Yasmin Tayag | The Atlantic

One Food All Americans Can Agree On

2026-03-12T11:51:04-04:00

If nutrition is a sport, it has no casual fans. Supporters of Team Protein, the 2025 champions, are numerous and passionate, backed up by a sprawling industry of protein-supplemented products such as popcorn, soda, and cereal. Also popular is Team MAHA, captained by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which endorses “real foods,” especially red meat and dairy. The Dietitians are veteran players with an old-school strategy: going heavy on plants and light on saturated fats. Alongside underdogs like Team Keto and the Vegans, there are the Fiber-Maxxers, upstarts whose popularity has soared alongside sales of fiber-filled cookies, powders, and drinks.

As in any fandom, choosing one team can mean demonizing the others’ stars: MAHA partisans despise the Dietitians’ low-fat milk, and the Fiber-Maxxers sneer at Team Protein’s constipating supplements. Yet there is one player that any team would gladly welcome. It’s packed with fiber and protein. Kennedy would call it a “real food.” It’s plant-based, widely available, and incredibly affordable. It is the homeliest and humblest of foods: the bean.

Beans have a lot going for them. (The term beans is often deployed as a catchall term for the larger family of legumes, which includes beans as well as a subset called pulses; here, I’m talking about all of them.) These tiny packages pack a nutritional punch—so much so that the advisory committee for the 2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommended upping the daily serving size of legumes and promoting them as a protein source over meat and seafood. (The meat-happy published guidelines did not incorporate this suggestion.) Navy beans, for example, are especially fiber-dense, and lentils are protein powerhouses. To the farmer, beans are a boon: The plants store nitrogen in their roots, so they require less fertilizer and leave soil healthy once they’re harvested. They are significantly gentler on the climate than meat. Cooked well, they are creamy, tender, and excellent vehicles for flavor.

[Read: If everyone ate beans instead of beef]

Even the most skilled player can’t excel at everything. Dried beans take time and effort to cook. Expert technique can make them delicious, but they’ll never be as succulent as steaks. And yes, they can cause horrible gas, especially among bean novitiates—that is, most Americans. Unlike, say, Mexican or South Asian cuisines, American food is not particularly bean-heavy. Americans consume roughly 60 pounds of beef annually, but only about nine pounds of beans.

The discrepancy is partly because of beans’ lackluster image. Bean companies “might need a little bit of extra oomph in the marketing department,” Jonna Parker, a produce analyst at the industry-research firm Circana, told me. Zach Conrad, a nutritional epidemiologist at William and Mary, recently co-authored a study showing that most Americans don’t eat enough beans to meet the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines advisory committee. The paper also noted that beans, owing to their relative cheapness, have a stigmatizing association with poverty. “At a nice restaurant, on a date, most people are not going to get a bean salad,” Conrad told me.

But a confluence of changes in American life are making beans a more attractive choice. Other humble foods, such as tinned fish and cottage cheese, have lately experienced a bump in their status, thanks in part to the nation’s ongoing protein obsession. The protein in beans isn’t as easy for the body to absorb as that in animal products, so you have to eat more to get the same amount, Conrad said, but the conversion is hardly unreasonable. Opting for beans also helps square some of the conflicting nutritional advice in the 2025 Dietary Guidelines. The latest version newly emphasizes protein consumption, but also maintains firm limits on saturated fat, which is plentiful in red meat and associated with a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. As my colleague Nicholas Florko has noted, meeting those standards with animal products would be a challenge. But with beans, it’s almost trivial.

Lately, food costs have become eye-wateringly high, particularly for protein. Beef prices were nearly 15 percent higher in September 2025 than they were a year earlier; this year, chicken will likely become less affordable too. Kennedy recently encouraged people to embrace offal as a more affordable source of protein. Even canned foods have become more expensive. Yet beans, canned or otherwise, are still one of the cheapest protein sources around. A can of navy beans costs about a dollar and contains nearly the same amount of protein as a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.

[Read: America’s grocery lifeline is fraying]

If the nutritional, environmental, and financial benefits aren’t sufficient reasons to root for beans, take note of their recent makeover. Beans are no longer “what Grandma used to make,” Parker said. American culinary enthusiasts have been experimenting with them since at least the early 2000s, but bean innovation really took off in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when people adopted pantry cooking as a matter of staying safe, budgeting, and passing the time, says Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at Eater whose popular Instagram account is filled with alluring photos of stewed legumes. Well-known recipe developers including Alison Roman—who in 2021 helped propel the “brothy bean” into culinary-world ubiquity—elevated beans further. The food influencer and model Pierce Abernathy gives beans the gourmet treatment with ingredients such as salsa verde and bottarga. Abernathy, whose bean recipes include lesser-known varieties such as Anasazi and gigante beans, is among a growing number of heirloom-bean enthusiasts; Rancho Gordo, an heirloom-bean company, runs a subscription club that reportedly has 29,000 people on its waitlist.

Food companies are riding this leguminous wave, introducing bean-based products with unexpected flavors and convenient formats. The vibrantly branded canned-bean stews from Heyday Canning, launched in 2020, include products such as kimchi-sesame navy beans, harissa-lemon chickpeas, and vodka-sauced cannellini beans. A brand called Lentiful sells individually packaged, microwavable lentil stews in flavors such as Thai Coconut Curry and Lemon Mediterranean, marketing them as grab-and-go lunches. Lentil Telepathy, which launched in 2023, specializes in air-toasted crunchy lentils that can be eaten as snacks or salad toppers, as in the case of the peri-peri and salt-and-vinegar varieties, or as breakfast cereal, if toasted-marshmallow or chocolate lentils hold more appeal. Bean dips can be scooped up with bean chips. Should you prefer a lighter bite, a line of jarred fermented-bean salads is due to launch next month.

“Americans are finally catching up to what much of the world has known for centuries,” Ben Bacon, a co-founder of Lentiful, told me: Beans are a main course, not just a side. Steve Sando, the founder of Rancho Gordo, told me that he hopes the beanthusiasm is here to stay. “Being the flavor of the week is kind of fun, but I really want people just to incorporate beans into the American diet,” he said. Team fandoms, of course, run deep. But no matter where allegiances lie, everyone should be able to agree that beans are the MVP.

American Snacking Habits Are Transforming the Restaurant Industry

2026-03-03T13:10:32-05:00

The eating habits of American adults have, in recent years, begun to resemble those of hobbits. Maybe you, too, have scarfed down scrambled eggs at home in the morning, only to arrive at the office and supplement them with a protein bar for second breakfast and a bag of chips for elevenses. The late-afternoon pastry and banana-bread mocha latte have proliferated—and for humans, at least, may become an existential threat to dinner.

Blame the coronavirus pandemic; blame Ozempic; blame inflation. Whatever the cause, intermediary bites and sips make up a growing portion of Americans’ daily consumption, especially among young people, as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote in 2024. The shift has now become so pronounced that restaurants are adapting to it. Chains that primarily offer meals are rolling out smaller and cheaper options—solid and liquid alike—in the hope of capturing customers who just want a snack. And in the past two years, the nation’s fastest-growing restaurant brands have been those specifically oriented toward that audience.

The restaurant industry subscribes to an extremely broad definition of snacking. Any item consumed outside the traditional breakfast, lunch, and dinner “dayparts”—industry lingo for eating occasions throughout the day—can be considered a snack, David Henkes, a food-and-beverage analyst at the food-industry research firm Technomic, told me. That includes beverages, as long as they’re purchased at a restaurant during off-meal hours; both a high-protein espresso smoothie and a black coffee count. In this view, the most important characteristic of a snack is not content or form but versatility, David Portalatin, a food-service-industry expert at the research firm Circana, told me. In fact, he said, one of the biggest drivers of the snacking trend is consumers’ demand for flexibility.

In the past few years, snacks—especially sweet ones—have powered immense growth among quick-service restaurants, a category that includes stalwarts such as McDonald’s as well as more recent arrivals such as the China-based Luckin Coffee. According to preliminary estimates from Technomic, the top-10 fastest-growing brands in the United States last year were cafés or dessert shops. Most are known for specialty drinks. The fastest-growing chain of 2025 was 7 Brew, which specializes in ultra-customizable sugary drinks such as the Cookie Butter (a creamy espresso concoction flavored with toasted marshmallow, hazelnut, and white chocolate) and the Pink Mermaid 7 Fizz Soda (a bubbly drink with notes of strawberry, watermelon, and coconut). Last year, the company opened 280 new stores, and Technomic projects that it made more than $900 million in sales. Second on the list was Swig, which sells soft drinks flavored with creams and syrups—popularly known as “dirty sodas”—followed by HTeaO, a Southern-style-iced-tea chain. The drinks sold at these chains are descendants of the Frappuccino, one of the earliest chain-restaurant products to blur the line between beverage and snack. Yet even as Starbucks attempts to refocus on coffee by moving away from desserts masquerading as drinks, newer chains are making no pretenses about selling beverages that can easily tide someone over through a mealtime or two.

[Read: How snacks took over American life]

Some brands have realized that snack time can call for a beverage and food. Last year, Dutch Bros Coffee, best known for its saccharine, candy-colored beverages, began rolling out small, hot breakfast items—egg sliders, a single waffle—across its stores to supplement its existing snack menu. The South Korea–based companies Paris Baguette and Tous les Jours, which were also among the top-10 fastest-growing brands of last year, serve baked goods and desserts in addition to coffee- and tea-based drinks. Tous les Jours’ snacks are geared toward younger customers “who are replacing traditional meals with smaller, more intentional indulgences,” Regina Schneider, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me.

Well-established restaurant chains best known for selling full meals are getting into the snack game too. A common strategy is offering smaller versions of typically sandwiched items in the form of a wrap. Last year, McDonald’s reintroduced the chicken Snack Wrap, a palm-size crispy chicken strip enveloped in a tortilla. (It was discontinued from menus in 2016 because it was a nightmare to assemble quickly, but McDonald’s says that it has streamlined the process.) Similarly diminutive and affordable chicken wraps rolled out at Sonic and Popeyes. Chipotle’s interim chief marketing officer, Stephanie Perdue, told me that the company is catering to demand for protein-laden options “across more occasions, especially snack-sized portions at accessible prices.” Accordingly, in December, Chipotle introduced a chicken taco and what the company described as its first-ever snack: the High Protein Cup, a four-ounce container of chopped chicken or steak. The items cost less than $4 each. Even sit-down restaurants are expanding their appetizer and side-dish offerings; earlier this year, TGI Fridays introduced new sampler platters, which were designed to give “guests a snackable option that fits any daypart,” Lauren Perez, the company’s senior vice president of global marketing, told me. Some TGI Fridays locations are even testing a kids’ menu for all ages, she said.

The snackification of restaurants, as one might call it, is partly a response to Americans’ desire for lower-calorie options. GLP-1 use, weight-loss attempts, and the popularity of lean protein are driving that demand, Portalatin said. Circana data show that 35 percent of restaurant-goers say that they’re ordering smaller portions than they have in the past, and roughly 75 percent of that group say that they’re doing so for health reasons. Some restaurants offer not only smaller items but also foods that evoke wellness. Marketing for Chipotle’s High Protein Cup, for example, touts the 32 grams of protein it contains. In January, Dunkin’ added Protein Milk drinks to its menu; they can include caffeine, B vitamins, and more than 15 grams of protein.

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

As American work habits become decoupled from traditional mealtimes, people want to eat in a way that’s convenient for that new paradigm, Portalatin said. Busy workdays and, especially among younger generations, guilt about taking breaks lead half of American employees to skip lunch at least once a week, according to a recent survey. “People all across the country are looking up from their desks at 2 in the afternoon and going, Oh, I didn’t have lunch, but I need something,” Portalatin said. Plus, thanks to the pandemic, a significant chunk of American employees are working from home, which means they have fewer organic opportunities to eat meals outside the house. These workers are part of the reason that the share of lunches purchased at a restaurant—the most lucrative daypart in the business—is 5 percent lower than it was in 2019, Portalatin said. Yet remote workers haven’t given up on restaurants altogether; they’re just visiting off-hours. “If you work at home, you’re like, Well, I’ve got to get out once in a while,” Sam Oches, the editor in chief of Nation’s Restaurant News, a trade publication, told me. A jaunt outside for a change of scenery between meetings may not offer enough time for a sit-down meal, but it presents a natural opportunity to pick up a snack—a little reward, perhaps, after a productive stretch. The popularity of drive-through chains such as 7 Brew and Swig reflect that shift in behavior, Oches said.

That little reward is crucial to understanding why snackification endures. As the cost of living has increased because of inflation, people are spending less at restaurants. Yet they’re loath to give them up altogether. When people decide to eat out, they consider not just the cost but also “the quality, the convenience, and the craveable indulgence that I can’t get for myself at home,” Portalatin said. These factors strongly shape appetite, even when finances are an issue. “At the end of the day, Americans love restaurants,” Oches said. And a $3 Snack Wrap gets you just as much of the McDonald’s experience as a combo meal that can cost $10 or more.

[Read: The worst sandwich is back]

Restaurants going all in on snacking is more than just a trend. It’s a major step in codifying America’s upended eating patterns. Restaurants will never entirely abandon breakfast, lunch, and dinner, experts told me, but for the foreseeable future, they’ll likely continue introducing items that people can eat whenever and wherever they need to. In that regard, the rise of snacking is anything but hobbit-like: The abundant mealtimes of Bilbo and his kin were occasions to take a break from the daily grind and savor the pleasure of eating. Ours allow us to keep eating as the wheel turns.

