When the Danish media talk about Donald Trump’s America, it is always about Ukraine, tariffs, Iran, and rhetoric they dislike. We hear almost nothing about MAHA – Make America Healthy Again. And that is a pity, because it is not only a necessary health policy, but also one of the most interesting phenomena on the American right at present. It is about food, exercise, and the restoration of the body.
Recently, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a video together with the actor Rob Schneider in which the two urged Americans to eat real food, get moving, and ‘take back their health’. Kennedy accompanied the message with the now familiar slogan: ‘Eat Real Food, Get Active, and together we can Make America Healthy Again.’ MAHA has even been given its own mandate under the White House.
The commission was established shortly after Kennedy took office as Health Secretary, with the declared aim of solving the chronic-disease epidemic among Americans, particularly among children. Last summer, the commission published its latest strategy report, containing more than 120 concrete recommendations, ranging from reducing ultra-processed foods to regulating the medication of children.
The health crisis behind the slogan
There is a reason why the movement has gained such a hold over Americans. Ultra-processed foods account for between 53 and 58 per cent of the calories consumed by American adults, and fully 62 per cent of what children and young people eat. More than 40 per cent of schoolchildren and adolescents have at least one chronic condition, such as asthma, obesity, or learning and behavioural problems, while fewer than 1 per cent of children eat a diet that meets the recommended standards.
Among adults, three out of four have at least one chronic disease, such as obesity, high blood pressure, or diabetes. Research increasingly points to the degree of processing itself as the problem, not merely calories or sugar in isolation.
It is this epidemic that MAHA was established to solve. But there are broader perspectives as well.
The conservative shift in outlook
This perspective concerns the change in the American right’s understanding of itself. The glass of whisky, the steak, and the cigar – conservatism’s old props – have been put on the shelf and back on the grill, in favour of dumbbells and running shoes.
The old image of conservatism is being replaced by an entirely different aesthetic: discipline, strength, and bodily self-mastery. Trump himself does not drink alcohol, and although this is rarely mentioned as a political argument, it fits neatly into the new image.
Around Vice-President JD Vance and within a broader online culture, there has in recent years been a flourishing preoccupation with strength training and a widespread scepticism towards industrially produced foods. It is a culture often associated with the more masculine part of the new right, but to which MAHA has now given an official, government-backed expression.
The new right’s focus on the body is a counterweight cast in iron against a civilisation that cultivates sofas and screens. It can be seen as a reinterpretation of the old American pioneer spirit: the conquest is no longer the open land to the west, but health. The pioneer spirit has thus found a new, unexploited territory: the body itself.
Vitalism as a philosophical foundation
Behind all this lies something resembling a vitalist philosophy of life, although Americans themselves would hardly formulate it in those terms.
Nietzsche’s reckoning with what he called slave morality, and his demand for affirmation of life rather than resignation, provide a language for what ‘take back your health’ is really about: a reckoning with civilisation’s slow-moving abundance, a civilisation that has grown accustomed to administering lifestyle diseases rather than cultivating vitality.
Ultra-processed food is no longer cultivated, but moulded; it is an industrial product in the guise of food, constructed in a laboratory by engineers whose aim is maximum appetising effect rather than nourishment. The slogan ‘Eat Real Food’ thus becomes an attempt to avoid this technification of food culture.
The MAHA movement’s cultivation of local, homemade, and unprocessed food is a variant of what Roger Scruton called oikophilia: a love of what is close at hand and cultivated, standing in sharp contrast to globalised, anonymous supermarket goods.
The industrialised food chain is liberal globalisation developed to the extreme: infinite choice, no attachment to region, tradition, or community around the meal. MAHA may be seen as an attempt to reintroduce forms and limitations where liberalism has dissolved them.
And finally: conservatives such as Christopher Lasch criticised the way in which the welfare state’s experts turn the citizen into a passive client rather than an autonomous human being with responsibility for his own life. This is precisely the core of MAHA’s appeal to personal responsibility. Not the patient as an administered object of medical expertise, but the citizen as master of his own health.
National strength and the critique of corporatism
There is also a classical conservative aspect to all this that is easily overlooked: the criticism of the food industry’s power over legislation and dietary guidance is, in reality, a criticism of corporatism.
Health Secretary Kennedy has himself pointed out that previous American dietary guidelines bore the mark of having been drawn up by the food industry’s own lobbyists.
The reckoning is therefore not merely about individuals’ choice of breakfast, but about breaking an entangled bond between state and industry towards which a sound conservatism ought naturally to feel aversion.
A strong nation, according to this line of thought, requires strong, independent citizens, not a population held fast in dependence on industrially manufactured products and a state that has handed over its health policy to big industry, which profits from illness.
The MAHA movement is the recultivation of a neglected field in the American national soul, and it deserves far more serious treatment than the silence or shrug with which it has so far been met.