What ails America

Dara Chetelat shifts her newborn from her right shoulder to her left so she can open the refrigerator door. Her baby boy, cozy in light-blue footed pajamas, doesn’t notice a thing. He keeps dozing with a slight smile on his face. He’s her fourth child, and she gave birth to him—at home—six weeks earlier. 

Chetelat reaches into her fridge and picks up a small tub containing a thick, light-yellow liquid that glistens. It’s beef tallow that she bought at an Amish farm. “I’ll use it instead of olive oil for sautéing,” she explains. She also points out a large glass jar of chicken broth and a container of elderberry syrup, both of which she made herself. 

Across from her kitchen counter is the family’s homeschool nook. The walls are covered with a map of the world, the letters of the alphabet, and the children’s many art projects. Chetelat sits down in a rocking chair and, still snuggling her baby, tells me about why she considers herself a “MAHA mom”—a supporter of the grassroots initiative that aims to transform America’s food and health systems. 

There’s a broad consensus that American health is in a terrible state. And in the wake of the pandemic, trust in public health institutions is at an all-time low. But until recently, concerned Americans hadn’t come together in a political coalition. That changed on Aug. 23, 2024, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed President Donald Trump and coined the phrase “Make America Healthy Again.” It’s unknown how many people identify as MAHA, but this group helped send Trump to the White House, and Kennedy, once dismissed as a peddler of medical misinformation, is now running the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). 

MAHA has enthusiasm and some real power on its side, but can it cure what ails America?

Dara Chetelat prepares a healthy lunch for her family. Kenneth K. Lam / Genesis

STATISTICS ABOUT AMERICA’S HEALTH are staggering: 40% of adults have obesity, and for around 10% of adults it’s severe obesity. Moreover, 1 in 5 adolescents and 1 in 4 young adults are prediabetic. Half of Americans used at least one prescription drug in the past 30 days. In 2023, the United States spent $4.9 trillion on healthcare. This represents 17.6% of our gross domestic product. At the same time, we have some of the worst health outcomes of any developed country.

But after acknowledging something is wrong come the thornier questions of where the problems originated and—more importantly—how to fix them. One person who is thinking hard about those questions is Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Heritage put its considerable political heft behind getting Kennedy confirmed as secretary of HHS, and now wants to help him succeed.

Richards argues America is in the grip of what he calls a “legal cartel” that helped create and now reinforces our health crisis. This cartel consists of four different groups. The first is the government and its regulatory agencies. The second is the big food and pharmaceutical companies. He thinks government and private business act like “partners,” with government serving the industries’ interests rather than those of the public.

Mary Holland is president of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Kennedy. She points to the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act as important examples of that partnership: “Both of those statutes from Congress essentially give Big Pharma complete liability protection for vaccines, and for any countermeasures in any kind of disaster scenario, like COVID.” She argues pharmaceutical companies enjoy “profit with almost no risk.”

Richards says the third component in the cartel is the media. Media companies get a substantial portion of their advertising revenue from the big food and pharmaceutical companies. One study found that food, beverage, and restaurant companies spend nearly $14 billion annually on advertising. Pharmaceutical companies spend up to $8 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising, a practice banned in nearly every other country and which Kennedy is likely to target in the future. Richards thinks the advertising revenue means journalists and editors are “unlikely to challenge the source of their bounty.”

The fourth component of the cartel is the nonprofit sector. Nina Teicholz thinks the American Heart Association (AHA) is a good example of this. Teicholz is the author of the 2014 book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, a foundational text of the MAHA movement. And she has done extensive investigation into the AHA. “It’s the premier organization for giving people advice about heart disease,” she said, but it was fairly small until 1948, when it received a large grant from Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil. Ever since then, the AHA has promoted using vegetable oils and avoiding animal fats as the best prevention against heart disease—even though Teicholz argues the opposite is true.

Richards says political activists would traditionally think about taking on either the government or big business. But MAHA is fighting a “multifront war” that requires a new approach: “Any strategy that’s going to defeat what has given us a massive increase in chronic disease is going to have to figure out how to challenge all four of those together.”