Is It Aging, or Is It ADHD?

2026-02-25T13:58:44-05:00

Updated at 3:48 p.m. on February 27, 2026.
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Realizing that your brain is slowing down can be jarring. After the age of, say, 45, anyone might start forgetting names, misplacing items, or struggling to pay attention, and the onset of such symptoms can often prompt a visit to a doctor, if only to confirm a patient’s hunch that the passage of time is to blame. Yet, as ever more of the United States’ aging population enters the “What’s happening to my brain?” stage of life, many patients are asking a new question, providers told me: Am I just getting old, or do I have ADHD?

In recent years, awareness of ADHD has spread dramatically—CDC estimates from 2020 to 2022 showed that roughly 11 percent of American children aged 5 to 17 had received a diagnosis. Now many Americans in midlife and beyond have started to question whether their cognitive chaos really is just a symptom of aging. For at least some people, the answer might very well be that they have undiagnosed ADHD and that the symptoms are becoming too prominent to cope with. Because the condition manifests differently as people age, the answer can also be “both.”

Historically, ADHD was closely associated with overactive boys. But global studies suggest that roughly 3 percent of people older than 50—which would translate to about 3.6 million Americans—are expected to have ADHD, David Goodman, an expert on adult ADHD at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Tensions persist around whether, in general, ADHD is overdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. But as awareness continues to rise among providers and the general public, diagnoses have been climbing in populations that were previously overlooked. The CDC reports that prescriptions for stimulants increased “substantially” among people in midlife from 2020 to 2021.

Midlife can complicate the already tricky process of diagnosing ADHD, though. Adult ADHD was directly addressed in the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook of diagnoses, only in 2013, and it’s barely touched upon in medical schools, so many providers don’t think of it as a possible explanation for a patient’s worsening condition, Goodman said. As I have written previously, the only clinical guidelines for diagnosing or treating ADHD focus on childhood, and the disorder can show up very differently across the lifespan. For example, what looks like physical hyperactivity in childhood may manifest as internal restlessness later in life. Few physicians are trained to treat adult ADHD, and even those who are might struggle to tease apart the disorder’s symptoms from those of other health conditions that arise in midlife.

[Read: Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychology]

The potential causes of declining cognition in midlife are numerous and frequently intersect. The shifts associated with “normal” aging can partly be attributed to the natural shrinkage of the brain and a decrease in the number of its neuronal connections. Mental- and cognitive-health consequences similar to those of ADHD can arise from psychiatric conditions that are prevalent in midlife, such as depression and anxiety. Mild neurocognitive disorder, a stage between healthy cognition and dementia that is common in people aged 65 and older, also has similar signs as ADHD, including missing appointments and frequently losing things. (Crucially, people with MND, but not ADHD, tend to forget words and how to spell them.) For some people, early-onset dementia or Alzheimer’s disease may be behind the symptoms. Caregiving, physical ailments, and increased work responsibility—all hallmarks of midlife—can exacerbate cognitive issues caused by any of these factors. “It can be tricky to rule all those things out,” Dara Babinski, a clinical psychologist at Penn State Health who studies ADHD across the female lifespan, told me.

Middle-aged women are particularly difficult to diagnose with ADHD. That’s partly because girls are less frequently diagnosed with ADHD than boys are, so many adult women live their whole life with the disorder without ever suspecting it. It’s also because many middle-aged women are dealing with perimenopause, which comes with cognitive changes such as brain fog, trouble concentrating, and forgetfulness. The fluctuations in hormone levels that cause perimenopausal symptoms can also exacerbate ADHD by interfering with dopamine signaling in the brain, Brandy Callahan, a neuropsychologist at the University of Calgary who studies ADHD in older adults, told me.

Increased awareness of adult ADHD, thanks in part to social media, has led many women to seek help for their symptoms, Babinski said. And stimulant prescriptions have risen especially sharply among women aged 50 to 54. Still, the combination of hazy diagnostic criteria and overlapping symptoms means that many older Americans with ADHD very likely don’t have a diagnosis. Even fewer are being treated, and so people may be having a worse experience of aging than they need to. A first-time diagnosis in midlife can profoundly improve the experience of aging. For one thing, it makes people feel validated at a time when major life changes can make it harder to cope with the effects of ADHD, which can include trouble maintaining relationships, paying bills on time, and performing at work. And a stimulant prescription can lead to improvements in attention, impulse control, and hyperactivity among people with ADHD.

[Read: ADHD’s sobering life-expectancy numbers]

Aside from improving life in middle age, a diagnosis has implications for future brain health. ADHD is associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and some types of dementia, but scientists aren’t yet sure why. One possibility is that people with ADHD struggle with habits that maintain a healthy brain, such as managing stress and getting adequate sleep and exercise, Craig Surman, a neuropsychiatrist and a scientific coordinator of the Adult ADHD Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. Callahan and others have shown that ADHD brains have abnormal white matter—the communication pathway of the brain—which may make them less resilient to later disease. Researchers don’t know whether ADHD drugs actually protect against the underlying causes of more debilitating brain diseases. But if stimulants enable a person to maintain other habits that protect brain health, it’s reasonable to suspect that they might help.

Yet stimulants aren’t prescribed to older adults as often as they are to younger people. Most ADHD drugs are FDA-approved only for people up to age 55 or 65 because they haven’t been tested in anyone older and, as such, aren’t typically covered by Medicare. Stimulants also raise blood pressure and heart rate, which can be especially risky in midlife and later, when health issues such as cardiovascular disease and obesity are common. For these reasons, some providers are hesitant to prescribe stimulants to older adults. (The federal government, too, in the Make America Healthy Again report, argued that the drugs are overused.) But evidence is growing that prescribing ADHD medications to older adults can be done safely. This makes a reliable diagnosis all the more important.

The American Professional Society of ADHD and Related Disorders, known as APSARD, is expected to release the first clinical guidelines for adult ADHD this year. It’s an attempt to “put out some ground truth about how to treat ADHD,” Surman, who is on the guideline committee, told me. (He would not say whether APSARD will include specific guidelines for middle-aged and older adults.) Still, information is slow to disseminate, and there is pushback against the notion of adult ADHD from within and outside the medical field. Some providers feel that the risks of treating older adults with stimulants are not worth the benefit; other providers are concerned that the diagnosis over-medicalizes normal aging.

Yet as the American population skews older, perhaps it is worthwhile to question what constitutes normal aging. The medical literature offers only a loose definition: Rapidly deteriorating cognition is not normal, but gradual decline with age is. At the very least, the rise in adult-ADHD diagnoses presents an opportunity to refine the latter notion. No one’s brain stays sharp forever, but some people may have more time to maintain their edge.

This article originally misstated Babinski's affiliation.

GLP-1 Envy Was Just the Beginning

2026-02-08T11:58:27-05:00

Americans watching the Super Bowl today will hear a tantalizing pitch: You, too, can live like the rich. All you need is a way to order up health care the way they do.

A new ad scheduled to air during the big game, from the telehealth company Hims & Hers, opens with the provocation “Rich people live longer.” A dizzying montage spoofing America’s wealthiest and most wellness-obsessed characters follows: An ageless man bathes in red light in the manner of Bryan Johnson, the multimillionaire who rose to fame for his fanatical efforts to live forever. A bald man doffs a cowboy hat as a rocket blasts off—clearly an allusion to Jeff Bezos, who in recent years has become incredibly buff and backed a buzzy age-reversal start-up. Surgeons pull the sagging face of a woman taut as a drum, perhaps a reference to the Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner’s notorious 2025 facelift. Dan Kenger, the chief design officer at Hims & Hers, told me in an email that the actors in the commercial represent only “symbols of an intimidating, members-only healthcare culture.” But the parallels to real life are too obvious to ignore. “They get the best of everything,” the voiceover continues. “So why don’t you?”

Hims & Hers is best known for offering weight-loss and hair-restoration treatments, but the ad positions the company as a gateway to a different world of health care—one with concierge doctors who are available on demand to offer personalized, cutting-edge therapies. “America’s healthcare is a tale of two systems: one elite, proactive tier for the wealthy, and a broken, reactive one for everyone else,” Kenger said. Hims & Hers’ actual offerings, which include diagnostic blood testing and hormone therapy, may be more mundane than a facelift, but the ad emphasizes one thing they all share: They’re all available to you, for a price.

Telehealth platforms such as Hims & Hers offer patients the ability to pay out of pocket to quickly seek treatment for their ailments. Generally, they assert that patients must consult virtually with a medical provider before receiving a prescription, but this requirement isn’t featured prominently in most ads. The new spot from Hims & Hers notes that its doctors are around to chat, and—in the fine print—mentions that a consultation with a provider is required before receiving treatment. But unless you’re squinting at the screen, the message that comes across is that health care is primarily a transaction between patient and company.

In general, telehealth platforms have come to essentially function as a kind of Amazon for drugs, making it easier for people to get prescriptions for controlled substances such as Adderall and testosterone. The companies sidestep the high cost associated with many name-brand drugs by using compounding pharmacies to offer cheaper, nearly identical versions of the medications. In theory, a licensed provider writes the prescription after a thorough medical assessment. But in just the past two years, two different telehealth practices have been sanctioned for inappropriately prescribing stimulants. (Hims & Hers has not faced any federal investigations for its prescribing practices.)

Last year, Hims & Hers ran a Super Bowl ad similarly focused on democratizing care—specifically GLP-1s for weight loss. It asserted that America’s obesity epidemic is caused by “the system,” which keeps people sick by making health care unaffordable. When name-brand GLP-1s such as Wegovy first started being prescribed for weight loss, in 2021, they were inaccessible for most Americans because of their steep cost and insurance providers’ limited coverage. Rumors that celebrities were using the drugs for cosmetic reasons sparked a mix of outrage and envy, and as Americans of more humble means began to see the results the drugs could bring about, many began scrambling for cheaper sources—a perfect opportunity for Hims & Hers and its peers.

[Read: What is Hims actually selling?]

But Americans aren’t clamoring for just GLP-1s anymore. Medications such as testosterone and peptides—a largely untested class of drugs with a wide range of purported health benefits—are in high demand too. Like GLP-1s, they have been touted by wealthy, high-profile figures, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Joe Rogan, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hims & Hers has positioned itself to meet these demands. Last year, the company launched its low-testosterone treatment program and bought a peptide-manufacturing facility. It plans to use that factory to make its own “personalized” drugs.

Such language evokes the concierge treatments enjoyed by the rich. But in telehealth-platform parlance, personalization usually refers to creating a version of a name-brand medication that fits a patient’s needs by, say, changing the dose, adding other active ingredients, or offering it in a different format. These compounded versions aren’t reviewed by the FDA—in fact, the FDA announced Friday that it had asked the Justice Department, out of concern for consumer safety, to investigate Hims & Hers for selling compounded GLP-1 pills. The move is part of the DOJ’s wider plan to take “decisive steps” to restrict the marketing of compounded GLP-1s.

The medical community is concerned that telehealth platforms too easily allow patients to take unsafe drugs—or drugs they simply don’t need. The Obesity Society, a scientific organization, warns people not to use compounded GLP-1s, because they may not contain the appropriate active ingredients. (As I wrote recently, men’s-health experts are also worried about the cardiovascular and reproductive consequences of unnecessary testosterone-replacement therapy.) When I asked Hims & Hers about the DOJ investigation, a spokesperson directed me to a public statement posted yesterday on X, in which the company said it would stop selling compounded GLP-1 pills. “We remain committed to the millions of Americans who depend on us for access to safe, affordable, and personalized care,” the statement said.

[Read: T-maxxing has gone too far]

The Hims & Hers ad is shrewd in its heavy-handedness. It validates Americans’ frustration with health care and positions itself as a deliverer of justice. (The ad is narrated by the rapper Common, known for his socially conscious music; in its Super Bowl ad last year, the company used Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” a song about systemic racism and gun violence, to pile onto its message of a broken system.) Pew Research Center data released a few days ago show that 71 percent of Americans are worried about the cost of health care.

At the same time, Americans can’t seem to stop imitating billionaires’ wellness habits: untested peptides, NAD+ IV drips, Erewhon smoothies, red-light masks, keto diets. A slew of other planned Super Bowl ads promoting new visions of health illustrates just how central the pursuit of wellness has become to American life and the American economy, even when the benefits of so many of these practices are questionable at best. Hims & Hers is accurate in its diagnosis that much of this country’s gap in health and longevity boils down to wealth. But the treatment it prescribes seems to be an unlikely cure.

T-Maxxing Has Gone Too Far

2026-01-30T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on January 30, 2026

Some of the country’s most powerful men are panicking about testosterone levels. Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary The End of Men blamed declining testosterone for the supposedly rampant emasculation of American men. Influencers issue warnings that “low T is ruining young men.” Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services has gone all in on the hormone, publishing new dietary guidelines meant to help men maintain healthy testosterone levels and considering widening access to testosterone-replacement therapy. Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that “a generational decline in testosterone levels among American men is one of many examples of America’s worsening health.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone further, calling low T counts in teens an “existential issue.” The secretary, who at 72 has the physique of a Marvel character, has touted testosterone as part of his personal anti-aging protocol. He also recently proclaimed that President Trump has the “constitution of a deity” and raging levels of T.

