Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a wellness influencer who is also President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services … has correctly identified an association between the ultra-processed American diet and high rates of chronic disease. [Still,] he’s also an anti-vaccine advocate who has suggested that [poppers cause AIDS deaths] and that seed oils are poison.
[J]ournalists, doctors, and scientists have rushed to correct Kennedy’s false statements. More than 75 Nobel Prize winners signed a letter, … asking senators to oppose Kennedy’s confirmation, given his “lack of credentials” in medicine, science, and public health. [However,] a better way to understand his appeal is to situate him … in a long lineage of American wellness figures waging a battle against conventional medicine.For more than a century, alternative health practices—what we now call wellness—have seduced Americans not because of the accuracy of their claims, but because of what else they offer: a sense of certainty, an outlet for mistrust, a pseudo-religious belief in the “natural,” and an affirmation of modernity’s limits. Because it satisfies those needs, wellness has a pattern of success in presenting itself as a replacement for the failures of medicine, even though the goals of wellness radically diverge from those of public health. The history of wellness suggests that the best way to defuse Kennedy’s power is not by litigating each one of his beliefs, some of which are irrefutable health truisms, but by understanding why the promise of being well has such lasting appeal.
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