During the first months of the second presidency of Donald Trump, the world of American health care experienced rapid transformations, largely at the request of its secretary for health and social services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy’s policies range from pure and simple refusal of science established to new strict food regulations. Disrédités and anti-Vaccin doctors such as David Geier have been exploited for positions in the federal government. Apart from Washington, some states followed Kennedy’s advance by turning away from decades from medical precedent. In UTAH, the Republican Governor Spencer Cox recently signed a fluorine ban in drinking water.
“Almost all modern societies are concerned about the creation of a healthy population,” said Corinna Trietel, historian of science, medicine and popular culture, at the University of Washington in St. Louis. “Unhealthy populations are not productive. They do not effectively fight wars. They aspire a lot of money. “
The current federal government is ostensibly very concerned about public health. When Kennedy presented himself to the presidency, his slogan was Maha or “to make America healthy”. After Kennedy approved Trump, Trump folded this and Kennedy’s coalition in his own campaign.
“Our goal is to withdraw toxins from our environment, withdraw our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong,” Trump said in an address in Congress in March. “And there is no one better than (Kennedy) and all the people who work with you, you have the best, to understand what is going on.”
Trump’s rhetoric could be somewhat denied by the reality that his administration has dismissed more than 10,000 federal health workers and has reduced billions of dollars in health funding and science.
But in many ways, this contradiction is at the heart of American health culture: we have never been so obsessed with our well-being, while simultaneously adopting unproven treatments and rejecting established science.
Americans spend much more for the so-called well-being than any other country. In 2023, the American well-being industry was worth 2 billions of dollars. China, in second place, has spent only $ 870 billion. At the same time, a third of American residents do not even have primary care physicians, according to a 2023 report of the National Association of Community Health Centers.
“Well-being and politics have been linked for a long time,” said Mariah Wellman, professor at the College of Communication at Michigan State University who studies the influence of social media on the well-being industry. “When we talk about people like RFK Jr. and other more marginal people, it’s not surprising, but it’s a growing problem that seems to come to the head right now.”
It is a puzzle that people in industries – from the university world to marketing and medicine – have trouble addressing. How can experts encourage people to continue to kiss their health, while protecting bad science and political extremism in many aspects of the well-being industry?
COVID-19: A permanent turning point
Since the start of the Pandemic COVID-19 in 2020, the Americans of all the bands have developed an obsession with their health.
Ethan Bauley, chief of narrative intelligence of the marketing company Weber Shandwick (IPG), analyzes online data to better understand the stories that settle on social networks. This includes health trends that pose challenges for business customers in the health care sector.
“Two things are true at the same time,” said Bauley. “The first is that there is incredibly precious and precise information shared online … It is also true that people motivated by profit or ideological recruitment use social media to influence people to sometimes make suboptimal and even dangerous health decisions.”
This was not always the case with the culture of online well-being, said Wellman. Only a decade ago, she said, well-being was widely favorable to consumer medicine, and not in contradiction with it.
“Covid-19 has been so afraid of the unknown,” said Wellman. “People who had the impression of having control of their health no longer felt in this way.” Influencers of well-being were able to make people have control of their health again, thanks to precise and inaccurate information. »»
A male embrace of a female world
Although change towards well-being has transcended demographic categories, the male embracing of what was once an industry massively focused on women is particularly notable when you consider changes in American health culture.
Jonathan Leary, who has a doctorate in chiropractic and alternative medicine, has witnessed a change in his male clientele over a period of half a decade to practice in Los Angeles.
“I have never had a single male patient to me unless they are a major trauma or a major problem,” he said. “Men only came because it was like the last resort. While my patients knew about it. They wanted to be preventive. “
Learn more:: The world of well-being becomes wild and weird
The skeptics and supporters of the culture of well-being noted the same change of rhetoric that brought men into the fold of well-being: American men were informed by influencers by kissing their health, they could stimulate productivity and success.