American men are responding by attempting to increase their testosterone levels—whether they need to or not. Low-testosterone clinics, many of them based online, have proliferated, promising men a way to “get your spark back” or “reclaim your life.” So have supplements and accessories designed to support testosterone health—you can buy an ice pack designed specifically to keep testicles cool in a sauna. Recently, a friend who questioned his dedication to testicular health after seeing ads for testosterone boosters asked me if he should buy nontoxic briefs from a company called (yes, seriously) Nads.

Research has shown that average testosterone levels are indeed declining in American men. The primary study on the slump, published in 2007, followed Boston-based men over two decades and found that their levels had declined significantly more than would be expected from aging alone. Since then, numerous studies have documented the same trend among various age groups. The dip can probably be attributed to a number of factors, including rising obesity rates, widespread chronic disease, and sedentary lifestyles, Scott Selinger, a clinical associate professor at University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School who studies testosterone, told me. Hot testicular temperatures—because of tight-fitting clothes, excessive sitting, or, more dramatically, a quickly warming climate—may also affect testosterone production, Selinger said.

[Read: RFK Jr.’s testosterone regimen is almost reasonable]

Low testosterone really can be debilitating. Deficiency is linked to low libido, erectile issues, fatigue, heart disease, osteoporosis, anemia, and depression. But the prevalence of testosterone deficiency is hard to define. It ranges from 2 to 50 percent across studies and differs greatly by age. Speaking about men’s-health experts, Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist specializing in testosterone therapy at Harvard Medical School, told me, “I don’t think too many people are really concerned” about population-level declines. Major professional groups whose members study and treat testosterone deficiency—the Androgen Society, the Endocrine Society, the American Urological Association—haven’t launched any specific initiatives to combat low testosterone, Morgentaler said.

They are nonchalant in part because the average decline in testosterone is not especially large. The “normal” range for testosterone isn’t well defined; limits set by different medical societies span from about 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter. The Boston paper found that the average participant’s testosterone levels dropped roughly 50 nanograms per deciliter every eight years or so, “which for some people can make a difference, but for a lot of people, it doesn’t,” Selinger said. Experts are more concerned about what might be driving the decline: “I wouldn’t say there is an epidemic of low testosterone,” Franck Mauvais-Jarvis, an endocrinology professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, told me. “The problem is the epidemic of chronic disease.”

Meanwhile, the number of American men receiving testosterone-replacement therapy has grown by almost 30 percent from 2018 to 2022. In TRT, lab-synthesized testosterone is administered to patients in a variety of formats, including injections, pills, topical gels, and slow-dissolving pellets inserted under the skin of their buttocks or hips. Testosterone, which is a controlled substance, is approved only for the treatment of testosterone deficiency; a diagnosis requires blood work that shows levels below the normal range over multiple days and, crucially, corresponding symptoms. But it’s also easy to get for other reasons. Doctors can prescribe it off-label to men with normal T levels who complain of low energy, decreased libido, or erectile dysfunction. Some gym fanatics buy it, sometimes through illicit channels, to build muscle, which is the only undeniable effect of raising T in someone with normal levels, Morgentaler said. All of the experts I spoke with were dubious that low-T clinics follow standard medical practice for prescribing testosterone, including discussing potential risks with patients and employing hormone specialists. (I reached out to two large testosterone clinics, but they did not respond.)

[Read: Why are so many women being told their hormones are out of whack?]

Whether the goal of these clinics is to treat low T or jack levels up to the max isn’t clear. Many encourage men to aim for excessive T, Michael Irwig, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. A 2022 study of seven direct-to-consumer low-testosterone clinics found that three of them proposed a treatment goal of at least 1,000 nanograms per deciliter—one advertised a goal of 1,500. It should come as no surprise, then, that up to a third of men on TRT don’t have a deficiency, and that the majority of new testosterone users start treatment without completing the blood work needed for a diagnosis.

The maximalist approach to testosterone is risky. Although new research dismisses previous concerns about TRT causing cardiovascular disease and prostate cancer, too much of the hormone can elevate levels of hemoglobin, which raises the risk of blood clots, and estradiol, which can cause breast enlargement. It also causes testicular shrinkage and infertility. Although increasing testosterone can improve sexual performance, it has the opposite effect on reproduction, which is why the American Urological Association advises men to be cautious about TRT if they want to have kids. If a man begins testosterone therapy in his 20s and stays on it for upwards of five years, the chances that he’ll ever recover his original sperm levels are low, John Mulhall, a urologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, told me.

Plus, pumping the body full of testosterone may not alleviate the problems that patients set out to solve. Every patient responds to testosterone differently, Mauvais-Jarvis said; some men may feel perfectly fine at levels considered deficient, while others require far higher levels. The symptoms of deficiency could also be caused by any number of common ailments, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and depression. It’s not uncommon for a patient who still feels unwell after starting treatment to ask for more testosterone, Mulhall said. But if his problems have a different root cause, “pushing that man to a T level of 1,000 won’t improve his symptoms.”

[Read: Men might be the key to an American baby boom]

The current spotlight on testosterone could lead to better care for men in at least one way: If the FDA removes restrictions on the hormone, more patients will be able to get treatment from their doctors—many of whom are reluctant to prescribe controlled substances—instead of turning to dubious third-party clinics, Mauvais-Jarvis said. This would be especially beneficial for the men who do have a genuine T deficiency but are currently not receiving treatment.

The panic over testosterone seems unlikely to end anytime soon, in part because it is about not just men’s health, but also manhood. The Trump administration is obsessive about manliness. Trump himself—who shared his T level (a perfectly respectable 441 nanograms per deciliter) during his first presidential campaign—has been lauded by his fans as a paragon of masculinity. The message is clear: When it comes to testosterone, more is definitely more.

This article originally misstated Scott Selinger's academic title.

Why the Trump Administration Is Obsessed With Whole Milk

2026-01-18T08:30:00-05:00

Milk is mundane in most contexts, but you can’t help noticing when it is smeared across the upper lips of America’s government officials. An image of Donald Trump sporting a milk mustache and glowering over a glass of milk was just one of many dairy-themed posts shared by government accounts on X during the past week, all of which made clear that the milk was whole. In one video, a seemingly AI-generated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes a sip and is transported to a nightclub, suddenly milk-mustachioed; in another, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson raises a glass of full-fat and sports a white ’stache. The upper lips of the former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines and the former NBA player Enes Kantor Freedom, among other personalities embraced by the right, also got the whole-milk treatment.

The posts were shared to celebrate a big month for whole milk. On January 7, the Department of Agriculture released its updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which newly recommend whole dairy over low-fat products, and placed a carton of whole milk near the top of a revamped, upside-down food pyramid. Then, on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law a bill allowing schools to serve whole milk after more than a decade of being restricted to low-fat.

Medical professionals, who have long advised people to avoid full-fat dairy because it contains high levels of saturated fat, were generally critical of the new dietary guidelines for milk. But Kennedy and Trump, along with other government officials, have framed it as a major win for health. Kennedy recently argued that America’s children have been missing out on key nutrients such as calcium and vitamin D because they don’t want to drink the low-fat milk served in schools. The new law, he said at its signing, embodies the new dietary guidelines’ directive to “eat real food.”

The low-fat-versus-whole controversy is a real, active scientific debate. For roughly the past two decades, reduced-fat milk (2 percent milk fat, by weight) has dominated American refrigerators largely thanks to fears about fat in general, and saturated fat in particular. Copious research has linked saturated-fat intake with health issues including cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as death from all causes. It also leads to higher LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which has been shown to cause strokes and heart attacks, Kyla Lara-Breitinger, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, told me.

[Read: The most miraculous (and overlooked) type of milk]

Saturated fat generally isn’t a huge concern for children, so giving them the option to drink whole milk at school is somewhat less fraught, Steven Abrams, a child-nutrition expert and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me. And some researchers propose that, because whole milk is more satiating, kids who drink it are less likely to reach for other high-calorie foods. “Full-fat dairy is especially important for kids ages 12 months to 10 years to meet energy needs and promote brain development,” a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote in an email. But the AAP holds that kids should switch to drinking low-fat or skim at age 2.

In contrast to most nutritionists, Kennedy is all in on saturated fat, championing foods such as butter, beef tallow, and red meat. At a press conference to announce the new dietary guidelines, Kennedy proclaimed that the government was “ending the war on saturated fats.” The reality is more confusing. The new dietary guidelines promote more foods that are high in saturated fat, but they retain the old recommendation to limit daily saturated-fat intake to 10 percent of total calories, or about 20 grams a day in a 2,000-calorie diet. A single cup of whole milk has 5 grams. If a person consumes the recommended three daily servings of full-fat dairy, it would be “pretty close to impossible” to stay within the saturated fat limit, Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told me. (The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

A relatively new and controversial school of thought posits that full-fat milk isn’t as harmful as other sources of saturated fat. A 2018 study that involved participants from 21 countries found that dairy consumption—even whole-fat dairy—was negatively correlated with mortality and major cardiovascular-disease events. Other studies have shown that the consumption of whole-fat dairy is linked to decreased diabetes risk and doesn’t cause weight gain. “There’s no convincing evidence that low-fat dairy is preferable to whole-fat dairy for any health outcome,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist at Tufts University who was a co-author on the 2018 study, told me. The broader research community has so far resisted this idea, but has acknowledged that the science on dairy fat has become more complex. “The reason you’re getting so many conflicting opinions is that the evidence is very controversial,” Lara-Breitinger said, noting the lack of randomized clinical trials comparing whole-fat and low-fat dairy.

[Read: Go ahead, try to explain milk]

Ultimately, milk isn’t “going to make or break a diet,” Dow said. Dairy makes up just 10 percent of the average American’s caloric intake, and most of that is cheese. Even for kids, very real concerns, such as obesity and diabetes, will probably not be solved—or meaningfully exacerbated—by a switch to whole milk. “You could probably have either low-fat or whole-fat, and it doesn’t matter,” Mozaffarian said.

As I have written previously, Americans have spent roughly the past 150 years quarreling about various aspects of milk, including its benefits, safety, and chemical composition. That’s partly because dairy is a powerful industry; last year, dairy products in the U.S. had an economic impact of nearly $780 billion. But since 2012, when the USDA under then-President Barack Obama required schools to serve only low-fat milk, student milk consumption has declined; according to the dairy industry, that’s because low-fat milk doesn’t taste as good. The Trump administration’s promotion of whole milk, Dow said, “really, really supports the dairy industry’s bottom line.” In fact, many of the reviewers of the new dietary guidelines were recently found to have ties to the beef and dairy industries. (When I asked the USDA about allegations of industry influence on the push for whole milk, the spokesperson asserted that the evidence “was evaluated based solely on scientific rigor, study design, consistency of findings, and biological plausibility.”)

[Read: Milk has divided Americans for more than 150 years]

Beyond serving as an economic engine, milk is a potent cultural symbol. It has long evoked an idealized past: a simpler time when cows roamed through pastures and produced pure, wholesome milk, and the Americans who tended them thrived in harmony with the natural world. Dairy companies have leaned into that aesthetic, featuring barns, fields, and words such as pure on milk cartons. Milk is also culturally linked to strength, wealth, and beauty, thanks in no small part to the celebrity-studded dairy ads of the late 20th century, including the “Got Milk?” campaign referenced by the Trump administration’s milk mustaches. Such positive associations make milk a powerful metaphor for what America could be—if certain unsavory elements of modernity could be undone or erased.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this association has also been invoked in racist contexts for more than a century. In a 1923 speech, Herbert Hoover, who was then commerce secretary and would be elected president five years later, framed milk as a means to ensure “the very growth and virility of the white races.” Modern-day white nationalists and alt-right groups hold up dairy milk as a symbol of whiteness and masculinity, in contrast to soy milk, which they associate with the woke, feminist, multiracial left. (Yes, seriously.)

The idealized era of perfectly safe, perfectly wholesome dairy never really existed. “This whole idea that there was a time when we were healthy, and during that time we were eating steak and drinking whole milk, is not rooted in any reality,” Dow said. Nevertheless, it resonates with the MAHA and MAGA agendas, which both center on the belief that America will return to its former glory if it can re-create the past. The Trump administration’s endorsement of whole milk may nominally be about public health. But a recent White House post featuring a retro illustration of the president as an old-fashioned milkman, captioned “Make Whole Milk Great Again,” was all about aspiration—and the purified nation, untainted by modernity, that America could someday become.

High January Was Bound to Happen

2026-01-16T07:00:00-05:00

Many Americans enthusiastically partake in Dry January, but it is rarely pitched as fun. After the holiday stretch of office parties and family gatherings, Americans have come to use the start of every year to abstain from alcohol in the name of health and auspicious beginnings. It’s a time of discipline, of cleansing, of embodying your mood board, even if it makes you a drag at parties. And it is also, as weed companies have learned, a marketing opportunity.

In recent years, weed companies have started to lean into the argument that taking the edge off sobriety with a low-dose gummy or THC drink still counts as dry. My social-media feeds are flooded with posts from cannabis companies pitching their products as fun and approachable tools to get through an alcohol-free month. Mary and Jane, an edibles company, makes a tantalizing proposition: “Dry January made easy.” Artet, which specializes in beverages, sells a “High & Dry January” bundle that includes a bottle of its THC-laced aperitif. Some products are conspicuously health-coded: North Canna describes its cannabis drinks as “functional,” and Feals highlights its edibles’ low calorie count. Above all, the ads emphasize how little booze you drink when you get high instead.

