The way Jessica Knurick sees it, the Make America Healthy Again movement won over Americans on social media — and so that’s where public health’s battle to win back people’s hearts and minds must be fought.
Knurick, a dietitian with a PhD, has become one of the faces of a fledgling counter-MAHA movement. She has 1.1 million Instagram followers and 335,000 followers on TikTok. She serves up snappy videos featuring news clips and charts to debunk the latest claims from US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other MAHA leaders. Her voice is playful but authoritative — making her explanations of basic scientific concepts more engaging and hopefully more likely to help people to navigate the sometimes-deranged social media wellness influencer ecosystem.
But before she began creating her own content, she was troubled by the transformation unfolding on social media. A shift was underway and became especially pronounced in the most personal way. She said that in 2019, during her first pregnancy, she recalled misleading and fear-based content for pregnant women being present but hardly overwhelming. But then the pandemic hit and polarized people about public health even more than they had been. When she had her second child in 2022, it seemed like that was the only kind of content she was being shown.
“A lot of people who maybe trusted science before, maybe trusted our institutions, or never even thought about them and went about their lives, they were in their houses on social media, and saw tons and tons of conspiratorial information and health information taken out of context,” Knurick told me in a recent interview. “That started laying the foundation for this anti-science, anti-public health movement we’re seeing now.”
The seeds for this transition had been laid over many years. Facebook and Instagram have overhauled their algorithms in ways that elevate fear-based content — and the wellness businesses that used that kind of marketing to target young women, and moms in particular, have thrived.
When Kennedy launched his presidential campaign in 2024, he gave this broad collection of people who feared toxins and chemicals and a corrupt food and medical industry a name: the Make America Healthy Again movement (MAHA). Now he is the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump and is remaking federal health policy in his and MAHA’s image.
Knurick and other public health experts believe parts of Kennedy’s agenda could actually lead to more sickness based on the available evidence; falling vaccination rates, for example, have already led to a historic measles outbreak this year.
But how do you persuade people when appeals to authority aren’t effective anymore, because many people reflexively don’t trust the experts?
That is Knurick’s project.
She is an expert herself and reads the latest research from reputable scholarly journals, as any trained dietitian would. But that is not the focus of her messaging. Instead, she told me that she is trying to figure out how to use the tools of the MAHA movement to argue that, while its concerns about chronic diseases are sincere and well-founded, its explanations for that crisis and its proposed solutions are misplaced. She knows she won’t convert everybody, but her Instagram follower count has grown from 150,000 to more than 1 million in the past two years; she says she receives DMs from previous skeptics, another sign that she may be making some inroads in her mission.
I spoke with Knurick about how she goes about the work of trying to counter MAHA on its own turf. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.
A lot of the concerns underlying the MAHA movement are credible, genuine concerns. Among those, which in particular do you take most seriously?
I think what tends to confuse a lot of people when they first come across my content is the fact that I do sound a lot like the people in MAHA on a surface level — because what I always say is they largely get the problem right.
Now, at times they overstate the problem. RFK Jr. will just cite random statistics, like that nearly 50 percent of American children have Type 2 diabetes when it’s really less than 1 percent.
But we do have a chronic disease issue in this country, particularly a lifestyle-related chronic disease issue where more than half of American adults are living with at least one chronic condition and nearly 30 percent are managing multiple chronic illnesses. Many of those are among the leading causes of death in the United States.
I think what MAHA has really tapped into is this idea that we do have a food system that prioritizes profit over people’s health. We do have a health care system that largely prioritizes profits, as opposed to most health care systems in the world. We pay twice as much as other countries for health care, and we have worse outcomes.
They really tap into this feeling we all have that our systems are set up for us to fail. Our systems are set up for corporate profits and they’re leaving us behind.
Which concerns do you not take seriously?
When I saw this movement coming, it was literally my exact area of expertise; exactly what I’ve been studying. I’ve been studying chronic disease prevention, how policy impacts our systems that impact our health, for years.
I saw how they were manipulating the narrative. Where I diverge with them is: The issues are largely right, but what they identify as the causes of those issues are largely wrong and misleading.
MAHA really leans into this idea of corruption, right? Regulatory corruption, scientific corruption, over-medicalization. It’s all very focused on this idea that you can’t trust experts. You can’t trust science. You can’t trust regulation. When you look at the original MAHA report, what was supposed to be their scientific report about the causes of childhood chronic disease, it really leaned heavy into this conspiratorial corruption narrative.
Whereas if you’re actually looking at it from a very evidence-based place, that’s not what’s causing chronic disease. In public health, we look at things like social determinants of health: income inequality or the built environment or education access or health care access. MAHA doesn’t even talk about these things, which are very evidence-based causes of chronic disease. You can’t really talk about health disparities because of the Trump administration’s opposition to DEI.
They really have this strong focus on things like food dyes and seed oils, and, in fact, the evidence is quite the opposite for something like seed oils. Food dyes are a bit more nuanced, but if I make a list of one to 20 things in our food environment that are causing issues, food dyes are going to be quite low on that list. To put all of our emphasis into that and not talk about the actual issues is just disingenuous.
I will give you one example. They talk about the dietary guidelines as being corrupt, right? The dietary guidelines are in bed with these food corporations. RFK Jr. says they put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid — not understanding that the top of the food pyramid is what you are supposed to eat sparingly. And even if he didn’t make that mistake, they bring up the food pyramid like we still use it. That pyramid has been discontinued since 2005.
The other thing is less than 10 percent of Americans follow the dietary guidelines. But if they did, research suggests that their diet quality would be greatly improved.
