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For Mikyla Page, keeping a three year-old daughter healthy is serious business. Before eating anything, the stay-at-home mom reads an ingredients list, staying away from artificial colors, flavors, dyes, and excess sugar. She doesn’t support vaccination, instead believing that “bathing in sunlight” will keep her family healthy, making sure her family gets outside every day to soak up vitamin D.
At first, Page felt alone in her choices. “You’re called crazy for even questioning the medical field,” she said. “My intuition was telling me one thing, but the world was telling me something else. My husband was like, ‘Are you sure this is where you want to go?’ I just went with my gut.”
Now, with Robert F Kennedy Jr tapped by Donald Trump to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, Page, who is 26 and lives in Utah, feels vindicated.
Kennedy is well known for his history of pushing baseless health claims that sometimes veer into tinfoil hat territory – he’s said that chemicals in the water supply affect a child’s gender identity, and that Covid was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese people. He has also long advocated against vaccines, repeating the debunked claim made by the discredited British doctor Andrew Wakefield that the vaccines cause autism.
Kennedy’s supporters include an army of self-identified “crunchy moms” like Page, who are especially drawn to one proposal in particular: improving Americans’ diets and reeling in the processed food industry. In November, he accused major manufacturers of “poison[ing]” kids.
Moms on social media adopted the hashtag #MAHA, which has been used in over 224,000 TikTok videos (Kennedy has promised to “make America healthy again” – a play on Donald Trump’s trademark slogan that’s often shortened to Maha). Anyone can consider themselves Maha, but mothers in particular have become its fiercest evangelists online, where they post videos explaining their politics while cooking dinner or resting a swaddled baby in their arms.
Maha can be seen as the alliance of multiple health-focused subcultures. Along with crunchy moms, there are influencers and entrepreneurs who use the movement to peddle supposedly non-toxic brands of baby wipes or moisturizers. There are the chronically ill, who feel failed by the medical establishment. There are the yogis and wellness bros who believe that it’s possible to optimize your way to a better life, to heal oneself without the help of mainstream medicine. And then there is Trump – famously a McDonald’s lover, and not exactly the picture of health – and his supporters, who politicize Maha as a rallying cry against science-based elites.
But moms have a special place within the movement. They are the kinds of voters that the Democrats thought they had locked up when Kamala Harris ran on a history of prosecuting sex offenders and a platform of abortion rights. But, Page says, it was Kennedy who mad her feel legitimized for the first time.
“It’s nice to have somebody backing you up, especially a male [such as Kennedy], because I feel like sometimes men take longer to catch on to these things since they don’t have a maternal instinct,” Page said. “It’s nice to have someone like Robert Kennedy and Trump to see these issues.”
Page says she’s most excited for Kennedy to “crack down on dyes in food and helping the [Food and Drug Administration] regulate that”. One specific dye, the petroleum-based red 3 that’s ubiquitous in American junk food, may be banned by the FDA soon for use in food – it’s been banned in cosmetics since 1990 – since it has been found to be carcinogenic in animals. A number of Democrats, including the New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone, have sought to have the dye banned. The FDA’s current review is not related to Kennedy, though he is in favor of a ban.
“If you look at the food labels in Europe, there are no dyes, and then if you look at the labels here, it’s completely different,” Page said. “I’m really excited on RFK getting real, raw ingredients back into our food.”
For some, Kennedy might seem like an unlikely defender of America’s families. Last year, a woman who used to babysit his children accused the lawyer of sexual assault, saying he had groped her in 1998, when she was 23 and he was 45. Kennedy has not outright denied or addressed the allegations, instead only saying that he was “not a church boy … I have so many skeletons in my closet”.
And yet, most Americans approve of Kennedy – according to a CBS/YouGov poll, RFK is the most popular nominee from Trump’s transition team, with 47% of respondents saying the environmental lawyer is a good pick for the job.
“It’s not that I’m overlooking the facts, but every single person has made mistakes,” Page said. “When someone’s in the limelight, people are going to go after them. I think about things that I did in the past, and I made mistakes, but I’m just working to be better each day. If something is coming out, I’m not going to really pay attention to it, because I don’t know the full truth. I just know what I want to happen and how I’m going to help.”
Kristen Louelle Gaffney, a former Sports Illustrated model and mother of three, recently started Super True, a snack bar brand she says is inspired by the Maha ethos. Gaffney, who is married to the former NFL running back Tyler Gaffney, enthusiastically supports Kennedy and Trump.
“I choose to focus on the positives,” Gaffney said. “No one’s perfect, and [allegations of abuse by Trump do] not personally blind me and my admiration for his goal of putting America and our families and God first. That overrules anything that I might see on a news headline.”
The past decade-plus has seen the rise of the momfluencer, women who project an impossible image of soft, mess-free, domestic bliss. They sell new mothers a fantasy – as well as promoting the products they say are required to attain it. These brands are always “non-toxic” or “organic”. Kennedy also uses this language, and his audience is primed to respond to it.
Kennedy has also declared war on the “chronic illness epidemic”. Women are disproportionately affected by chronic illnesses such as depression, endometriosis, and Alzheimer’s, but doctors are less likely to listen to them. Kennedy’s promise to overhaul systems like the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention takes on a common enemy: the idea of a traditional doctor in a white lab coat. Maha women might have felt dismissed or gaslighted by this figure, so they root against the status quo and look for alternatives – no matter how untested, or potentially dangerous.
Gaffney believes Maha is a feminist movement, as some of its loudest advocates online are women who feel “empowered” through making choices about their children’s health – no matter if it goes against modern science.
“How many times do you go on Instagram and see moms who are like, ‘Look at this new cabbage soup I’m making,’ or ‘Look at this raw milk I have,’ or ‘Look at this – no seed oil,’” she said. “They’re really proud. So I think that’s a feminist movement within households.”
Kennedy has faced widespread criticism from the medical and scientific community. Alistair McAlpine, a pediatric physician at British Columbia’s children’s hospital, wrote on X: “It is hard to overstate what a terrible decision this is … The last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.”
McAlpine referred to a devastating 2019 outbreak of the preventable disease in the island country, which happened after Kennedy met with government officials and other vaccine skeptics to conduct what health experts called “a significant disinformation campaign”.
Maha moms recognize this outpouring of disapproval but say that Kennedy’s focus is on “just educating people”, as Gaffney puts it. Using the language of anti-vaccine groups who call for “freedom of choice”, Gaffney believes that “ultimately, all RFK’s policies are giving freedom of choice back to the parents”.
“Whether it’s food or taking dyes out, giving freedom to the families is what excites me most,” she said.