This push for a weed-filled January is, of course, a blatant (and somewhat silly) attempt by cannabis companies to get more customers. But as restrictions on marijuana loosen, and more Americans find themselves able and willing to fit the drug into their lives, Dry January does appear to be offering an opportunity for experimentation. In fact, cannabis sales surged in January 2024, and 21 percent of Dry January participants who responded to a 2023 survey swapped booze for weed that month.

None of the four cannabis-company founders I spoke with framed their products as replacements for alcohol per se. Still, many products marketed as Dry January aids aim to approximate the effect of having a single drink, leaving users buzzed but in control. These products tend to contain a low dose of THC, usually five milligrams or less. (One milligram of THC could give a weed newbie a pleasant buzz, and a heavy user might not feel five milligrams at all.) Wims, which sells THC-laced drink mix-ins, is designed to take effect and wear off in roughly the same amount of time as a serving of alcohol, Lauren Miller, one of the company’s co-founders, told me.

[Read: Pour one out for weed seltzer]

Even if THC can induce a similarly loose state as alcohol at those doses, weed companies still have some distance to overcome. In general, using cannabis as a substitute for social drinking is a harder sell than using it to avoid alcohol at home—not only because most bars don’t serve THC but also because the drug has a better chance of spurring you to melt into the couch than to mingle. Cannabis companies are trying to position their products to be used in the same context as alcohol. In states with looser cannabis laws, such as Minnesota and Tennessee, THC beverages from Nowadays are served at bars and hotels, Justin Tidwell, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told me. Wims can be dissolved into a drink, so “you don’t have to change your rituals or the way that you’re socializing,” Miller said.

The shaky logic of replacing one drug with another during a month dedicated to sobriety is hard to ignore. If the point of Dry January is to improve health, replacing alcohol with cannabis—which is not a benign substance—seems counterproductive. Far less is known about the long-term use of cannabis compared with alcohol, but both can be abused, cause dependence, and interfere with daily function and productivity, Ryan Vandrey, who helps run Johns Hopkins’s Cannabis Science Laboratory, told me. Some people are predisposed to react negatively to cannabis, experiencing anxiety, paranoia, or even cyclical vomiting. Over time, long-term heavy cannabis use can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia and depression. Plus, Vandrey said, weed hangovers are very real (if different from alcohol hangovers).

Still, for people with a more benign response to the drug, cannabis can be a genuinely useful tool for cutting back on booze, Vandrey said. If cannabis helps people drink less, it might indeed lower the health risks associated with excessive alcohol use, such as liver disease, cardiovascular problems, and cancer. Whatever the relative health benefits may be, Rachel Dillon, a co-founder of Mary and Jane, argues that cannabis is a realistic way to satisfy the all-too-familiar desire to decompress.

[Read: The new war on weed]

This month, I decided to put Dillon’s theory to the test. So far, High January, as I’ve come to call it, has mostly replaced my nightly glass of wine. Taking an evening 1.5-milligram gummy has subdued the urgency of the post-work rush—and, importantly, quieted any cravings for alcohol in that context. My mind is clearer, I’m sleeping better, and my mornings are less sluggish.

Yet cannabis has proved to be an imperfect tool for cutting down on my own alcohol consumption. The drug can’t quite re-create the intimacy of sharing a drink; during a recent late-night chat with a friend, I gave myself a free pass to enjoy a glass of Bordeaux. I’ve even experienced the all-too-real weed hangover. And I’ve felt conflicted about the need to soften my reality with any drug. Certainly, there are healthier ways to relax. Maybe I’ll discover them next January.

Eat More Deer

2026-01-09T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 5:14 p.m. ET on January 9, 2026

The deer were out there. The crisp tracks in the snow made that clear. Three hours into our hunt through the frigid New Hampshire woods, Ryan Calsbeek, a rangy 51-year-old biology professor at Dartmouth, guessed that 200 animals were hiding in the trees around us. Calsbeek and I were 20 feet up a pignut hickory, crouching on a creaky platform. His friend Max Overstrom-Coleman, a stocky 46-year-old bar owner from Vermont, had climbed a distant tree and strung himself up by a harness, readying his compound bow and swaying in the wind. Shivering in camo jackets and neon-orange beanies, we peered into the darkening forest, daring it to move.

I had joined Calsbeek’s December hunt to try to get my hands on high-quality red meat. Calsbeek had yet to kill a deer that season, but in previous years, he told me, a single animal kept his family of four well fed through the winter. His young daughters especially liked to eat deer heart; apparently, it’s marvelously rich and tender. My mouth watered at the thought. The last time I’d tasted venison was more than a decade ago at a fancy restaurant in Toronto, where it was served as carpaccio, drizzled in oil and so fresh that it may as well have pranced out of the woods and onto my plate.

A bounty of such succulent, free-range meat is currently running through America’s backyards. The continental United States is home to some 30 million white-tailed deer, and in many areas, their numbers are growing too rapidly for comfort. Each year, a white-tailed doe can typically birth up to three fawns, which themselves can reproduce as soon as six months later.

Wherever deer are overabundant, they are at best a nuisance and at worst a plague. They trample gardens, destroy farmland, carry ticks that spread Lyme disease, and disrupt forest ecosystems, allowing invasive species to spread. They are involved in tens of thousands of car crashes each year in New York and New Jersey, where state wildlife departments have encouraged hunters to harvest more deer. In especially populated regions, wildlife agencies hire sharpshooters to cull the animals. Last year, New Hampshire legislators expanded the deer-hunting season in an attempt to keep the population under control. By the looks of the forest floor, which was pitted with hoof marks and scattered with marble-shaped droppings, that effort was falling short.

Over the past decade, some states have proposed a simple, if controversial, strategy for bringing deer under control: Couldn’t people like me—who don’t hunt but aren’t opposed to it—eat more venison?

Venison may not be a staple of American cuisine, but it has a place in many people’s diets. Health influencers laud it as a lean, low-calorie, nutrient-dense source of protein. Venison jerky sticks are sold at big-box stores and advertised as snacks for people on Whole30 and keto diets. Higher-end grocery stores, such as Wegmans and Whole Foods, sell ground venison for upwards of $12 a pound, roughly twice the cost of ground beef.

Part of the reason venison is so expensive is that most of it is not homegrown. It’s mostly imported from New Zealand, which has sent more than 5 million pounds of the stuff to the U.S. every year since 2020. Beef, the dominant red meat in the States, has historically been more affordable. But beef prices jumped nearly 15 percent in 2025, and the conventional kind sold in most supermarkets comes from cattle raised in abysmal conditions. If high-quality venison were cheaper and more widely available, it could be an appetizing alternative.

In recent years, a few deer-swamped states, including New Jersey and Maryland, have tried to legalize the sale of hunted venison, which would deliver two key benefits: more deer out of the ecosystem and more venison on people’s plates. Despite the sport’s association with trophies, many deer hunters are motivated by the prospect of obtaining meat, and they can only consume so much. “It’s for your own table,” Overstrom-Coleman said as he fixed climbing sticks onto a tree to form a makeshift ladder. He had already stocked his freezer full of venison this season (“That son of a bitch,” Calsbeek whispered, once we’d left our companion in his tree) and planned, as many hunters do, to donate any excess meat to a food bank.

Hunting is waning in popularity, in part because younger people are less keen on participating than older generations. Efforts to bring in more hunters, such as programs to train women and youth in outdoor skills, are under way in many states. Women are the fastest-growing demographic, and they participate largely to acquire food, Moira Tidball, the executive director at the Cornell Cooperative Extension who leads hunting classes for women, told me. Still, interest is not growing fast enough for the subsistence-and-donation system to keep deer numbers in check.

[Read: America needs hunting more than it knows]

It’s hard to imagine a better incentive for deer hunting than allowing hunters to sell their venison to stores and restaurants. But the idea is antithetical to a core tenet of American conservation. For more than 100 years, the country’s wild game has flourished under the protection of hunters and their allies, steadfast in their belief that the nation’s animals are not for sale.

The last time this many white-tailed deer roamed America’s woodlands, the country didn’t yet exist. To the English colonists who arrived in the New World, the deer bounding merrily through the forests may as well have been leaping bags of cash. Back home, deer belonged to the Crown, and as such, could be hunted only by the privileged few, Keith Tidball, a hunter and an environmental anthropologist at Cornell (and Moira’s spouse), told me. In the colonies, they were free for the taking.

Colonists founded a robust trans-Atlantic trade for deer hide, a particularly popular leather for making work boots and breeches, which drastically reduced the deer population. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau notes a man who preserved the horns “of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity.” The animals were already close to disappearing from many areas at the beginning of what ecologists have called the “exploitation era” of white-tailed deer, starting in the mid-19th century. Fifty years later, America was home to roughly half a million deer, down 99 percent from precolonial days.

The commerce-driven decimation of the nation’s wildlife—not just deer but birds, elk, bears, and many other animals—unsettled many Americans, especially hunters. In 1900, Representative John Lacey of Iowa, a hunter and close friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, introduced a bill to ban the trafficking of America’s wildlife. (As Roosevelt, who notoriously hunted to collect trophies, wrote in 1913, “If there is to be any shooting there must be something to shoot.”) The Lacey Act remains one of the most binding federal conservation laws in existence today.

[From the May 1906 issue: Camping with President Theodore Roosevelt]

The law is partly contingent on state policies, which make exceptions for certain species. Hunters in most states, for example, can legally harvest and sell the pelts of fur-bearing species such as otters, raccoons, and coyotes. But attempts to carve out similar exceptions for hunted venison, including the bills in Maryland and New Jersey, have failed. In 2022, the Mississippi attorney general published a statement that opened up the possibility of legalizing the sale of hunted deer, provoking fierce opposition from hunters and conservationists; today, the option remains open but has not led to any policy changes. Last year, an Indiana state representative introduced a bill that would allow the sale of hunted venison, but so far it has gone nowhere.

The practical reason such proposals keep failing is that allowing the sale of hunted meat would require huge investments in infrastructure. Systems to process meat according to state and federal laws would have to be developed, as would rapid testing for chronic wasting disease, an illness akin to mad cow that could, theoretically, spread to humans who eat infected meat, though no cases have ever been reported. Such systems could, of course, be implemented. Hunted deer is sold in some common grocery stores in the United Kingdom, such as Waitrose and Aldi. (Notably, chronic wasting disease is not a concern there.)

[Read: Deer are beta-testing a nightmare disease]

Although the sheer abundance of deer makes them easy to imagine as steaks on legs, several experts cautioned that some people’s affection for the animals runs deep. Deer are cute; they’re docile; they’re Bambi. David Drake, a forestry and wildlife professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, likens them to America’s “sacred cow.” As Drake and a colleague have outlined in a paper proposing a model for commercialized venison hunting in the U.S., any modern system would be fundamentally different from the colonial-era approach because it would be regulated, mostly by state wildlife agencies. But powerful coalitions of hunters and conservationists remain both faithful to the notion that wild game shouldn’t be sold and fearful that history will repeat itself. As the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, a national hunting association, puts it, “Any effort to recreate markets for game species represents a significant threat to the future of our nation’s sportsmen-led conservation efforts.” Some of the fiercest pushback to the New Jersey law, Drake told me, came from the state wildlife agency.

The only U.S. state with a deer-related exception to the Lacey Act is Vermont. During the open deer-hunting season (which spans roughly from fall to winter in the Northeast) and for 20 days afterward, Vermonters can legally sell any meat that they harvest. This policy was introduced in 1961, and yet, “I am not aware of anyone who actually takes advantage of it,” Nick Fortin, a wildlife biologist at Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife Department, told me. He added that the department, which manages the exasperated homeowners and destabilized forests that deer leave in their path, has been discussing how to raise awareness about the law.

Even after I explained the 1961 law to several Vermont hunters, they were hesitant to sell me any meat. Hunted meat is meant to be shared freely, or at most bartered for other items or goodwill, Greg Boglioli, a Vermont hunter and store owner, told me. I met Boglioli at the rural home of his friend Fred Waite, a lifelong hunter whose front room alone was decorated with 20 deer heads. I had hoped to buy venison from Waite, but he insisted on sharing it for free. After all, he had plenty. His pantry was crammed with mason jars of stewed venison in liver-colored brine. On a table in the living room was the scarlet torso of a deer that his son had accidentally hit with his truck the other day, half-thawed and waiting to be cooked.

During our hunt, I found Overstrom-Coleman to be more open to the idea of selling the venison he hunted. “I guess that would be a pretty excellent way to share it,” he said. Earlier in the season, he’d killed a deer in Vermont, and he was willing to sell me some of the meat the next day. At least, I thought as I stared into the motionless woods, I’d be going home with something.

[From the July/August 2005 issue: Masters of the hunt]

By the time the sun went down, the only deer I’d seen was a teetering doe in a video that Overstrom-Coleman had taken from his tree and sent to Calsbeek. “Too small to kill,” he texted; he’d meet us in the parking lot. The air was glacial as Calsbeek and I trudged empty-handed toward the trailhead, hoofprints glinting mockingly in the light of our headlamps. From the trunk of the car, we took a consolation swig of Wild Turkey from a frosted bottle, and Overstrom-Coleman reminded me to visit the next day.

I found his chest freezer stuffed with paper-wrapped packages stamped with Deer 2025. He handed me three and refused to let me pay. Back home a few days later, I used one to make meatballs. Their sheer depth of flavor—earthy and robust, with a hint of nuttiness—made me wonder why I bothered to eat farmed meat at all.

This article originally misidentified Max Overstrom-Coleman’s hunting weapon.

