We Don’t Need RFK Jr. To ‘Make America Healthy Again’
The online, health-focused “crunchy” community has always had an antigovernment streak. That makes sense, as it consists of trad wives who want legal raw milk, health nuts who hate chemicals and junk food, moms who are concerned about vaccines, hippies who want to use natural products, and other groups that tend to go against the status quo. Personal responsibility to make choices that benefit both people and the planet has often been the community link between wildly different accounts and motivations.Â
And then came Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. Suddenly, many of the same crunchy influencers who championed personal responsibility and making informed choices for their families began to applaud the federal government making choices for all American families.
As the nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), RFK Jr. has an opportunity to leverage the federal government’s power to restrict things he believes are making Americans sick, such as seed oils, junk food, vaccines, chemicals, and more. A large portion of the crunchy community would support him in doing so. Eryn Carroll, a health-minded influencer, applauded MAHA, suggesting that the federal government should work to ban GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, and fluoride in tap water. “Imagine a health system led by someone who truly prioritizes our well-being over corporate interests,” wrote Carly Shankman, another online crunchy influencer, in support of RFK Jr.Â
But many in the crunchy community remain adamant that the federal government should not take choices away from people. “I am granola but also a rational science-minded person, and they are going to have to pry vaccines and pasteurized milk out of my cold hands,” ranted one Reddit user in a channel describing itself as “a place for almost hippies.”Â
The disagreement over MAHA within the health-focused community proves that two things can be true at once: Yes, many things are bad for our health. No, asking the federal government to remove our option to choose these things is not a good idea.Â
I live in the daily tension between these two things as the stereotypically crunchy person among my friends and family. My house is as chemical-free as possible, and anything including the ingredient “fragrance” is banned. I don’t use perfume, make homemade cleaning products, haven’t lit a candle in years, filter my water, and religiously read the in
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