These concerns should transcend party lines. But in our highly polarized times, this discussion was coded as a right-wing affair. Johnson’s event unofficially marked the launch of MAHA: Make America Healthy Again, a slogan with a deafening echo. And the speakers included not only physicians like Makary and Means but also such provocateurs as Jordan Peterson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump tapped last week to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

For many observers, this makes a public discussion about realigning food policy, research priorities, and nutrition guidelines not only right-wing but part of a pseudoscience fringe. Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic called it the “Woo-Woo Caucus.” One viral tweet lamented that tax dollars went to “anti-science personalities.” A recent column in Vanity Fair declared MAHA “a public health nightmare, wrapped in the Trojan horse of language about good, clean living.”

But it would be a grave mistake if necessary conversations about chronic illness and our medical and food systems became another casualty of the culture wars. More scientists, doctors, Democrats, and journalists should take this subject seriously.

The speakers on Johnson’s panel are not wrong to call out the potential links of estrogen-mimicking plastics and pesticides, soil depletion, forever chemicals, and industrial food to obesity, neurological disorders, metabolic dysfunction, autoimmune disease, infertility, depression, and the skyrocketing costs of health care. And say what you will about wellness influencers and entrepreneurs grifting for clicks, but the classically trained physicians on the panel have little to gain by recommending solutions outside the pharmacy.

“We have the most overmedicated, sickest population in the world, and nobody is talking about the root causes,” Makary told Johnson’s roundtable, lamenting that medicine’s answer to these systemic problems is drugs like Ozempic. “The best way to lower drug costs in the US is to stop taking drugs we don’t need.”

Means’s book examines the dysfunction in the mitochondria of the chronically ill, arguing that our metabolisms are overburdened by a toxic pile-on of modernity. At the roundtable, she put the problem in existential terms: “What we are dealing with here is so much more than a physical health crisis. This is a spiritual crisis,” she said to applause. “Our path out will be a renewed respect for the miracle of life and a renewed respect for nature.”

That may sound hyperbolic, conspiratorial, or quasi-religious, but she is among a growing cohort who see metabolic breakdown at the core of an array of diseases.

Among them is Dr. Chris Palmer, a Harvard psychiatrist who also spoke at the roundtable and whose book “Brain Energy” has a message sympatico with Means’s. “We agree that metabolic/mitochondrial dysfunction or dysregulation is foundational in a wide range of human health conditions,” including mental health conditions, he told me, and that “diet and nutrition play a very large role.” Palmer has used carbohydrate-restricting diets to induce improvements in patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression and even schizophrenia — findings published in peer-reviewed journals. Long before “keto” was the rage among health “optimizers,” it originated in the 1920s and proved a successful treatment for epileptic seizures.

At the macro level, these physicians are promoting many of the same commonsense lifestyle tweaks as wellness influencers — fresh air and sunshine, physical movement, good sleep and stress reduction, foods that come from the earth rather than corporate labs — and they have piles of research to back up their advice. Yet I’ve seen countless takedowns of “wellness culture” in books, podcasts, and tweets. These debunkers’ credo is that anyone who’s critical of medicine or offers alternatives to pharmaceuticals will send you on a slippery slope to anti-vaccine, anti-science woo, where you’ll lose all capacity for critical thought and die a horrible preventable death in a puddle of green smoothie.

It’s tiresome and patronizing.

Yes, there are ridiculous wellness products and zealots. There are dubious intravenous therapies and other very expensive snake oil. Some people become so obsessed with eating healthily that they develop an eating disorder called orthorexia. And certain self-care icons can be maddeningly oblivious to their privilege. But that doesn’t negate the legions who feel better after their wellness-y pursuits.

We all know someone who has made a healing journey or we may have made one ourselves. A relative of mine who’s a registered nurse reversed fatty liver disease with a high-protein diet and naps. A friend who’s a science professor keeps his ulcerative colitis in remission by eliminating triggers in his diet. I recently brought my own thyroid labs into the normal range. Was it the cold plunges, the supplements, the morning walks, the vegetables, or all of the above? I can’t tell you, but I can assure you science was not harmed as a result.

“If being healthy is woo-woo, then yeah, we’re woo-woo,” says Will Cole, a Pennsylvania-based naturopathic doctor who went to Michigan for the Kellogg rally. He points out that major institutions like the Cleveland Clinic have opened world-class centers that offer what used to be dismissed as alternative quackery — now called functional or integrative medicine — including nutritional support, herbs and supplements, meditation, and movement therapies like yoga, so the naysayers are on the wrong side of history. “How far have we fallen as a society when getting healthy on your own terms is the thing that’s being villainized?”

Hari tells me that she’s often subjected to a broken record of attacks by skeptics. “It’s ‘she’s pseudoscience, she’s fear-mongering, she’s a chemical-phobe, she has no credentials.’” The author of four books, she’s led successful campaigns to remove contested ingredients from the menus of Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Subway, and In-N-Out Burger.

When I asked Kellogg for comment about the subject of Hari’s rally in October — the dyes in food the company sells in the United States — the company responded that its products “comply with all applicable relevant laws and regulations.” It added: “The colors we use in our cereals have been deemed safe by scientific bodies around the world looking at the totality of research.”

Critics of MAHA are correct to point out that Republicans don’t seem likely to serve the cause very well.

During Donald Trump’s first term, he placed one of the chemical industry’s top lobbyists in charge of chemical oversight at the EPA, which promptly rolled back dozens of protections and approved more than 100 new pesticide products, including many that are banned outside the United States and several that contain atrazine, a powerful endocrine disruptor.