Can Jollibee Beat American Fast Food at Its Own Game?

2025-12-09T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 12:30 p.m. ET on January 21, 2026

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“Jolly morning!” is a weird way to be greeted, no matter the context. But it rang out, like birdsong, from behind the counter of a fast-food joint I visited in the Los Angeles suburbs in May. Although the restaurant’s bright overhead lighting and giant menus suggested a typical American chain, something was a little off. Along one wall, a floor-to-ceiling mural depicted a cartoon bee in a chef’s hat demonstrating the dance steps of the twist.

The bee is the eponymous mascot of Jollibee, which now has about 80 locations across the United States. Its food seems familiar until you taste it. Chickenjoy, the chain’s signature fried chicken, has a golden, rippled exterior, just as you might expect. But tooth meets flesh with a burst of garlic, citrus, and something salty and fermented, a little like soy. What lingers on the tongue is a blast of umami that’s so deeply chicken-y, it’s hard to square with the mild-flavored meat that Americans have come to know.

The menu’s other highlights smack of the surreal. The Aloha Burger is savory-sweet, sporting a halo of grilled pineapple beneath layers of bacon and cheese. Jolly Spaghetti is slathered in a sugary meat sauce and garnished with grated cheese and hot-dog slices. Crisp hand pies ooze purple ube and golden mango.

Jollibee does not serve American food, not exactly. The chain is based in the Philippines, which developed a taste for burgers and fried chicken during its years as a U.S. colony, and has since made the foods its own. Despite Jollibee’s off-kilter dishes and feel—or perhaps because of them—Americans are eating it up. USA Today and Eater recently ranked its fried chicken as the best in the country among fast-food restaurants, beating out brands such as Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, and KFC. The company, once threatened by the incursion of McDonald’s into its territory, is aggressively expanding across the U.S.; in 2022, it opened its flagship in Times Square, a block away from McDonald’s New York anchor store. Fast food, an export pushed out around the globe by the U.S., is now boomeranging back in unexpected—and, so far, lucrative—ways.

A statue of the Jollibee mascot, ushering customers into a store in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)

Two symbols dominate the haze of Manila’s skyline: church steeples and signs bearing Jollibee’s logo. Often, the Catholic Church and Jollibee go hand in hand: Final blessings at Sunday Mass release worshippers to their post-service meal, and children’s birthday parties start with blessings over sweet spaghetti (and sometimes end with a visit from an employee in a giant bee costume, as I observed enviously in my own childhood during visits to Manila).

Jollibee is often described as the McDonald’s of the Philippines, but that doesn’t do the chain justice. It has approximately 1,300 locations across the nation, which is about the size of Arizona. Per square mile, Jollibee has nearly four times the number of stores in the Philippines as McDonald’s does in the U.S.

Driving down Manila’s main highway in May, I turned at a colossal golden statue of the Virgin Mary and headed toward one of the city’s main business districts. Chubby red lettering at the top of a skyscraper came into view: Jollibee TOWER. At a Jollibee across the street from the headquarters, I met Ernesto Tanmantiong, the global CEO and president of Jollibee Foods Corporation. We sat down for a light breakfast: a Burger Steak (beef patties smothered with mushroom gravy) and rice for me; Chickenjoy and pineapple juice for him.

Tanmantiong, who is trim with graying hair, wore a bright-red polo embroidered with the words CHOOSE JOY! He told long-winded stories and laughed at his own jokes, which made him seem less like the leader of a company worth north of $4 billion and more like a guy who hangs out in the food court at the mall, albeit one wearing what appeared to be a blue IWC Portugieser watch worth about $13,000. Employees call him Sir Ato, combining respect for authority with the familiarity of a nickname. He has worked at the company since his older brother, Tony Tan Caktiong, known as Sir Tony and now Jollibee’s chairman, founded it in 1978.

Culinary ambitions ran in the family. Tanmantiong’s father had cooked at a Chinese temple in Manila before opening a restaurant in the southern city of Davao. In 1975, Tan Caktiong borrowed family money to open two Manila franchises of Magnolia, a popular Filipino ice-cream company established by a U.S. volunteer Army cook. With college graduation and a wedding imminent, Tan Caktiong figured that ice cream was as good a way as any to make a living. But before long, he started serving burgers too, bringing on his sister to develop recipes and Tanmantiong to manage operations. He renamed his restaurants Jollibee, which captured the family’s business ethos: Employees should work as hard and harmoniously as bees, but unless they’re happy, that kind of effort is “not worth it,” Tanmantiong said. Jollibee’s burgers were soon outselling the ice cream.

Ernesto Tanmantiong, the global CEO and president of Jollibee Foods Corporation (Sonny Thakur for The Atlantic)

The U.S. had seized control of the archipelago at the turn of the previous century, after the Spanish-American War, bringing American soldiers and officials—along with the food they ate back home. Over time, that reshaped the national appetite. Tom’s Dixie Kitchen, a Manila hot spot opened in the 1910s by a Black GI, popularized southern-style fried chicken. After the Philippines was granted independence in 1946, the hunger for American food remained. Local burger chains such as Big 20, 50/50, and Tropical Hut proliferated by serving distinctly Filipinized burgers. The Filipino palate, also shaped by a long history of Indigenous, Chinese, and Spanish settlement, demands maximum levels of sour, sweet, salty, and umami. Tropical Hut, for instance, serves an onion-sweet, heavily seasoned beef patty sandwiched between sweetened buns.

Jollibee followed in this same tradition. Its Yumburger—so named because it was “more yummy than others,” Tanmantiong said—appears to be a standard American burger. Yet its patty is sweet and intensely savory (the recipe is kept secret, but amateur attempts to re-create it rely on flavorful add-ins such as oyster sauce, banana ketchup, and MSG). Its dressing—thick, tangy, saccharine—is like Big Mac sauce, distilled into something more potent. The company may prize joy, but its burger recipe is the result of a ruthless development strategy, carried out by Tanmantiong’s father and sister: Copy the competition, then improve it.

[From the January/February 2018 issue: Robots will transform fast food]

Chickenjoy was designed the same way. Homegrown chicken chains, such as Max’s Restaurant and Classic Savory, were popular, but they didn’t serve the southern-style breaded version that the family had in mind. Tanmantiong sought inspiration abroad, before Filipinizing the final recipe. The chicken is served with a gloopy sweet gravy that Anthony Bourdain once described, not disparagingly, as the “sinister brown sauce.” (He also called the sweet spaghetti—a spin on the pasta dish once served as rations to American GIs—“deranged, yet strangely alluring.”)

In Jollibee’s early days, even as it was seeking to perfect American fast food for the Filipino palate, American fast-food chains were racing into the country. Around 1980, Tanmantiong and his brother started to notice American businessmen hanging around local Jollibees. “We already knew that it was McDonald’s,” he said. With just 10 locations across the country, Jollibee seemed to stand little chance against the global giant. Tan Caktiong sought advice from E. Smith Lanning, an American corporate strategist living in Manila. Lanning’s prognosis was grim: Jollibee’s service was too slow, its footprint too small.

Perhaps most challenging was the prospect that its identity was too Filipino to compete with McDonald’s. Minyong Ordoñez, a titan of Filipino advertising, warned the family about what some locals derisively called the “American mentality”; people assumed that anything made in the U.S. was better by default, and thus worth paying more for.

“We decided to face them head-on,” Tanmantiong said. Unable to fill locations as big as its competitor’s, Jollibee swarmed each new McDonald’s with a ring of smaller stores. It marketed itself as a restaurant where every family could go for an affordable treat; even today, a combo meal of spaghetti, fries, and a drink is cheaper than McDonald’s. (Ahead of my meeting with Tanmantiong, Jollibee corporate staff cautioned that the restaurant might be crowded because it was payday for many workers; it was indeed packed.)

A Burger Steak, Chickenjoy, Jolly Spaghetti, and rice (Sonny Thakur for The Atlantic)

Most of all, Jollibee set out to convince locals that its food was superior—more flavorful and better aligned with their taste buds—than whatever McDonald’s could offer. During our breakfast, Tanmantiong expounded on a concept that is central to the Jollibee brand: langhap sarap, which roughly translates to “breathe in deliciousness.” The fried chicken is not just meant to be eaten; you should be able to taste it before you even unwrap it. When I ordered the chicken at a drive-through in the Manila suburbs, the closed paper bag filled the car with dizzying richness. It verges on sensory overload, which is the point: Any American meal should seem bland in comparison.

[Read: One community’s complicated relationship with SPAM]

And more often than not, it does. McDonald’s has tried to adapt its menu in the Philippines to local tastes, and it thrives there today, but it has failed to surpass Jollibee in terms of market share or cultural significance. The bone-in fried chicken I ordered at a McDonald’s drive-through was monotonously salty; the sweet spaghetti tasted synthetic and was topped with a single hot-dog slice. As an American, I found it both disorienting and disappointing to see McDonald’s playing catch-up. As a Filipino, I was appalled that I hadn’t gotten my money’s worth of hot dogs.

When I visited the Jollibee Commissary in nearby Laguna, the company’s 24-acre flagship production plant, I didn’t breathe in deliciousness so much as bathe in it. A cloud of steam, perfumed with onions and beef, marked the entrance to the spaghetti room, where sugary sauce bubbled in stainless-steel vats the size of hot tubs. Buckets of diced bell peppers, beef tallow, and textured vegetable protein were stacked next to sealed containers of powder, which I assumed was the company’s secret spice mix. (My guides, in lab coats, would neither confirm nor deny this.) In the pie room, huge metal tubes squirted jammy mangoes and peaches onto strips of pastry. The Laguna plant is one of many, but it is the only one that makes Jollibee’s peach-mango pies (the company insists on using Filipino mangoes). I watched assembly-line workers hand-packing them—tens of thousands a day—into boxes addressed to stores across the globe.

[Read: The beloved Filipino tradition that started as a government policy]

Jollibee’s growth outside the Philippines initially followed the migration of Filipinos abroad. Since the 1970s, so many Filipinos have left home in search of better jobs that, in 2024, their remittances accounted for more than 7 percent of the Philippines’ national income. Many of Jollibee’s 1,800-plus international locations exist where there are large pockets of homesick Filipinos, which is most places: the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, and America. Even in areas without a Jollibee, its parent company is at work. Worldwide, Jollibee Foods Corporation operates more than 10,000 stores under the 19 Filipino and international brands it has swallowed up, which include Smashburger, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and the Michelin-starred dim sum chain Tim Ho Wan. Tanmantiong’s goal is to become one of the top five restaurant companies in the world (one recent estimate ranked Jollibee 17th; McDonald’s is consistently first). He believes it can happen—if Jollibee can win over America.

A restaurant in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)

Jollibee opened its first store in the continental U.S. in 1998; by 2020, it had 48. Most were concentrated in regions with dense Filipino-immigrant populations, such as Los Angeles and New York. But those locations have been successful enough that Jollibee has ventured into other markets. In October, when I visited the Times Square restaurant at lunchtime, a steady flow of customers—roughly half were Filipino—cycled in and out of the packed dining area, where Chickenjoy or chicken sandwiches were on nearly every table. Nationwide, average revenues per store were at least double those of Popeyes and KFC in 2024, David Henkes, a food-and-beverage-industry analyst at Technomic, told me.

The warm reception from the “mainstream”—company parlance for non-Filipino Americans—has emboldened Jollibee to ramp up its expansion, Tanmantiong said. In 2021, it announced a plan to open 500 stores across North America before the end of the decade, and recently launched a franchising program to accelerate its growth. A few blocks away from the Times Square flagship, a new storefront is preparing to open by Grand Central Station, right next door to a McDonald’s.

Tanmantiong’s hopes for expansion rest mostly, but not entirely, on the distinctive flavor of Jollibee’s food. During our interview, about three-quarters of the way into my Burger Steak, we were interrupted by whistles and cheers. Jollibee himself had arrived, and he was bounding toward me in a flame-red suit and black bow tie. The lids of his huge doll eyes fluttered maniacally as he spread his arms for a hug. I let out a little scream—whether from joy or shock, I’m not sure. The staff clapped in unison as he invited me to dance by the counter, his striped thorax—abdomen?—gyrating. A pirouette later, he raised his hands for a double high five. In addition to the fried chicken, this is what Tanmantiong is exporting to America. “Aside from superior taste,” he told me later, in a boardroom in the company’s tower, “you get the joy of eating in a Jollibee store.”

How far can Jollibee go in the U.S.? A week after my trip to Manila, my stomach still reeling from my fast-food extravaganza there, I sat down with Beth Dela Cruz, the president of the chain’s North America division. I’d made the mistake of scheduling another breakfast meeting, at a franchise in West Covina, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Dela Cruz, compact and energetic, had an auntie’s indefatigable determination to compel me to eat more. Our meal included, but was not limited to, fried chicken (regular and spicy), spaghetti, two kinds of burgers, pineapple juice, and peach-mango pie. Across the street from the restaurant was Jollibee’s American headquarters, a glass tower topped with the company logo.

Beth Dela Cruz, the president of Jollibee’s North America division, at a restaurant in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)

I wanted to know how the company, having overcome Filipinos’ “American mentality” decades ago in Manila, was seeking to do so again, in America itself. Chickenjoy may be exceptionally tasty, but Americans do not live on fried chicken alone. Jollibee’s other offerings—which, in addition to the burgers and spaghetti, include palabok, rice noodles slathered in pork- and-shrimp gravy—are not as approachable.

