Don’t Walk The MAHA Plank

There are plenty of fine people on both sides of the party divide, and in the natural products business, who seem to find common cause in certain aspects of the MAHA movement and its leader, new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charmed by his past environmental bona fides, they hear his stated desire to battle Big Food by removing artificial dyes and other potentially harmful additives from store shelves, and think he’s a fellow traveler. Some hear about his willingness to look skeptically at GRAS certifications and drug approvals and feel kinship in the obvious conflicts of interest that come when industry representatives slide easily between private practice and gatekeeping in the name of public health. Others have shared concern about inflammation, obesity, and chronic health conditions.

So when Expo rolled around, it was only mildly surprising to spot attendees sporting MAHA Action swag; it was maybe a bit aggressive that in addition to selling the stuff, they were swapping products for feats of strength like extended planks or pull-ups, but Expo can get that way.

The MAHA team wasn’t just there to cheerlead on the floor, though. Three of its main faces, MAHA Action leader Del Bigtree (RFK’s former campaign spokesman), “Food Babe” Vani Hari, and health care entrepreneur Calley Means took to Expo’s education program to tempt the crowd with the big dollars they insist MAHA will bring the natural products business. Instead of drugs and vaccines, according to these folks, government dollars could be diverted to brands offering cleaner food and supplements, forming a backbone of preventive health care in a country where medical costs have grown immensely.

“It would be much cheaper to have money flow to the entrepreneurs in this room,” Means exhorted. “We should be proudly saying we can be part of the cure of the health care mix.”

There’s a certain amount of self-interest there, of course. Hari and Means both have their own supplement brands, among other holistic health business interests, while Bigtree’s profile continues to rise due to his alliance with Kennedy; his anti-vaccination Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) has seen fundraising soar.

But business synergies aside, it’s logical that Trump acolytes would want to break non-GMO bread with the folks at Expo. After all, the skepticism of institutions, for good or ill, has been a driving force behind both Natural Products and Trumpism.

But I found MAHA’s chest-pounding at Expo West to be pretty hollow. In fact, the sheer size of the natural products business, with Expo its annual celebration, would seem to indicate that there’s already a strong market for better-for-you, responsibly made products. It was there long before RFK started campaigning, in fact he even tried to join it with “Keeper Springs” water.

True, Expo, and the business it represents, is a natural outgrowth of dissatisfaction with the status quo, around diet, around product quality, around skepticism of Big Food and Big Pharma. It’s healthy to be skeptical in many ways – in journalism, in business, in science. For consumers, for entrepreneurs, for retailers, that skepticism has helped, legitimize, via the marketplace, movements like organics, regenerative agriculture, allergen-free foods, alternative proteins, and sustainable food systems.

The MAHA movement takes things to a darker place, offering the kind of aggressively paranoid response that comes when healthy skepticism is exposed too long to craven political ambition. It doesn’t express skepticism for the purpose of health, it expresses it for the accumulation of power. It might support a cleaner supply chain, but it also seeks to drown legitimate scientific study around life-saving medicines in populist rhetoric. It throws all flavors and colors under the umbrella of Red Dye No. 3; it takes legitimate concerns around the state of the GRAS approval process and uses it as a wedge to completely disable the functions of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — and all other established institutions.

Like most of the Trump administration, it offers deceptively easy answers to incredibly complex problems, promoting Vitamin A as a cure for Measles, when scientific studies make it clear that, although severe Vitamin A deficiencies – like from extreme malnutrition – can exacerbate the effects of infectious diseases, there’s no better prevention than the Measles vaccine itself. It knowingly promotes false conspiracy theories around vaccines’ relationship to autism and other conditions, largely to justify an agenda of vaccine avoidance, one that has become rocket-powered with the politicization of the COVID-19 response.

The rabble-rousing expediency that the MAHA brain trust offered around diet and medicine doesn’t extend to the specifics, of course. It traffics in junk science, advising farmers to let the bird flu “burn through the flock” to find “survivors” for study – when that creates millions of opportunities for the virus to rapidly mutate. It takes outlier individual experience and lays it out as policy for all. It is appealing only in that it bucks sometimes unpopular but ultimately responsible conventions and cures; it attacks scientific fact but offers only Google- and Reddit-driven alternatives.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cutting programs that bring fresh produce to local food systems while canceling $12 billion in grants to states for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services and addiction treatment. It’s cutting the Small Business Association, which has offered loans to many of the startups at Expo. It’s gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, which operates programs around food waste, upcycling, recycling, and provides crucial research around clean water and food – those same environmental bona fides that MAHA claims to value.

Like the administration that hired RFK, MAHA points fingers, spouting obvious truths that it didn’t invent in an attempt to co-opt what’s already an incredibly successful business movement. They didn’t built it. They need you more than you need them; don’t let them greenwash their authoritarian partners.

As someone who puts on conferences, I’m blown away by the scope and size of Expo. We host close to 1,000 people, they host closer to 100,000. But that impressive size was what I feared the most five years ago, in 2020. I was all packed up and ready to take my Expo flight, but my mind was spinning with the terms we were all starting to hear: disease vectors, superspreader events, refrigerated tractor trailers parked outside of ERs.

It’s hard to fathom, now, just how close we all came to an explosive, Expo-driven outbreak in 2020. It’s hard to appreciate just how many lives were saved when, despite the obvious financial hit, New Hope leadership was wise enough to pull the rip cord on the event that year.

I wonder, given a seat at the table, whether MAHA would have done the same? Or would they have hoped for herd immunity to appear on the Expo floor, as they stood, cheering pull-ups, standing up to science, selling sweatshirts.