He killed an Obama-era animal welfare rule that bettered our meat supply, a rule that was restored under President Biden. Trump has not supported the Global Plastics Treaty, while Biden issued the first US plan to reduce the use of plastics. Trump brought chocolate milk back to school lunches; the Biden-Harris administration just issued stricter nutrition requirements for schools. Democratic-led California just banned six artificial dyes from school meals; Project 2025 calls for taking away genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling.

In broader terms of health, one of Trump’s first actions in 2017 was to attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act. This time, a Republican-controlled Congress could simply sit back and let the subsidies expire.

In September, the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services launched a Food Is Medicine initiative and website. It is based on the idea that nutritious food supports “a broad range of approaches that promote optimal health and healing and reduce disease burden.”

Yet the community voicing concerns about food and contaminants — like the people who showed up at Vani Hari’s rally in Michigan — feel as if they’ve gotten a warmer reception on the political right. Their calls to action have been given extensive airtime on Fox and the shows of Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson.

Hari, who was a Democratic National Convention delegate from North Carolina in 2008 and 2012, says she reached out to the Harris campaign to no avail. And that was prior to her cause’s association with RFK Jr.

The truth is, wellness was already being politicized before it was attached to a slogan rhyming with MAGA. Promoters were frequently accused of misleading followers and lumped in with the so-called deplorables. In her recent book “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein laments a “mirror world” where “soft focus wellness influencers” who questioned the COVID response “make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists.” It’s fair to say that some people with large followings fell down bizarre rabbit holes in recent years, but I’m not convinced the wellness community was any more prone to that than others.

Meanwhile, a strange idea has taken root among some on the American left that to demonize junk food is to shame marginalized consumers.

This summer, Time magazine featured an antiracist nutritionist’s “fight back against the mounting war on ultra-processed foods” because it ignores barriers to accessing fresh groceries and makes people “feel bad.” Even using the word “obesity” has become a cancellable offense. Last spring I suggested that the PTA might break from tradition and not sell soda at my child’s elementary school talent show. The response was immediate and decisive. Some families “like and want soda,” the president replied-all, “I don’t think we need to turn it into a soapbox, let people make their own decisions.”

“I’m very much against shaming people and making people feel bad,” says Palmer, the Harvard psychiatrist. “But the reality is that overweight and obese children are much more likely to develop a wide range of physical and mental health conditions,” which can lead to “a lifetime of suffering and disability.” And it’s hard to convince kids to refuse “treats” that are being served up by other parents and defended with social justice arguments.

To be sure, the building blocks of health, such as adequate sleep and exercise, stress-relieving relationships and activities, and wholesome foods, require a significant amount of time, money, or both — not to mention therapeutic diets and lifestyle modifications under the guidance of a qualified practitioner. But, says Palmer, “arguing that humans eating healthy food is somehow racist, sexist, ageist, or shaming of people in lower socioeconomic circumstances is a distraction, and one has to question who might be fueling those arguments.”

Indeed, recent investigations by U.S. Right to Know, The Examination, and Lighthouse Reports have revealed the lengths to which the food and chemical industries go to counter negative press and sway public opinion. Companies like General Mills pushed “anti diet” and “anti food-shaming” messaging so successfully it was regurgitated by dietitians to millions of followers on social media. A recent campaign led by a former Monsanto executive received taxpayer funding and sought to cast anyone critical of pesticides as part of an “anti-science ‘protest industry.’”

Activism and investigative journalism are far less polarized overseas. In the UK, physician Chris van Tulleken is another professional voice of caution against ultraprocessed foods. A recent meta-analysis in The BMJ found “direct associations” between exposure to UPFs and cardiovascular disease, depression and anxiety, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, and death from any cause, and it noted that the potential mechanism may be not only the inadequate nutrition but contaminants from packaging. Last summer van Tulleken binged on UPFs and has lab results to show the deleterious effects. This fall, a study of 300,000 people showed that those who frequently consumed UPFs had three times the rate of poor mental health as those whose consumption of UPFs was “rare” or “never,” even if their income was higher or they exercised more frequently.

Historically, demanding corporate accountability, more not less regulation from the FDA, and actual leadership from the agencies charged with safeguarding our food, water, and air have been the domain of Democrats. Michelle Obama planted the first organic garden at the White House and called for healthier school lunches. Environmental pollution, untested ingredients, and the revolving door between industry and government agencies should be progressive concerns, as should rallying around improving kids’ health.

RFK Jr.’s statements on vaccines are unnerving. Nobody wants a return of polio or measles. But trust in our public health institutions is at an all-time low, and plenty of reasonable people point to those institutions’ leadership over the last four years. “Let’s be honest, the current system is corrupt,” writes Vinay Prasad, a liberal UC San Francisco oncologist and epidemiologist who supports removing the blanket policy that protects vaccine manufacturers from being sued. “The compromise to RFK should be: let’s make a new vaccine and drug safety system.” Some public health leaders are even admitting that a reexamination of water fluoridation is “not an entirely crazy idea.”

Yes, RFK is alarmingly inclined toward conspiracies. But even Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, says he is “excited” about the prospect of RFK “taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health.”

MAHA may not be the slogan that will draw together a coalition across party lines, but we should not reflexively tune it all out because the movement includes some noxious personalities. Let’s not adopt such a restrictive diet of information that we starve ourselves of our own ideals.

Jennifer Block is an investigative journalist, most recently for The BMJ, and the author of “Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.” Follow her @writingblock.