Dela Cruz was, unsurprisingly, sanguine. “People freak out” about the sweet spaghetti, she said. “But then when they taste it, it becomes, like, an unexpected experience.” (In the Times Square restaurant, I’d watched a middle-aged flight attendant from Atlanta carefully remove the hot-dog slices from hers; she told me she loved the chicken but wouldn’t be ordering the spaghetti again.) The company has made concessions to its American audience. The spaghetti here is less sweet, and the pies are bigger. A line of Angus-beef burgers, available only in the U.S. and Canada, was designed to meet North American expectations: less seasoning and more sauce, Luis Velasco, the region’s senior vice president and marketing head, told me. Other menu items found in some U.S. locations include baked macaroni and cheese, chicken tenders, and southern-style biscuits, all of which I tasted during my breakfast with Dela Cruz. They were good, but they weren’t all that distinctive. The Angus burger, Dela Cruz said, “has really good flavors, but it’s meant for the mainstream”—a euphemism, I thought, for relatively bland.

And as for the joy? Dela Cruz has succeeded, at the least, in importing Jollibee’s colorful branding and goofy mascot. Ty Matejowsky, an anthropology professor who studies Jollibee (yes, really) at the University of Central Florida, told me about a recent proliferation of memes expressing nostalgia for a more fun era of American fast food, before McDonald’s cartoonish red roofs and PlayPlaces and Pizza Hut’s kitschy pendant lamps were given a sterile modern makeover. Jollibee seems to supply something a little like that—a “current of happiness,” he said. The service at the locations I visited was typically about as warm as any I’d experienced in Manila.

But happy low-wage workers aren’t always widely available in America. (In 2023, Jollibee settled a legal dispute with a group of employees in New Jersey who had sought better working conditions and higher pay.) Over-the-top friendliness is not the cultural default in the U.S. the way it is in the Philippines, and fundamental elements of the brand are inevitably lost in translation. In the Philippines, Jollibee is an institution; in America, it’s mostly just another chicken restaurant, and may never be destined to be anything more. Even if Jollibee opens up 500 stores in the U.S., McDonald’s has more locations in Ohio alone.

Still, Jollibee doesn’t have to topple the fast-food giants, or re-create an era when fast food was a little more fun, to play a part in reshaping the American palate, much as the U.S. reshaped the Filipino palate a century ago. On that front, it has one major advantage. For all of Jollibee’s weirdness, it isn’t entirely foreign. Because it is Filipino, it is also American.

This article has been updated to clarify that the Jollibee that opened in 1998 was the first store on the U.S. mainland. Jollibee had opened a store in Guam in 1995. This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “Postcolonial Chicken.”

America Refuses to Go Bald

2025-12-02T08:00:00-05:00

Throughout the 2000s, the music charts were rife with references to Rogaine. Jay-Z invoked the hair-restoration drug as a synonym for staying power. Weezer described it, begrudgingly, as a means of rejuvenation. Ingrid Michaelson, in a song about accepting one’s flaws, pledged to buy the drug for her partner when he inevitably lost his hair.

Now, as the Millennials who grew up on this music are fast approaching their Rogaine era, the hair-loss industry is eager to receive them—particularly the many women coming around to the idea that they might want to buy Rogaine for themselves too. Over roughly the past decade, hair-loss treatments aimed at women have broken into mainstream consumer culture, alerting women simultaneously to the possibility of balding and the potential to fix it.

Women have always been the target audience for shampoos, hair masks, hot-oil treatments, and so on. But those products aim to improve the appearance of existing hair, not grow more of it. Products specifically for hair loss have historically targeted male users. When Rogaine launched in 1988, it was available only for men. (The women’s version came three years later.)

Advertising for hair loss has, accordingly, mostly focused on men. Throughout the big-hair craze of the 1980s and ’90s, infomercials for men’s spray-on hair were all over TV. In a Rogaine ad from 2001, a narrator asks: “Will she feel the same way if you lose your hair?” (The answer: “Sure, she’ll just feel it about somebody else.”) Hair-growth treatments are an easy sell for men because many will go bald in midlife. Yet 40 percent of women experience some amount of hair loss by the time they turn 50. They just haven’t been as comfortable talking about it as men, Rachael Gibson, a hair-culture expert known online as the Hair Historian, told me.

Now brands and their ambassadors have taken the microphone. Nutrafol, a women-focused hair-supplement company that launched in 2016, has started selling its products at Sephora and Ulta. My Instagram feed is full of female influencers holding up fistfuls of loose hair and presenting sparsely populated scalps—then hawking serums, supplements, and shampoos that supposedly restored their voluminous mane. (Before watching these videos, I had no suspicions that my hair was falling out; afterward, I was convinced that with the right products, I could look absolutely equine.) When Hers launched in 2018, it offered topical minoxidil, the generic form of Rogaine. Over the past three years or so, many providers (including Hers) have started prescribing oral minoxidil, a hypertension drug, off-label to treat hair loss, which can be a welcome alternative to sticky topical versions. Hers and its men’s counterpart, Hims, also sell some of their hair-loss products at Walmart.

The proliferation of women’s hair-restoration products is impossible to separate from the booming menopause market. As pop-culture depictions of menopause have become more prominent over the past few years, numerous drugs, supplements, and telehealth platforms have sprung up to address it. Shoshana Marmon, a dermatology professor at New York Medical College, told me that she has observed a growing number of influencers targeting women in midlife, when hair usually starts to thin. Midi Health, a menopause-focused telehealth platform, started offering oral and topical minoxidil in 2023, and it screens patients for common issues, such as iron deficiency and thyroid problems, that can drive hair loss, Kathleen Jordan, Midi Health’s chief medical officer, told me. And because fluctuating hormones during menopause are a major driver of hair loss in women, hormone-replacement therapy can sometimes help.

Of course, hair-loss companies are ready to sell these products to anyone, not just aging women. In beauty chains and drugstores, numerous oral hair-loss supplements containing ingredients such as biotin and vitamin A are displayed alongside shampoos and conditioners. Last year, products for thinning hair and scalp health were among the fastest-growing categories in the roughly $450 billion prestige-hair-product market, according to the market-research firm Circana. Widespread hair loss during the coronavirus pandemic may have juiced demand for hair-loss products, and the rise of direct-to-consumer telehealth companies likely accelerated the trend: Hair-loss treatment is popular at Hims and Hers, a company spokesperson told me, because many people find hair loss embarrassing and telehealth allows them to seek help discreetly.

[Read: The year America’s hair fell out]

The most commonly prescribed hair-loss drugs are well established and generally trustworthy. Minoxidil is the “gold standard” of active ingredients for hair loss, Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist with Kaiser Permanente, told me. In both topical and oral forms, it works by slowing or reversing hair-follicle shrinkage, which tends to happen as hormones fluctuate. A drug called finasteride is sometimes used to reduce shedding; Midi Health combines it with minoxidil and two less-used hair-loss drugs in a “Regrowth Serum.” But finasteride is most commonly prescribed to men; it isn’t FDA-approved for women for hair loss, because it can be dangerous to pregnant women and their fetuses. (It has also been linked to panic attacks and suicidal thoughts in some men.)

Meanwhile, hair-loss supplements, like all supplements, are somewhat of a tangle. The highest-quality evidence available offers some support for swallowing ingredients such as zinc, pumpkin-seed oil, and omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, Elizabeth Houshmand, a fellow with the American Academy of Dermatology, told me. But purity, dosing, and consistency vary widely among products, and their safety and effectiveness aren’t regulated by the FDA. Herbal supplements that lower DHT, a hormone that shrinks the hair follicle, can sometimes be beneficial, but medications are “the only thing that really does work,” Spencer Kobren, the founder of the American Hair Loss Association, a consumer-advocacy group, told me.

The predominantly male focus of the hair-loss industry, combined with women’s reticence about thinning hair, has left many women clueless about the possibility that they, too, may lose their hair. “We hear all the time from our consumers that ‘I didn’t know,’” Cindy Gustafson, the CEO of Nutrafol, told me. Some are too embarrassed to bring it up with their provider, fearing that their concern will be criticized as vain or, worse, dismissed as just a part of life, Jordan said. Unlike men, who are generally more aware of hair-loss drugs and use them as a first line of treatment, women tend to rely on trusted friends and hairstylists for advice, Kobren said, noting that they usually try four to six non-pharmaceutical hair-loss products before consulting a doctor. Unfortunately, he added, women also tend to spend the most on hair-regrowth snake oil.

[Read: Soon there will be unlimited hair]

Women today are in an unprecedented position: They’re receiving more messages than ever about the possibility of balding, even as they’re bombarded with products to fix it. Perhaps this shift will make women more comfortable taking their hair concerns to their doctor, rather than to friends and influencers. But it seems equally likely to change nothing. Like smooth skin and mental clarity, perfect hair suddenly seems within reach at any age—as long as you’re willing to pay.

America’s Best Pasta Is Slipping Away

2025-11-12T15:21:26-05:00

Load up on linguine and stock up on spaghetti. In the new year, high-quality pasta may be a lot harder to come by in American stores. Several weeks ago, the U.S. Commerce Department announced that, starting in January, most pasta imported from Italy could be subject to a preliminary 92 percent tariff—on top of the 15 percent blanket duty on goods from the European Union. Outraged Italian pasta manufacturers are threatening to pull their products from American shelves.

The proposed tariff, the result of a year-long investigation into the pasta industry, targets 13 Italian companies that have allegedly undercut U.S. manufacturers by selling underpriced pasta. Pasta tensions between the United States and Italy have been simmering since the 1990s, but this new proposal has turned up the heat. White House Press Secretary Kush Desai told me that some of the companies “screwed up” their initial response to the probe by providing the U.S. government with incomplete data, but if they comply going forward, the Commerce Department may yet recalculate its tariff. The pastifici insist that they’re being unfairly targeted, and an Italian agricultural industry group has said they won’t give in to pressure. That could leave American noodle connoisseurs in an impastable situation.

The affected companies, which include La Molisana, Pasta Garofalo, and Rummo, manufacture the usual penne and rigatoni as well as fancier shapes: tubular bucatini, spiraling elicoidali, and delicate rings of anelli siciliani. Notably, all of them specialize in “bronze-cut” pasta. This term refers to the tool, known as a die, used to extrude the pasta dough into shapes. Using a bronze die gives the pasta a slightly sandpapery texture, which clings better to sauce and results in a more satisfying bite. (Indeed, I have tasted bronze-cut pappardelle, and it is spectacular.) Bronze-cut pasta imbues the water in which it is boiled with extra starch, and ladling some of that water back into the pan while mixing pasta and sauce—nonnegotiable for pasta enthusiasts—creates a silky dish, the chef J. Kenji López-Alt told me.

Most of the pasta made and sold in America is not bronze-cut, but extruded using plastic molds coated with Teflon, according to Tom Sheridan, president of sales and international development at the U.S.-based Kensington Food Company, which makes bronze-cut pasta. A pasta die is about the size of a car tire, dotted with 40 to 60 inserts that extrude the dough, Scott Ketchum, a co-founder of the American bronze-cut-pasta brand Sfoglini, told me. Bronze inserts aren’t as durable as plastic ones, so they need to be replaced more often. Ketchum said that he spends roughly $4,000 every two years to buy new inserts from Italy. Each shape requires a different insert, Tony Adams, the owner of Mill Valley Pasta, told me. And a major downside of making more textured pasta is that it produces huge amounts of pasta dust, necessitating even more equipment and labor to clean up the machinery, according to Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast and created his own pasta shape that launched with Sfoglini in 2021. Teflon pasta is cheaper to make because the dough simply glides out of the die, resulting in a faster and more streamlined process—and pasta that is gummier and less adherent to sauce.

These days, the average American is likely more concerned with price than the mouthfeel of their macaroni. Still, over roughly the past decade, demand for better-quality pasta has grown. Barilla, known in the United States for its inexpensive American-made products, launched its Al Bronzo line of imported Italian pasta in 2022. Even midrange stores such as Target and Wegmans sell their own bronze-cut pasta. House-brand pastas are usually imported from Italy, so they too may be affected by tariffs, Ketchum said.

[From the July 1986 issue: Pasta]

Bronze-cut pasta’s popularity is growing in part because Americans are becoming more savvy about their food. “Pretty much all the pasta was Teflon” until people started learning that there were tastier alternatives, Pashman told me. Recently, the appetite for bronze-cut pasta has also been whetted by health fears. In wellness circles, Teflon is basically synonymous with poison because it comes from a family of chemicals, called PFAS, that have been linked to certain cancers and reproductive issues. On TikTok, lifestyle influencers encourage viewers to seek out bronze-cut pasta because it is supposedly healthier than its Teflon-extruded kin.

The concerns are largely a nonissue. Teflon cookware can release harmful chemicals when it’s overheated, but extruding pasta is a room-temperature affair, Sheridan told me. Teflon bits could flake off into the pasta, but the health effects of this are unclear, and the company that makes Teflon maintains that those particles are inert. As I have written previously, the health consequences of using PFAS-coated cookware are generally not well studied.

If the pasta tariff goes into effect, bronze-cut pasta will almost certainly be rarer on U.S. shelves. More than half of America’s pasta imports—much of which is bronze-cut—come from Italy. Historically, and even more so now, companies don’t have much incentive to start making it domestically: “It’s gonna cost you a quarter of a million dollars or more to get into the game,” Sheridan said. Bronze-cut-pasta equipment from an Italian company called Fava Storci, which he called the Ferrari of pasta machinery, can cost upwards of $500,000. Such machines are hard to come by in the U.S., so they’re usually imported from Europe—and subject to their own tariffs.

