Here's a great fifteen-minute video to share with friends and family, particularly those who might have already gone down the "Make America Healthy Again" rabbit hole. The New York Times Opinion Video, created by Derek Beres of Conspirituality Podcast in collaboration with NYT producer and editor Alex Stockton, is called, "You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA's Conspiracy Theories," and seeks to explore and explain how participating in seemingly innocuous health trends like conducting celery juice detoxes and avoiding seed oils and artificial food dyes can lead some people — especially those who are suffering from illness, feel alienated from the traditional medical system, and are desperate for help and answers — down a harmful path where wellness influencers spread health misinformation, push anti-vaccine disinformation and other conspiracy theories, foment distrust of medical science and the healthcare system, and peddle junk science and expensive remedies that are at best useless and at worst dangerous or deadly.
The New York Times provides an overview of the video:
Using artificial intelligence to identify narrative patterns across nearly 12,000 videos and podcasts from the world of wellness, New York Times Opinion Video reconstructed the MAHA conspiracy theory rabbit hole. In the video above, hear from people who found themselves sucked to the bottom of it. They developed an extreme distrust of the healthcare system, with tragic consequences. All the while, the people peddling anti-health-care content — people now empowered by and working in the Trump administration — have raked in their share of the $460 billion wellness industry, profiting from the paranoia they fueled.
The pair worked on the project for almost ten months, as it involved a massive content analysis of podcasts, videos, social media posts, and more from MAHA influencers, including the man at the helm of our entire public health system. In the project, they set out to reconstruct the journey of people who fall victim to the conspiracy theories that MAHA influencers spread, though interviewing former followers, and retracing their stories step by step through the content they consumed. They examined approximately 12,000 videos and podcasts, and found that this content acts like a funnel that turns health-conscious people into skeptics who end up distrusting the healthcare system. People start out trying to get healthier by, for instance, eating more 'clean' foods, or avoiding food dyes or seed oils. Soon, they find themselves being fed content by influencers proclaiming that pretty much any ailment is caused by some kind of toxin. Wellness influencers label so many things as "toxic" — sugar, dairy, gluten, fluoride, canola oil. The list is endless. People searching for healthier ways to live can often get obsessed with finding "cleaner" ways of eating and living, so they turn repeatedly to the wellness influencers who have guided them and who appear to be extremely healthy and successful.
As the video explains, though, "toxins are just a scapegoat, distracting from the real causes of America's health problems, like poverty, lack of access to health care, and nutritious food." And MAHA wellness influencers aren't interested in addressing those issues. Instead, they push expensive products for clean living and detoxification. Soon, as a person looks more and more to their favorite wellness influencers (and their products!) for answers, they come to have less trust in their doctors and other healthcare providers. The video continues:
"All the while, these influencers profit. Just about every MAHA influencer sells something or another. Calley Means runs an online marketplace for alternative health products. He steers money that's supposed to be spent on health care into his business. He now works in the Trump administration. His sister, Casey Means, sells health technology wearables, which can allow people to obsessively track what they eat. She's been nominated surgeon general. And of course, RFK, Jr. has made millions through his anti-vaccine organization, lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, and book deals. Wellness is a $460 billion industry. These influencers criticize Big Pharma, but they're just Big Wellness, using their newfound political power to dismantle the health care system from the inside, while working to write regulations that benefit their own businesses. You see, the MAHA movement is not going to fix the health care system because its leaders profit by making people distrust healthcare."
The video then discusses the dangerous term "sick care," which is actually "the conspiracy theory at the core of the MAHA movement" and is about "much more than just distrusting medicine." In fact, during their research, they found 749 videos or podcasts featuring the core of MAHA influencers they studied claiming that the healthcare system knowingly and actively harms people. Pushing this conspiracy theory about "sick care" is how MAHA influencers lead people from "harmless health tips" to turning their back on all healthcare. And this can cause dire consequences for people — including sickness or even death.
So what's to be done? Is there an exit strategy? The video also highlights a few ways out of this morass, including holding supplements to the same regulatory standards as pharmaceuticals, which would reduce the ability for grifters to profit off useless (or harmful) products. Another important point the video makes is that people seeking answers, who end up turning to wellness influencers, often feel shunned or ignored by the mainstream healthcare system, so it's imperative that we begin to make healthcare more affordable, make insurance less complicated, and invest in healthcare systems where doctors and other healthcare providers have the time and energy to really listen to their patients and take their concerns seriously. The video states, however, that, unfortunately, these solutions, which have always been difficult, are even more unlikely to happen under this current administration. But one interviewee, Heather, a former anti-vaxxer who now runs an organization that helps vaccine-hesitant parents learn more about vaccines and overcome their fears, suggests something we can all start doing right now: listening to the anti-vaccine and other MAHA folks in your lives with more empathy. This can help defuse tensions and create opportunities for actually sharing science-based research in ways they might be open to hearing. She explains:
"If you have anti vax people in your life, they just need you to acknowledge that they are worried and that they care about their kid. It takes their defensiveness down 100 notches . . . Today I refer to myself as an anxious pro-vaxxer."
After hearing the heartbreaking stories of the people in the video who fell victim to MAHA's conspiracy theories, I'm going to try much harder to put Heather's idea into practice.
You can watch the video here. Also, Conspirituality Podcast released a companion podcast episode where Derek Beres talks about making the video and discusses the role of journalism and podcasting in fighting health dis- and misinformation. You can listen here.
Previously:
• MAHA wellness influencers hype raw milk and rotting meat
• RFK Jr's MAHA project funnels millions from public health to private wellness industry
• Caught using AI to hallucinate sources in a report, White House calls it a formatting issue (video)
• Conspirituality: A podcast that dismantles New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis
• Wellness influencers are convincing people to shove coffee up their butts
• How Tik Tok amplifies the consumerist fever dream of conspirituality
• Dr. Oz trolled for supporting predatory multi-level-marketing scams
