The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called “dead food.” His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, “Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,” in a book called “Strength From Eating.”
“Strength From Eating” features a photograph of the muscleman flexing his veiny, highly articulated arm right before the preface, with the phrase “yours for health,” written in Macfadden’s distinctive cursive underneath the photo. Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion — he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his own scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was key to spreading his gospel.
A fit body like his own, his thinking went, was a moral body. A person could ward off all manner of deadly diseases without medical intervention as long as they took care of their individual health. According to a biography of Mr. Macfadden called “Mr. America” by Mark Adams, “Vaccination, or as Mr. Macfadden saw it, the unnecessary pumping of dead germs into the bloodstream, was lunacy.”
Mr. Macfadden’s ideas are served to millions of people every day via social media health influencers in the year 2025, but he is not of the internet era. He was born in 1868, and he was arguably the most prominent proponent of alternative health practices from around 1900 until after World War II. He found common ground with politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and Hollywood celebrities like Rudolph Valentino. It is impossible to read about Mr. Macfadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.
On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy described battling the ill health of our nation’s children in much the same way Mr. Macfadden did, as a moral crusade: “It is a spiritual issue and it is a moral issue. We cannot live up to our role as an exemplary nation, as a moral authority around the world, and we’re writing off an entire generation of kids.”
For a long time, I thought the MAHA movement was simply anti-institutional. But that explanation falls apart upon examination, because the medical establishment has long argued for clean air, clean water and better access to healthy food. I have never met a doctor who doesn’t stress regular exercise. Many people have pointed out that Michelle Obama was concerned about childhood obesity just as Mr. Kennedy is and used her platform to encourage Americans to eat healthily and move their bodies.
Of course, the vaccine skeptics are mostly just wrong, and they rely on poor and debunked studies to make their fractured case. Emphasizing Kennedy’s lack of scientific knowledge and the other contradictions in the MAHA coalition go some of the way of exposing its threats. For example: Why believe in the curative power of some Big Pharma-supported medications, like ivermectin, but not others? Also, why aren’t Mr. Kennedy’s crunchy-natural followers dogging him for investing in gene-editing technology?
It was only after I stopped trying to resolve the contradictions of Mr. Kennedy and his movement, and started reading history, that the source of his appeal came together for me. Many of the ideas Mr. Kennedy is pushing have been part of the American bloodstream for a long time. They may ebb and flow in popular culture, but they never disappear entirely. The trick is understanding why many of these ideas are at the forefront right now, and this awareness is key to combating MAHA’s most dangerous notions.
Make America Healthy Again is an emotional, not an intellectual, movement. It is based on a fear of cultural and technological change, and it yields to charisma instead of bureaucracy. As The Atlantic’s Shayla Love explained in December, MAHA gives its followers “a sense of certainty, an outlet for mistrust, a pseudo-religious belief in the ‘natural’ and an affirmation of modernity’s limits.”
It also gives them a sense of control over their own bodies and the bodies of their children when faith in all of our institutions is at a low point.
Another Rep Is an Antidote to Chaos
Mr. Macfadden wasn’t the only alternative healthfluencer who rose to prominence in the period between Reconstruction and World War II, even though he may be Mr. Kennedy’s closest analog.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who started the cereal company with his brother Will, became a household name. Dr. Kellogg, like Mr. Macfadden, was a marketing savant and coined the word “sanitarium” when he created a modern health spa in Battle Creek, Mich. He also ran a popular wellness magazine. That’s because he “understood the need to establish and widely advertise a temple of health, healing and well-being,” according to “The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek,” by Howard Markel.
When I spoke to Dr. Markel, who is a pediatrician and a historian, he was adamant that he would have chosen Dr. Kellogg over Mr. Kennedy “any day of the week,” because Dr. Kellogg was pushing for change when American life really was dangerous and dirty. Life expectancy when Dr. Kellogg was a young man was around 40 and infant mortality was high.
While Mr. Macfadden and Dr. Kellogg were both magnetic influencers, the major difference between the two is that Dr. Kellogg was an actual medical doctor, and he did real scientific experimentation at the “San” in a “suite of laboratories to analyze every possible bodily fluid and each patient’s caloric intake.” He also believed in vaccines and was an early adopter of sanitary measures in medical care before they were widespread. Both Dr. Kellogg and Mr. Macfadden were forward-thinking about the downsides of cigarettes, alcohol and excessive meat consumption.
The reason they both broke through to the mainstream was their total self-certainty and willingness to go against established authorities in order to provide a kind of comfort to Americans during a period of rapid medical, health and cultural change, which included the influenza pandemic of 1918.
In their lifetimes, pasteurization of milk became widespread, and that helped reduce infant mortality. The germ theory of disease gained traction, and vaccines began to be developed one after another. Life expectancy increased by over a decade (save for the year of the Spanish flu outbreak).