So when you’re trying to talk about what the problems are with health in America, and you are very disingenuously saying that it’s the dietary guidelines because it plays into this idea of corruption — when it’s absolutely not the dietary guidelines, and again, if more people followed them, we’d be better off — it just says to me that this is not a genuine movement to improve health.
It’s more to play into this idea of corruption so that we don’t trust our public health agencies, we don’t trust scientists, and they can insert ideology instead of evidence.
Obviously, nevertheless, they have found an audience. Who do you see being the core audience for MAHA?
RFK Jr. has his core base that’s been with him since he was running for president, and over the last couple of decades with his work at the Children’s Health Defense. That core base is really based on an anti-vaccine movement.
Then within the broader MAHA coalition, it is more moms. They really play into this MAHA mom and younger women generally. This isn’t all of them, but I would say that a good representation of MAHA is moms with young kids who are middle- to upper-class white women. That’s a really strong MAHA coalition. They don’t necessarily need to think about all of the factors that play into the health of Americans, particularly low-income Americans. But they genuinely want a healthier food environment. They want to see an improvement in health outcomes for the people they know and, for some of them, Americans overall.
Maybe they have never thought through these issues before. I get DMs from people all the time who are like, I have literally never connected the fact that policy impacts the systems and impacts our health. For a lot of them, this is the first time they’ve ever thought about these issues. I’ve also seen people say, Well, at least an administration is talking about our health. So obviously, they weren’t paying attention during the Obama administration with Michelle Obama’s movement, but a lot of them were probably children.
Moms with young kids are a very vulnerable population. I know this because I’m a mom with young kids. We really just want to do what’s best for our children. We are very susceptible to fear-based messaging like, You can’t trust this in your food. This is going to hurt your kids. I stitched a video a few months ago that started with the question: Are you poisoning your kids?
That messaging really, really triggers us. We’re the audience for it. And the MAHA movement does that quite well.
Who do you see as the audience for your own content?
When I started, I just didn’t see a voice opposing the misleading narratives that I saw out there. So I was really trying to reach people who were open to hearing another side but just hadn’t had that opportunity. They were concerned, just like I’ve always been concerned, about our food environment, about policies that are impacting our public health institutions or our public health outcomes. But they were being a bit misled by the narrative. They got into the wrong algorithm, and they were seeing the same thing over and over. They just literally hadn’t had an opportunity to hear an evidence-based perspective through a public health lens. People who still care about science and evidence, but maybe they just didn’t think about these topics before.
I would love to reach people who have already been misled by this movement, who really do care about changing systems, because I think that if we can diagnose the causes correctly, that will give us more momentum to actually make real change.
One of my goals is to never be condescending or talk down to the people in the MAHA movement who have just been caught up by it because they’ve never thought of these issues. They really genuinely care, but they’ve just only ever heard the MAHA rhetoric.
I have very little tolerance for the people at the top of this movement who are spreading this misinformation and are making tons of money off of it.
How do you bring in the people who have been misled without alienating them by being sarcastic about RFK Jr. — somebody they like? You can take a very confrontational tone in some of your content. How do you think about that calibration?
Yeah, it’s something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. I’ll tell you that there’s a human component in this where I’m just so distraught at seeing what he’s doing to our public health agencies and the science, even if I wanted to be kind in my tone to him.
But what you’ll see is that I don’t disparage him as a person. I talk about what he’s doing and how it’s detrimental. The people that I will respond to, I don’t attack them personally. I go after the misinformation that they’re spreading. I try to really stay focused on that.
My approach will turn people off. I’m not going to get everybody because people who love RFK Jr. will come to my page or they’ll watch a video and they’ll hear my tone towards him, and they won’t even listen to the rest. I know that.
But for every person like that, there are people who you know will be like, Oh my gosh, how can she take such a strong stance about him, and then be more inquisitive and listen more. I’ve had several people send me DMs, somebody literally said this to me the other day: You know, I came to your page as a hater. But I just kept watching, and you kept backing up your claims and you kept explaining things in a way that I understood.
I don’t think you’re ever going to get everybody, no matter what approach you take.
A lot of your content is dedicated to explaining foundational scientific concepts, like “correlation does not equal causation.” What are some of the concepts people need to be able to really grasp nutrition science — and all kinds of science — and navigate this chaotic information environment that we all exist in?
It’s a media literacy thing. These are things that I see in a lot of these misleading videos, and so I try to point them out to people. I’m not going to be able to debunk everything on the internet, right? But if I can teach people what to look for, then they’re going to be more savvy viewers and they’re going to be able to say to themselves, Hey, that seems a bit out of context, or, Hey, that’s probably misleading.
Correlation vs. causation is probably the biggest one. A lot of people will show graphs of two different variables increasing at the same time and use that to imply causation. Identifying that, I think, can be really important.
I have also noticed that you call out some of these financial conflicts of interest that involve MAHA movement leaders, their businesses, and where the movement diverges with consensus science. Why do you think that is important?
We are so critical of conflicts within pharma or food, which we should be, right? That’s fair. But the wellness industry completely flies under the radar, and no one questions it. Many leaders in the MAHA movement who are really getting a lot of people to distrust the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory industries and the food industries, have supplement lines or sell a lot of wellness products on their websites.
Calley Means, one of the leaders in the MAHA movement, for example, has a company called TrueMed that allows FSA and HSA dollars to be spent on any number of wellness products or supplements. His sister [US surgeon general nominee Casey Means] has a company that sells continuous glucose monitors. Now we have HHS coming out recommending more research into supplements and wearable technology.
I think it’s really important for people to identify that most of the people who are high up in this MAHA movement are financially benefiting from this. We should be just as critical, if not more critical, because the wellness industry is far less regulated than the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry.
There’s a disconnect. People aren’t recognizing the conflicts that we’re seeing right in front of us when it comes to wellness and MAHA.
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