[Read: A great way to get Americans to eat worse]

If the pastifici accept the Trump administration’s proposed tariffs, Americans who are fussy about their pasta—for culinary or health reasons—may soon have to make tough decisions: stomach another meal of slippery, Teflon-extruded penne, or pay extra for ridged radiatori? The alternative—that bronze-cut noodles simply won’t be available—is scarier still. After a decade of growing accustomed to the chewy, high-friction delight of bronze-cut shapes, many American foodies may find that they can’t get their teeth on them at all.

The Patches That Want to Fix Your Sleep, Sex, and Focus

2025-11-11T16:18:13-05:00

Last Thursday, in lieu of my afternoon coffee, I placed a sticker on the inside of my wrist. It was transparent, about the size of a dime, and printed with a line drawing of a lightning bolt—which, I hoped, represented the power about to be zapped into my radial vein. The patch had, after all, come in a box labeled Energy Boost.

So-called wellness patches have recently flooded big-box stores, promising to curb anxiety, induce calm, boost libido, or dose children with omega-3s. Their active ingredients are virtually indistinguishable from those of the many oral supplements already hawked by the wellness industry. Whether the skin is a better route for supplements than the stomach isn’t entirely clear. But the appeal of wellness patches seems to have less to do with their effects and more to do with how they look.

Wellness patches are generally pitched as an easier, safer way to take supplements. The website for The What Supp Co., a British brand that launched in the United States this year, describes its products as “super convenient” because users don’t have to take a pill or mix a drink—plus, they’re extra portable. That brand, like many patch sellers, laments the filler ingredients (such as corn starch and gelatin) that can show up in oral supplements, plus their digestive side effects; patches, it says, come with no such risks. The slogan for Kind Patches, which rolled out across Walmart locations last month, is “No pills. No sugar. No nonsense.” Half Past 8, a patch company that launched last week, says that its products sidestep the crash and comedown associated with some pills and gummies by offering a slow drip of wellness. Some brands also advertise that, unlike a pill, you can take a patch off when you’ve had enough. But that cuts both ways: I put another patch on my wrist yesterday morning, and it had fallen off by the time I got to the office.

Most of the products are labeled as remedies for common complaints. Stickers from The Good Patch include Nite Nite for better sleep, Think for boosting focus, and Rescue for hangovers. Several brands sell patches that purport to mimic the appetite-reducing effects of GLP-1 drugs; you can buy them on the fast-fashion website Shein. And whereas traditional oral supplements tend to be marketed as vectors for specific compounds, leaving users to mastermind their perfect mix, patches are usually cocktails that advertise their active ingredients less prominently. Putting on The Friendly Patch Co.’s Relax and Let Go sticker really is easier than consuming supplemental forms of its seven key components, which include the herb ashwagandha, the neurotransmitter GABA, and magnesium. (Neither The Good Patch nor The Friendly Patch Co. responded to a request for comment.)

[Read: The return of snake oil]

Whether those ingredients will actually help you chill out is an open question, as is whether they can pass from a sticker into the bloodstream. The whole point of skin is to keep most things out of the body, and although some compounds are known to pass through the skin—nicotine and birth-control patches have been used for decades—little is known about the permeability of the many ingredients used in wellness patches. Some basic principles are well established: For compounds to pass through the skin, they need to be both tiny and fat-soluble; caffeine and vitamins A, D, E, and K all meet those criteria, says Jordan Glenn, the head of science at SuppCo, an app that helps supplement users optimize their intake.

But other common wellness ingredients—such as coenzyme Q10, vitamin B12, folic acid, and zinc—require extra processing to permeate the body’s exterior, Glenn told me. My lightning patch was made by Barrière, whose co-founder Cleo Davis-Urman told me that the company uses a process called micronization to break down large molecules into particles small enough to enter the bloodstream. Micronization is a real technique used for pharmaceutical drugs, transdermal or otherwise, so it’s certainly possible that it could help big compounds pass through the skin. Yet this assurance, together with claims that patches offer a gentler and more sustained release than oral supplements, simply isn’t backed up by independent research; Meto Pierce, a co-founder and the CEO of Half Past 8, told me that the industry is “still developing in terms of published data.” “There might be claims of skin patches being more effective or more consistent, but we can just ignore that at this point because there’s no proof,” Elise Zheng, a health-technology researcher at Columbia University, told me. Dietary supplements aren’t regulated for safety or effectiveness by the FDA, and patches can’t even be regulated as dietary supplements, because they’re not ingestible.

[Read: Everything is a multivitamin]

Wellness patches seem most useful for people who are already supplement enthusiasts—not only because they’ve already bought into the idea that ashwagandha works but because they take so many oral supplements that their mouth needs a break. “Pill fatigue” is a common complaint among the wellness set, Glenn said, though patch users notably still need to remember to apply their supplements. (Glenn also pointed out that patches might be more convenient for people who have digestive problems or difficulty swallowing.)

An hour after I put on my sticker last week, I thought I felt marginally less groggy than usual. Maybe micronization really did make its B12 and folate particles tiny enough to seep into my skin. Or maybe the source of my energy was the sunny 15-minute walk I’d taken to acquire the sticker. By far the most noticeable impact of my thunderbolt was that I kept admiring it, as if it were a tattoo I’d gotten on a whim.

Wellness patches are meant to be seen, as their fun colors and designs suggest. Ads for Kind Patches show wrists adorned with pepperoni-size stickers whose color matches their claim: Dream patches are a dusty blue, Energy is electric yellow, and Period Patches are, of course, bright red. The What Supp Co.’s patches are shaped like a w and come in lavender (for chilling out), kelly green (for detoxing), and pink (for beautifying). “We want the experience to feel joyful and intuitive, not clinical,” Ivana Hjörne, the founder of Kind Patches, told me. Kelly Gilbert, the founder of The What Supp Co., suggested that a patch on your skin could remind you to make other healthy choices throughout the day. It’s also free advertising for the company. Davis-Urman, Barrière’s founder, told me that with patches, customers are “elevated to brand ambassadors, because the product sparks conversation.”

Before the rise of social media, personal wellness was a more private endeavor. These days, people post their run stats, sleep scores, and workout selfies; they wear fitness trackers and brand-name athleisure to the gym. This shift has reordered the priorities of personal health. It’s not just about taking care of yourself; it’s about taking care of yourself in a visible and socially sanctioned way, Marianne Clark, a sociologist at Acadia University who studies wellness culture, told me.

[Read: The perilous spread of the wellness craze]

Accordingly, wellness has also become a notably aesthetic pursuit—it’s no surprise that you can find patches to release skin-firming collagen or strengthen hair and nails. Conspicuous consumption has been part of the beauty industry since at least the 1920s, when Chanel No. 5 first hit shelves and became synonymous with wealth and luxury. (Wellness patches, too, don’t come cheap: My pack of 36 was $15, and other brands charge significantly more.) Social media has made the labor of beauty all the more visible. The online beauty community is rife with selfies glamorizing branded sheet masks and under-eye depuffing patches, photos called “shelfies” that showcase collections of expensive cosmetics, and images of celebrities sporting pimple patches in public. Brightly colored vitamin stickers similarly glorify the work of wellness. Not all wellness patches are beauty products, but many are meant to enhance appearance nevertheless.

By 11 p.m. last Thursday, seven hours into the eight that my sticker journey was supposed to last, I was not sure whether I was less tired than usual. (Davis-Urman assured me that, although the effects of the patch differ for everyone, “cellular-level benefits” were occurring whether or not I felt them.) But I did get a tiny hit of dopamine when my husband noticed it and said, “Cute tattoo.” My lightning bolt also nudged me toward self-reflection, a pillar of modern wellness. Whenever I glanced at it, I asked myself: How do you feel? The answer was the same every time: Tired.

America’s Grocery Lifeline Is Fraying

2025-10-31T11:28:47-04:00

Updated at 3:42 p.m. ET on October 31, 2025

During America’s hardest economic times, canned goods were a lifeline. From 1929, the start of the Great Depression, to 1941, when the United States entered World War II, people ate nearly 50 percent more canned fruit, by weight, compared with the preceding 13 years. Some used new community canning centers to safely preserve food for the long term, or depended on the U.S. government’s first food-stamp programs to buy “surplus goods,” including canned beef, mutton, goat, and peas.

Millions of Americans are now waiting to find out whether they will receive their November benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP was set to run out of funds on November 1—tomorrow—because of the ongoing government shutdown. As anxiety about hunger mounts, some state agencies have advised SNAP beneficiaries to stock up on canned goods such as beans, soup, fruit, and tuna. Only, those foods aren’t so reliably affordable as they once were, in part because of restrictions on the materials that go into the cans themselves.

Roughly 42 million Americans rely on SNAP for food. This week, a number of Democrat-led states sued the Trump administration for refusing to tap into a $5 billion SNAP emergency reserve. After this article was published, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the administration had to continue funding SNAP through the shutdown. But the administration could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court—or simply ignore the court order, as it has several others this year. “SNAP benefit recipients wouldn’t have to worry at all if Democrats would stop using them as political ‘leverage,’” Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, told me earlier this week; when I reached out to the White House again today to ask about the administration’s plans to respond to the federal judge’s ruling, I was directed to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not immediately respond to my questions. The USDA website also blames Democrats for the suspension in food assistance; when I emailed the USDA’s press office, an auto-reply from a spokesperson said they were furloughed and would respond when funding was restored.

Canned foods have been a lifeline in lean times because they’re long-lasting, generally nutritious, and, most of all, cheaper than their fresh counterparts—largely because the necessary materials could be imported reliably and cheaply. Canning requires a special type of metal called tin-mill steel, which the U.S. imports from Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply-chain resiliency at the Consumer Brands Association, told me. Tin-mill steel is unwieldy and fragile, he said, and less valuable than steel meant for cars and machinery. So U.S. steel manufacturers have deprioritized making it. As a result, the U.S. produces only about 20 percent of the tin-mill steel used by domestic can manufacturers, Scott Breen, the president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, a trade group, told me. “We have no choice but to import the other 80 percent,” he said.

Since Trump’s first term, those imports have been subject to a 25 percent tariff; in June, it rose to 50 percent for steel coming from most countries. Trump’s tariffs are meant to stimulate American manufacturing, but the U.S. is simply not equipped to produce enough tin-mill steel: Since 2018, the nation’s 12 plants have dwindled to three, and there’s no sign of further investment, Breen said. The administration has not yet heeded the canning industry’s calls for a tariff exemption on tin-mill steel. Trade negotiations with Canada, which involved metal tariffs, recently disintegrated. (The U.S. also imports roughly $2 billion worth of canned food a year, Breen said—about 10 percent of the national supply. According to the Can Manufacturers Institute, nearly a quarter of that food comes from China, which negotiated a 47 percent average tariff on imports that Trump announced yesterday morning.)

[Listen: SPAM: How the American dream got canned]

The price of tin-mill steel has never been higher, Madrecki said. Canned-food manufacturers have been passing the extra cost to retailers and, inevitably, consumers. From September 2024 to September 2025, the average consumer price of canned fruits and vegetables rose by 5 percent, nearly double the increase observed in food in general, according to government data. Over time, a 50 percent tariff on tin-mill steel could raise the sticker price of canned foods by as much as 15 percent, according to a June analysis by the Consumer Brands Association.

That increase is a matter of cents per can, but it does add up quickly. “It’s really hitting the lower-income customers that rely on SNAP benefits,” Usha Haley, an international-business professor at Wichita State University, told me. In an average week, a SNAP beneficiary eats seven cans of food, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. (Those who don’t use SNAP consume about five.) With a 15 percent price increase, the same amount of money that beneficiary spends would cover only six cans. “At the end of the day, you put one fewer can in your cart,” Madrecki said.

The government itself has been affected, too. One of the biggest purchasers of canned goods is the USDA, Madrecki told me, which uses them to supply food to prisoners, for school meals, and to the Women, Infants, and Children program. By raising tariffs, “the government is increasing its own prices,” Breen said.

State governments have encouraged families to continue to gather shelf-stable foods at food banks if the SNAP benefits stop coming. But charitable food organizations are already strained: Rising food costs due to inflation have driven more people to seek donated items. The implications of taking SNAP away would be “catastrophic” for food banks, Ami McReynolds, interim chief of government relations at Feeding America, told me. Plus, some of the goods such centers stock are donated, but the rest are purchased wholesale by the organizations that run them. “The prices go up for them as well,” Breen said. (Several states have announced plans to send more money to food banks next month.)

Most families spend all of their SNAP credits within three weeks of receiving them at the beginning of each month, Joel Berg, the CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, told me. Those who want to follow states’ guidance to stock up now, before a SNAP cliff, most likely don’t have anything left to budget. Families who can’t afford as much canned food as they normally buy now have limited alternatives for supplementing their diet: Delaware’s suggestions for shelf-stable foods include cereal, oatmeal, peanut butter, nuts, applesauce, pasta, and granola bars—hardly a filling or nutritious diet. A can of beans for protein, or canned pears for fiber, could turn a bowl of carbohydrates into a healthier and more satisfying, if still meager, meal.

