Today's guest is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose recent Reason cover story looks into the politics of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Just a decade or so ago, it was Democrats, liberals, and progressives who were pushing healthy eating initiatives and it was common to see Republicans and conservatives like Sarah Palin brandish Big Gulps like AR-15s and Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity declare their loyalty to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But now the Trumpian right is embracing wellness and food purity like nobody's business—and is using the state to enforce its preferences.

Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how we got here, where it's headed—and whether you've eaten your last red M&M.

This episode was recorded live in front of an audience in New York City. Go here to get information about upcoming events, including The Reason Roundtable live in New York on July 15!

0:00 —Intro

1:17 —What is MAHA?

4:51 —The right used to scoff at wellness

11:31 —Processed foods were once desirable

13:13 —Liberals were first to embrace "farm to table"

15:21 —What led to the right's embrace of healthy living?

23:52 —Where libertarians and MAHA align

27:43 —How RFK Jr. won over the right

30:44 —Research quality of dietary recommendations

35:53 —Concerns about the MAHA movement

37:17 —School lunches and food stamps

40:14 —Tradwives

43:00 —Gender roles and MAHA

Upcoming Reason Events

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Let's start by defining MAHA. How does it define itself, and what are its constituent parts?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: I think MAHA is a state of mind because it means so many things. When I was researching this article, I just searched the MAHA hashtag on various social media to see what was defined as MAHA. I think of it as being about using tallow to cook your fries instead of seed oils. Or maybe skepticism about vaccines, on the other hand. But when you look at what people are describing as MAHA, it's everything from banning food dyes, to getting people to exercise more, to functional medicine, to regenerative farming, to testing your air in your home for mold and toxins. Any sort of wellness fad of the past 40 years is kind of being lumped in as MAHA, right now.

What is regenerative farming?

Regenerative… Don't let the future surgeon general Casey Means—or Callie Means, I forget which one is which. 

It's one of the Wonder Twins of alternative medicine.

It's farming so that the soil, so that while you're planting crops, it's done in a way that the soil gives back and will be more healthy after you've planted in it than before.

Okay, that sounds… 

Unobjectable…

I suspect people are doing that, yeah. So who gets to define MAHA? Because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic presidential candidate—an independent presidential candidate— now secretary of Health and Human Services, is a big key figure in this. If Trump gets to say what "America First" means, does RFK Jr. get to define what MAHA is?

I think he's the one who coined the term or started popularizing the term. But it was really him capitalizing on this already existing trend within conservative circles, which was that suddenly conservatives were starting to sound like old-school hippies — or like my friends that lived in Brooklyn in 2009 about this stuff. Suddenly, they were talking about cleansing your aura and eating without additives, and just all of the stuff that you think of as not belonging to the right at all. Especially since COVID, that ramped up. RFK just sort of capitalized on that and brought it all under this MAHA umbrella.

What is the connective tissue between, "okay, we're going to eat healthy, we're not going to eat corporate cereals that have petroleum-based food dyes in them, and we're also going to be anti-vax?" Is there a controlling idea that motivates all of this?

Yeah. I think if there's a loose thread underlying all of this, it's skepticism of conventional health wisdom and health establishment authorities. So, skepticism of government health advice, skepticism of the big governing health bodies. And that's why, at its core, it's sort of refreshing from a libertarian standpoint. I'm not anti-vaccine. I am skeptical about some mainstream nutrition advice.

Like what? Can you give us an example?

Well, I guess now it's not necessarily mainstream anymore, but the whole "eat carbs to lose weight and don't eat saturated fat"—that kind of stuff.

So let's talk a little bit about—you were saying what's weird, or what's notable about this, among other things, is that you have people who identify on the right, they're conservatives, or they're MAGA Republicans, who are talking like they belong to the Park Slope Co-op in 2009, right? And you, in the story—which is just kind of a great run-through of all this in an analysis—you bring up forgotten episodes where Sarah Palin, of all people, is slurping from a Big Gulp and saying, "From my cold, dead hands. Would you ever take this"?

She literally did that. I discovered so many great old stories when I was going back through news archives. This is why it seemed so weird to me, though. This is what interested me in the first place. When I started noticing this trend—and a lot of people have written about it over the past year or so— but I remembered so vividly how pro-unhealthiness Republicans were in the late aughts and early 2010s. It was all, "Yeah, you can have my Big Gulp when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

And that was because they were responding, partly, to a lot of things. But at that point, they were pushing back against people like Michelle Obama and trying to make school lunches healthy.

Yeah. I think some of that, yeah—and the soda taxes here in New York, bans on big sodas, and stuff. Definitely there was some of it that was pushing back on government stuff. But I also think that in the aughts, there