Dara Chetelat feeds a tablespoonful of elderberry syrup to her daughter. Kenneth K. Lam / Genesis

CHETELAT CAME TO MAHA in the same way as many others. Conventional American food and medical care let her down. Throughout her childhood, she suffered digestive issues and dizzy spells. She says one of her earliest memories is having a dizzy spell while singing at church and needing to sit down. Her mother took her to various pediatricians who all said things like “Some kids are just like this.” Chetelat said none of them tried to get to the root of her struggles.

In her early 20s, her health hit an all-time low when she returned from ministry work in China. She didn’t want to see a regular doctor and get brushed off again. Instead, she went to an integrative medicine doctor who eventually diagnosed her with multiple food ­allergies. The main culprit? Gluten.

Her entire life she’d been eating a typical American diet heavy on processed food, “lots of bready, snacky stuff,” she recalled. Her newly discovered allergies demanded a radical overhaul of her eating habits. She learned to cook from scratch using whole foods for the first time. She says it was a big adjustment, but the massive improvement to her health made the effort worthwhile.

Chetelat is hardly alone. America’s interest in MAHA has proliferated through health-focused podcasts, blogs, and books in recent years. Joe Rogan, whose podcast The Joe Rogan Experience is the most popular in the world, has hosted numerous MAHA figures. Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, and her brother Calley Means, a close associate of Kennedy, co-authored Good Energy, a New York Times bestseller emphasizing metabolic health and critiquing traditional healthcare systems.

But the ideas underpinning MAHA have been percolating for decades. As rates of obesity and chronic disease continue to rise, more Americans are looking around and thinking, This can’t be normal. They are starting to wonder if the food they buy at the supermarket or the medications their doctors prescribe might be part of the problem.

MAHA only exists in its current form because Kennedy endorsed Trump. Kennedy initially ran for president himself as a Democrat and later as an independent. In early 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social, “RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far.” But they put their differences aside at an August rally in Arizona. Kennedy gave a brief speech that focused on chronic disease and asked the audience, “Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again?” After winning the election, Trump nominated Kennedy to lead the HHS.

Chetelat was cooking dinner and listening to a health podcast when she heard the news of Kennedy’s endorsement. She appreciated his speech because it “brought to light in a very public way that we have a public health crisis going on in our country.” Chetelat is a registered independent who describes her political views as “more conservative, anti-communist, and very pro-life.” She acknowledges Kennedy’s pro-abortion views are a “major concern.” But ultimately she thinks he’s a good choice for HHS because he can “bring people from both political sides together on this.”

Richards believes Kennedy’s joining forces with Trump was a pivotal moment because it finally gave people on the right and the left a political focus for their concern. “No high-paid political consultant would have guessed that a crunchy, left-wing person living on a commune in Eastern Oregon and a Catholic homeschool mom with her Berkey filter in Virginia would be allies. But if you knew the issues, you should know they’re actually allies.”

Dara Chetelat prepares a healthy lunch for her family. Kenneth K. Lam / Genesis

A CORE PRINCIPLE of MAHA is that our health crisis is closely linked to the food we eat. And almost no one’s been talking about that longer than Joel Salatin. He has been publishing books since the late 1990s, especially focused on regenerative farming.

In March, Salatin traveled 170 miles from Polyface Farm, his 550-acre family operation in the Shenandoah Valley, to speak to an audience of about 50 people—most of them young and wearing suits—a few blocks from Capital Hill. They lined up eagerly to get a signed copy of his book and listen to what he had to say.

To open the event, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood up and took the microphone. On the lapel of his gray suit, he wore an electronic ticker tracking the federal debt in real time. But the evening wasn’t about railing against excess government spending. It was all about Salatin’s lifelong mission. “He’s the pope of food freedom and to keep it ecumenical, I’ll say his farm is the Mecca of food freedom,” Massie joked.

Salatin’s views make him a natural fit with MAHA. During the 2024 campaign, a rumor circulated that he might take a role in the Trump administration, but Salatin called that “social media fabrication exaggeration.”

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a nonprofit that trains conservative staffers and elected officials, hosted the event with Massie. I met Salatin at CPI’s headquarters earlier that day. He told me much of our health crisis is due to a food supply that is “nutritionally deficient, adulterated, pathogenic, and toxic.” Salatin traces the beginning of the problems to the year 1837, which saw innovations that launched industrial farming using artificial fertilizer.