“Well-being went from something pretty crunchy and left, to something that can be optimized and capitalized,” said Wellman. “There has also been a change in the language of well-being: it has become a peak research space and (considered) as very male.”
Wellman noted that change towards a male culture is twofold: online wellness communities have become more lucrative while male entrepreneurs supplant female amateurs. At the same time, the emphasis was put on the need of men to become stronger.
“We saw it from the 2016 – Donald Trump and Fox News elections (Foxa), “Said Wellman.” It is very strategic because men had the impression of having the end of the stick. They have the impression that they are not heard. And that has continued for almost decades. »»
In some respects, added Wellman, it was the renewal of a culture that started in the 1980s, when Americans were obsessed with culturalists and home fitness videos. As president, Ronald Reagan has very publicly adopted his own health.
Biohacking: Sell solutions
Nowhere, the male embracing of technology and well-being is more clear than in the so-called biohacking movement.
Bryan Johnson, the face of the Biohacking movement, regularly becomes viral for his often bizarre health experiences: injecting the blood of his teenage son into his middle age body, exchanging all the plasma in his body and using stem cells of young Swedish volunteers to mitigate his joint pain.
“We are at war with death,” Johnson told his supporters in a “Don’t Die Summit” earlier this year in New York. “We are trying to create a new era of human beings.”
There is a resolutely male flavor to the Don Die community. On stage, Johnson told the hundreds of people in his audience, with an imperative smile, that many biohackers have made their debut in culture because of their concern for “Boners”. For Johnson, virility is a constant objective: “raising children to stand, being firm and being standing,” he wrote in a X postSupporting data on the duration of his 19 -year -old son’s erections.
Although Johnson’s movement is filled with humor in sophomotic and questionable promises of the advantages of avoiding cooked seed oil, fasting on planes and staying outside the sun, it is also a large company. Johnson sells supplements, urine tests, blood tests, prepared meals, protein bars and t-shirts.
And he is not alone.
Many Johnson recommendations are made in language that seems scientific. Bauley, the health health information expert, said that the use of technical terminology is increasingly common among those trying to make money in a booming market.
“It has always been that the most effective propaganda contains facts and truth. We see people referring to the search and the selection of cherries to obtain credibility. This tactic has become more widespread over time, “said Bauley. “References to scientific studies have in fact increased, but it is a lot of framing and reframing of research according to certain stories.”
The result: a link renewed with our health
When it comes to contacting the scientist, the exploitation and alarming elements of the culture of well-being, there is a fundamental challenge: there are a lot of good information and positive actors, mixed with the bad.
Over the years, the Americans have spent less and less time with their doctors and have received increasingly alienated health services. For many people, going to the doctor is intimidating or inaccessible. Going on Instagram is easy and usual.
Even the most extreme figures of online well-being communities spend a lot of time strengthening the basic principles of healthy life: eating well, avoiding excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol and obtaining good amounts of sleep and exercise. And although flashy experiences can make the headlines, many people create online well-being content on the basis of very basic health principles.
Arash Hashemi is a food influencer and the author of The mouth occurs: so easy, so goodA cookbook based on the recipes he first developed for his Instagram page of the same name. After losing more than 100 pounds, Hashemi began to share recipes on social networks, raising more than 4 million followers.
“Social media has its challenges and there are certainly improvements that must be made,” said Hashemi. “But it also helped to open conversations that did not happen before.
For men in particular, “mental health has become more destagmatized and there are more conversations on recovery, more in balance, more on rest,” said Hashemi. “These conversations did not really happen before (social media.) In many ways, they were avoided.”
Hashemi said some of the most significant interactions he has with followers come from parents of sick children. Having quick access to information on food that has good taste but that also meets the needs of children with cancer or diabetes was once a rarity.
“It is this positive prevails by more than anything else,” he said. “The information is at hand – you do not count on a show at a certain time or to collect a magazine at the store. I think it is a really monumental change as a company. ”