kombucha in the mornings, drink chia seed water, own crystals and dabble in essential oils. I have no problem with alternative healing and have enjoyed its benefits myself many times over.
It’s from a place of love that I condemn the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)movement for its superficiality.
MAHA makes actual health and wellness reform movements look like a joke for its hypocrisy and lack of foresight. It seems more concerned with aesthetic preoccupations than is with the actual long-term policy consequences it supports. It proves its legitimacy through superficial and irrelevant points, like the body weights of politicians and experts compared to RFK Jr.
This movement’s principles are based upon ripping our already extremely flawed healthcare system and regulatory bodies of what little parameters they have, putting bandaids over bullet holes and spreading harmful misinformation in a country where medical care has been made exceedingly inaccessible.
Many MAHA enthusiasts believe that health is skin deep. It makes no sense to demonize vaccines while rolling out the red carpet for weight-loss injections.
The former has been around for centuries and eliminated diseases that used to plague the American people. The latter, while also revolutionary, has not seen anything close in the way of long-term efficacy.
MAHA is not built upon actual health, but rather an artificially constructed vision of it.
MAHA is a play on the same nostalgia-induced conservative ideals that Trump has campaigned on. It too overly idealizes our nation’s complicated past into a heavily narrativized and filtered lens of the “good old days.”
Where Trump’s Make America Great Again suggests a utopian nation fraught over time with progressive legislation and initiatives, Kennedy’s MAHA paints the narrative that progress has destroyed our nation on a medical and scientific level as well.
MAHA functions on the premise that we’ve seen bubbling up to the surface in the past ten years or so. These include the notions of Uncle Sam being a malicious opponent to the health of his people by putting fluoride in the water, chemicals in our food and mandating vaccinations containing God-knows-what.
The outrage that’s manifested is less of an outrage at the actual detriment our bodies have or haven’t suffered at the hands of the state, but more of a visceral detest of the ways these detriments manifest physically, whether that be through weight gain or cortisol face.
Aimee Tritt, clinical assistant professor in dietetics practice and counseling at the University of Minnesota, said a lot of our increased mainstream interest in health can be attributed to a cultural shift away from blatant aesthetic valuation, leading to a conflation of wellness and aesthetics.
“It’s no longer seen as acceptable to have purely aesthetic priorities, right?” Tritt said. “So when products are advertised, like when online magazines are writing articles, it’s more likely to be about health now.”
This is a shame, because our healthcare system is deeply flawed, and our food and drug regulation is not up to standard, to say the least.
Danielle Croom, a third-year student at the University, said she feels more alternative healing methods have become popular as a result of our country’s healthcare shortcomings.
“We’re seeing a lot of backlash toward the healthcare system,” Croom said. “It’s also become something that’s not really accessible, specifically in America, because there’s no universal healthcare. So I think people will often turn to alternative routes for taking care of themselves.”
In what world does reverting back to drinking unpasteurized milk help anyone in any real way? Fringe ideas should stay fringe and out of the White House.
Instead of focusing on real-life solutions, such preposterous falsehoods are proliferated in the mainstream, infesting our politics to the point of no return. To make America healthy, a good place to start would be the implementation of some sort of universal healthcare, or at the very least, more regulation on predatory health insurance companies.
Instead, we’re left with the scam that is MAHA, which is as falsely conscious as it is rooted in half-truths. The need for better healthcare in this country has never been felt more, and we’re putting Flex Tape on the problem.
Tritt said this line of thinking comes from our fear of the unknown.
“I think that there is a lot of fear about things that people, unfortunately for the most part, don’t really understand,” Tritt said. “So we’re not doing a great job educating our population about food and nutrition, and so there’s a gap. And that’s how opportunism works.”
Health isn’t always beautiful, and real reform isn’t always visible or flashy.
The American people deserve a better solution than this. We need to make America healthier and re-instill trust in our government. What won’t help is stripping back the few accessible means to health that have gotten us here. Kennedy is not our guy.