While these changes were happening, American society was also evolving quickly. There was rapid urbanization and by the 1930s, 60 percent of Americans lived in cities. The first wave of feminist organizing culminated in the 19th Amendment and the liberated “new woman” who challenged strait-laced Victorian norms. There was huge growth in immigration, which fueled a huge backlash.
For many Americans, the past decade or so has very likely seemed increasingly unstable, just as the 1910s and 20s did to alternative-health enthusiasts back then. Young people are questioning gender norms and definitions that previously appeared set in stone. The months of Covid isolation and the government’s reaction to the pandemic could feel oppressive and sent many people down internet rabbit holes they haven’t emerged from. Technology is moving faster than ever before, with chatbots replacing human interaction whether we like it or not.
According to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a professor of history at The New School and the author of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” during such periods of dizzying change, there’s a harking back to the natural and the premodern. But there is also an emphasis on self-mastery. When society feels out of control, the body becomes a locus of control, Ms. Petrzela told me.
To put it in today’s terms: You might not be able to stop A.I. from eclipsing human intelligence, but you can always do another rep, run another mile or obsess about whether the fruit you are giving your children is genetically modified.
During periods of chaos, persuasive, authoritarian political leaders also gain a certain appeal. Jules Evans, a historian and a philosopher who has written about Mr. Macfadden and Dr. Kellogg and the way their notions of wellness tipped into eugenics, described Mr. Kennedy and MAHA as a shift from bureaucratic authority back to charismatic, quasi-religious authority. While Mr. Kennedy himself might not ooze charisma like the self-made Mr. Macfadden, the Kennedy name certainly does, and it helps bolster his image as a brave truth-teller who understands how the elites function and can claim to know when “they” are lying to “you.”
Mr. Kennedy has been peddling his alternative views for years, but he found a more receptive audience after 2020. Americans’ views of the public health bureaucracy took a real hit during Covid, and trust in various institutions has become increasingly partisan. Mr. Kennedy positions himself as the bulwark between individual families and the various institutions out to curtail their liberty. As my colleague Ruth Graham explained in a story about why home-schooling Christian moms are some of Mr. Kennedy’s most vocal supporters, he helps them feel like spiritual freedom fighters. She noted that they often share a quote they attribute to him: “The last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom.”
Fighting Influencers With Influencers
Though Bernarr Macfadden lived until 1955, he ran out of steam in the 1940s, when Americans largely came together over the war effort and mainstream medicine became so successful that it was much more difficult to argue against it. When coffee, sugar and various meats were being rationed during World War II, “Magazine buyers didn’t need a martinet telling them what to cut out of their diets,” Mr. Adams wrote in “Mr. America.” When a syphilis sufferer could simply take penicillin, why on earth would he “live on water alone for 10 to 14 days, followed by six to eight weeks of nothing but raw milk,” which had been Mr. Macfadden’s remedy?
I am not confident that Americans, in general, are going to be more trusting of health-related bureaucracies anytime soon. Medicine has been somewhat a victim of its own success — we enjoy a level of good health now that was basically unimaginable when Mr. Macfadden began his career. When expectations about what medicine can deliver are higher, it is easier to be disappointed, and it is easier for both legitimate and unhinged criticism to take hold.
And the information landscape is radically different from what it was in the 1940s. Social media is the form of advice and news many Americans, especially Republicans and young people, trust the most, and it is dominated by influencers whose ability to speak directly to the public about even the most intimate subjects is unrivaled. That’s why it’s going to take individuals with star power to push back against the worst ideas of the MAHA movement. They cannot be deputized by some outside authority; they need to grow organically, and they do exist already.
One of my favorite health influencers is Jen Hamilton, a registered nurse who has nearly four million followers on TikTok and a million on Instagram. She handles questions about vaccines with empathy and grace. If some Americans will listen to pro-vaccine health advice only from a male celebrity with bulging muscles and a Kennedy connection, there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has 26 million Instagram followers.
Americans still trust their own doctors more than any other kind of health professional or group. There will have to be lots of one-on-one conversations between skeptical people and their primary care physicians. Unfortunately we are already starting to see outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in pockets of the country with high rates of religious vaccine exemptions, and red states like Louisiana are rolling back vaccine promotion.
There is a measles outbreak right now in Gaines County, Texas, which “has one of the highest rates in Texas of school-aged children who opt out of at least one required vaccine: Nearly 14 percent of children from kindergarten through grade 12 had an exemption in the 2023-24 school year, which is more than five times the state average of 2.32 percent and beyond the national rate of 3.3 percent,” according to The Associated Press.
Some people may just have to see the harmful effects of the excesses of the MAHA movement in their own bodies before they realize that they have been misled and that lots of diseases don’t care how well you’re eating or how spiritually or morally pure you are. I don’t want Americans — especially children, who have no choice in the matter — to have to learn that lesson the hard way. But harsh reality, and the curative power of modern medicine, may be the only antidotes that work to puncture magical thinking.
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