From there, World War I and World War II saw massive government support for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium for bombs, elements later repurposed for fertilizer. Salatin noted this period also saw the advent of “vegetable oils, seed oils, DDT, pesticides, herbicides, and convenience foods.” As women entered the workforce, they had less time to cook, and processed foods became staples of the American diet.

I asked Salatin why it took this long for the ideas of MAHA to get a serious political coalition behind them. “The pendulum swung and swung, and it finally hit over here, where enough people realized, ‘Whoa, it’s gone too far,’” he said.

Mary Holland of Children’s Health Defense believes the lockdowns and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic left many Americans more receptive to MAHA. “The level of medical coercion for the whole global population was unprecedented in COVID, and I think it woke people up to the idea that we need to have some guardrails here,” she said.

A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that the percentage of Americans who had “a great deal” of “confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public” declined from 39% to 26% between 2020 and 2024. During the same period, the percentage of those who said they had little or no confidence increased from 12% to 23%. Holland says Kennedy played a “catalytic” role in launching MAHA, but it only became a political force due to “the backing of millions of people.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at an April 6 news conference on autism. Associated Press / Photo by Jose Luis Magana

SINCE TAKING OFFICE, Kennedy has moved quickly to tackle issues important to the MAHA movement. He has made autism a top priority, calling it an “epidemic.” On April 16, he held a news conference to discuss a federal finding that 1 in 31 children, and 1 in 20 boys, has autism. “Year by year, there is a steady, relentless increase,” he said.

Kennedy said HHS will launch a series of studies to identify the causes of autism. For his own part, he blames an environmental toxin. “Somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” he said. Notably absent from this list was the word “vaccine.”

Kennedy has frequently questioned vaccine safety in the past and is often labeled an “anti-vaxxer.” Holland knows Kennedy well and believes his choice to avoid mentioning vaccines was deliberate. She thinks he doesn’t want to “prejudge” the outcomes of the research. “He will go wherever the science leads,” she insists. To date, Kennedy’s most significant steps regarding vaccines include requiring that new vaccines be tested against placebos and announcing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

MAHA advocates are also deeply concerned about unhealthy food additives. On April 22, Kennedy announced plans to phase out petroleum-based food dyes like Yellow 5. An HHS statement heralded this as “a significant milestone in the administration’s broader initiative to Make America Healthy Again.” But some MAHA supporters say that, while it’s a good move, it won’t do much to improve American health. “Froot Loops without the coloring is still a bowl full of starch and sugar,” Nina Teicholz says.

Fluoride is another major MAHA concern. The state of Utah recently banned adding fluoride to public drinking water. Kennedy traveled to the state and told reporters, “I’m very proud of Utah. It has emerged as the leader in making America healthy again.” Holland calls fluoride a byproduct of the chemical industry that companies needed to offload inexpensively. Their answer, she says, was to “dump it in the water.” She says there is some evidence that applying fluoride topically is good for teeth but swallowing it offers no dental benefit and can cause neurological damage to unborn babies and young children. The American Dental Association issued a statement condemning Utah lawmakers for “wanton disregard for the oral health and well-being of their constituents,” and argued water fluoridation is “safe and effective.”

Chetelat has a reverse osmosis filter that removes fluoride and other substances from water under her kitchen sink. Her husband installed it to replace their portable countertop filter. But she keeps the smaller unit on hand. “We take it along on vacation,” she tells me.

Chetelat’s 6-year-old daughter handed me a list she wrote herself with suggestions for how to make America healthy again. She wrote in black pen in big letters: “Sharing Jesus. Not as much pollshun [pollution]. Healthier farms. Not as much junk food.” Chetelat tries to find a good balance between educating others about what’s healthy and not appearing judgmental. She teaches her children, “Just because we’re choosing to do it this way doesn’t mean we should look down on anyone who isn’t.”

Chetelat buys her food at several different local supermarkets and makes a weekly 30-minute drive to the Amish farm in Pennsylvania for her beef tallow and other essentials. While their grocery bills can be high, her family saves by rarely eating out and skipping processed snacks. “We figure it’s better to put the money there than on a lot of medical bills,” she says.

Kennedy is moving quickly to implement his agenda and shows no signs of slowing down. But it’s not clear how far he’ll get. He and the MAHA movement are calling for sweeping and radical changes—not just on particular issues but in how American society approaches the question of health itself. “I am hopeful about him,” says Chetelat. “But not too hopeful because I know politics often disappoints.”