[Read: A ‘MAHA box’ might be coming to your doorstep]

Modern-day hunger isn’t as stark as it was during the Depression: In 1933, a New Yorker died every 12 days from hunger, according to The New York Times, and many more Americans developed illnesses associated with malnutrition. Today, when budgets run low, people tend to reduce portion size, skip meals, or buy less healthy food; they generally don’t go long periods without eating, Berg told me. But if the first few days of November pass without the restoration of SNAP benefits, he said, “you’re going to start seeing, for the first time in modern American history, large amounts of Americans going without any food at all.”

The Cleaner Way to Get Ripped

2025-10-17T12:24:47-04:00

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To eat 10,000 calories a day, you might try putting away a family-size box of Oreos, a box of packaged cakes, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, takeout from Five Guys and McDonald’s, and many, many Reese’s cups—all between your regular three meals.

Dru Borden subsisted on this diet throughout his 20s and 30s. As a competitive bodybuilder—fans know him as Big Dru—he needed the calories. Since the mid–20th century, one of the core tenets of bodybuilding has stipulated that gaining muscle requires putting on weight, regardless of how. In Big Dru’s case, it worked: In early-career photos, he appears to have been cobbled together from boulders.

Body-composition researchers have established that a surplus of calories, plus resistance training, is required to gain muscle. The basic idea is that repetitive exercise causes muscles to break down, so the body needs energy and additional nutrients to build them back bigger and stronger. But spending months “dirty” bulking, as the ice-cream-and-burgers method is sometimes called, can also generate huge amounts of fat. Bodybuilders traditionally starved that fat off in the subsequent cutting phase, a period of caloric restriction that can last just as long as the bulk.

But these days, Big Dru and his fellow muscle-maxxing enthusiasts are embracing a new approach: moderation. At a time when celebrities, wellness influencers, and the nation’s top health officials are proclaiming the evils of processed foods, many bodybuilders—professionals like Big Dru, but also young, shirtless amateurs documenting their gains online—are leaving the old way of bulking behind.

On gym-bro social media, the hashtag #leanbulk is ubiquitous. (So is #cleanbulk, used interchangeably.) The term broadly refers to working out while consuming only slightly more calories than the body needs to maintain itself, and getting those calories from healthy sources. A typical lean-bulking TikTok features a young man showing off a comically ripped six-pack and C-cup pecs while meticulously documenting the food that fueled them: cottage cheese and eggs, sweet potatoes and tuna, berries and almonds, but never Twinkies.

[Read: Brace yourself for watery mayo and spiky ice cream]

“The paradigm has definitely shifted,” Guillermo Escalante, a kinesiology professor at California State University at San Bernardino and a competitive bodybuilder, told me. The concept of clean bulking emerged in the past decade or so, but it took off only recently, he said. The trend partly reflects the bodybuilding community catching up to the science. A 2020 review found that, for all but the most elite athletes, the body needs roughly 10 percent more calories to gain muscle than it does to maintain itself—certainly not anywhere near 10,000 calories. Beyond that point, research suggests, any extra calories are stored as fat. That not only obscures your gains but can hinder their growth: Working off fat sacrifices some lean muscle, Escalante said. Muscle growth can also be inhibited by the downstream effects of excess fat, such as insulin resistance and the release of inflammatory molecules, Brad Schoenfeld, an exercise-science professor at Lehman College, told me.

Lean bulking tends to produce big muscles more slowly, but it’s more sustainable over time. The effect of too much salty, fatty, and sugary food is the same for bodybuilders as it is for the less ripped: It disrupts the microbiome and immune system and increases blood sugar, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol. “That’s really going to wreak havoc on your cardiovascular system long-term,” Escalante said. Around 2021, Big Dru switched to clean bulking because his previous diet gave him digestive issues, headaches, hormonal imbalances, and heartburn. (Now in his early 40s, he still looks like he’s been hewn from a monolith.)

But the rise of lean bulking seems to be primarily a product of broader shifts in American culture, not health data. For competitive bodybuilders, all that matters is how you appear on the day of an event. These days, people want to look like a bodybuilder 365 days a year, Escalante said. That makes dirty bulking—and its attendant buildup of fat—a less attractive option. In recent years, America has more aggressively embraced a chiseled aesthetic and made heroes of the supremely jacked. They fill social-media feeds: punching each other in Ultimate Fighting Championship matches, hosting popular podcasts, hanging on Taylor Swift’s arm, leading the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 90 percent of boys see online messages about body image, and 75 percent see videos specifically about muscles, according to a new report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has stoked Americans’ hunger for “natural,” “clean,” and minimally processed foods—all compatible with a clean bulk, but not a dirty one.

[Read: The body-positivity movement is over]

Clean bulking may be a healthier option than slamming fast food, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you. If social media is any indication, lean bulking still commonly involves extreme dieting, which can lead to nutrition deficiencies, hormonal changes, eating disorders, and loss of muscle and bone density. “For any kind of adolescent, growing human body, I don’t like it,” Nicole Lund, a nutritionist at NYU Langone Health’s Sports Performance Center, told me. Among the athletes she treats, Lund has seen calorie deficits precede fractures and disturbances in mood, hormones, and growth. Eating disorders, which Escalante said are already a major concern in the bodybuilding community, seem to be rising faster among men and boys than women and girls. A study published this year found that muscle dysmorphia, a pathological obsession with obtaining a jacked physique that is sometimes called “bigorexia,” is more common among young men than previously thought. In a 2021 study of more than 4,000 American teenage boys, 11 percent had used muscle-building supplements, including anabolic steroids, to bulk up.

The collision of wellness culture with the age-old pursuit of a Greek-god bod makes it tempting to believe that swoleness is akin to health. Sometimes that’s true. But for all that lean bulkers profess online that their physical changes serve their health, many of them are primarily motivated by aesthetics. Bill Campbell, an exercise-science professor and the director of the Performance & Physique Enhancement Laboratory at the University of South Florida, told me that most of the questions he gets about clean bulking come from young men, and they’re asking “for cosmetic, physique reasons,” such as wanting to fill out a tight shirt. The world of amateur bulkers seems to be mirroring that of competitive bodybuilders: In the end, the muscles are for show.

Something Weird Is Happening With Halloween Chocolate

2025-10-07T12:14:48-04:00

Updated at 11:32 a.m. ET on October 8, 2025

My first thought upon seeing the Halloween-candy display at my local CVS last week was: Ooh, new treats! Then a second thought barged in: These new treats seemed awfully light on the chocolate. The Hershey’s Nuggets contained a pumpkin-spice-latte cream. The M&M’s were filled with, from what I could tell, berry-flavored peanut butter. And the Ghost Toast Kit Kats were covered not in chocolate, but in a fawn-colored cinnamon coating.

Candy manufacturers release new versions of old sweets all the time, but the timing of these decidedly un-chocolaty varieties is curious: They’ve all launched within the past two years, as the world supply of cocoa beans has dwindled, causing prices to skyrocket. Making cheap chocolate treats is no longer a cheap endeavor—unless they contain less chocolate.

Novelty is core to the candy business. It is especially important to Gen Z and Millennial consumers—the most candy-hungry demographic in recent years. This group seeks out taste mash-ups, unexpected textures, and flavor “experiences,” Carly Schildhaus, the communications director of the National Confectioners Association, an industry group, told me. Nostalgia is trending too: Sweets from the 1990s, such as Gushers and Nerds, are having a moment, as are childhood flavors such as PB&J. Plus, even before the cocoa crisis, plenty of mass-market chocolate candies contained add-ins. Mixing in more, or different ones, gives the impression of innovation, not cost cutting. For example, the vibe of M&M’s upcoming Bakery Collection—which includes such flavors as cherry chocolate cupcake, lemon meringue pie, and peanut-butter cinnamon roll—is fun, not frugal.

But candy-industry insiders know that the pressures for companies are twofold. Less chocolaty candies are “certainly a response to cocoa prices,” Nicko Debenham, a cocoa-industry expert and the former head of sustainability at the chocolate giant Barry Callebaut, told me. Since 2023, West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown, has had consecutive below-average harvests, owing to bad weather, crop disease, and illegal gold mining on farmland. A global shortage ensued, and the price of cocoa fluctuated wildly, reaching a record high of more than $12,000 a ton last December (in recent history, prices stayed below $4,000 a ton). Cocoa prices have become so volatile that banking on chocolate-based products is now a huge risk for candy makers. Companies are being forced to acknowledge that the cocoa crisis is a long-term threat, Ignacio Canals Polo, a chocolate-industry equity analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, told me. “Three weeks of bad weather can completely change the dynamics of the market,” he said. “If you’re a chocolate manufacturer, you have to adjust your portfolio.” (None of the candy companies I reached out to for this article returned my request for comment.)

“Cocoa cutting,” as one might call it, has turned some sweets into (literally) paler imitations of their former selves. This year, Hershey’s rolled out a chocolate-free Cinnamon Toast Crunch version of its classic Kisses; last year, it launched Reese’s Werewolf Tracks, which replaced half the chocolate coating with a vanilla cream. Ferrero’s newest versions of Butterfinger bars swap the milk-chocolate coating for salted caramel or marshmallow cream. Last year, Hershey’s released a white Kit Kat enveloped in vanilla-flavored cream. Non-chocolate versions of these treats have been sold before, of course, but their sheer prevalence in the midst of a cocoa crisis is notable.

Observant consumers have noticed another ploy to use less chocolate: smaller candies. Standard Reese’s cups, for example, come in a package of two that weighs 1.5 ounces, but Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins, which are typically sold during Halloween but launched this year in July, are sold in individually wrapped, 1.2-ounce servings. Bags of newly launched Kit Kat Counts, a vampire-shaped reimagining of the chocolate-coated wafers, are more than an ounce lighter than bags of their snack-size counterparts. (Last year, even former President Joe Biden complained that Snickers bars had undergone shrinkflation. Mars denied the allegations.)

Should the chocolate crisis worsen, candy companies have an especially springy cushion to fall back on: Gummies—shaped like bears, worms, NBA stars—are growing in popularity, as are other chewy, fruit-flavored candies. Most of the candy giants have thrust these alternatives into the spotlight. Hershey’s latest Halloween lineup includes Shaq-a-Licious XL Gummies, which were launched last year, and new Jolly Ranchers Trickies, gummies with intentionally mismatched colors, shapes, and flavors (a pink cherry gummy may, for example, taste of green apple). The Ferrara Candy Company just released a juice-filled iteration of its ultra-popular Nerds Gummy Clusters. Mars, meanwhile, is pushing Halloween variety packs that include Starburst, Skittles, Life Savers, and Hubba Bubba. Freed from the cocoa supply chain, and with a seemingly limitless range of synthetic flavors to choose from, fruity candies are an ideal vector for novelty. (Among Mondelez’s new offerings this year are Sour Patch Kids that, uh, glow under black light.)

Although next year’s cocoa harvest is looking up, its fate remains uncertain. The current price of cocoa is still more than twice as high as it was in 2022. Still, the future of American candy consumption seems fairly stable. People tend to buy chocolate even when prices fluctuate, Canals Polo said. More pertinently, most trick-or-treaters (and, in some cases, their parents) expect not chocolate specifically, but candy—lots of it, and the more variety, the better. The pastel-green, marshmallow-flavored Witch’s Brew Kit Kats for sale at my CVS initially struck me as an unnecessary addition to the world’s confectionery lineup, but it seemed unfair to rob my 2-year-old of a core Halloween experience: eating dumb, fun sweets. They were not great, and certainly not chocolate, but that didn’t stop me from gobbling them down too.

This article originally misidentified the maker of Butterfinger.

Who to Trust If You Can’t Trust the CDC

2025-09-17T18:16:45-04:00

Americans across the political spectrum are aligned on at least one belief, albeit for different reasons: The CDC is a mess. In a poll conducted this summer by The Washington Post and KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed low confidence that the agency could be trusted to make independent decisions based on scientific fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the head of Health and Human Services, has described the CDC as dysfunctional and politicized; according to the former CDC director Susan Monarez, he has also disparaged the agency’s workers as child murderers. Meanwhile, public-health experts—a group that has historically worked in tandem with the CDC—now question the agency’s credibility with Kennedy in charge. “You can’t trust anything that comes out of the CDC,” Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told me.

Today, Monarez testified before a Senate committee that Kennedy fired her after less than a month in her role because she refused to accept his vaccine policy. According to Monarez, Kennedy demanded “blanket approval” of all recommendations made by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy dismantled in June and has since remade in his own anti-vaccine image. Over the next two days, the group is scheduled to discuss vaccines for COVID, hepatitis B, and other diseases. According to a Washington Post report, at the meeting, Trump-administration officials also plan to use a database of unverified vaccine-injury reports to link COVID shots to the deaths of 25 children.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Kennedy has previously claimed that he fired Monarez because she told him she was not trustworthy. And in response to the Post report, Kennedy’s spokesperson said, “Any recommendations on updated COVID-19 vaccines will be based on gold standard science and deliberated transparently at ACIP.”

If the CDC is no longer the reliable source of health guidance it once was, Americans must find reliable information elsewhere. (Even Americans who don’t regularly seek out the agency’s advice generally receive it through their doctors and local officials.) Physicians, researchers, and public-health experts I spoke with told me that academic and public-health institutions can be trustworthy sources but also that no existing institution in the United States is equipped to replace the CDC. Kennedy has long encouraged Americans to do their own research on health matters and especially on vaccines; now we have no choice but to follow his advice.

Some public-health experts I spoke with emphasized that the CDC can no longer be trusted specifically on vaccination. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me that the agency’s vaccine-credibility problems lie with ACIP. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and the Biden administration’s COVID czar, agreed. “Whatever ACIP recommends, it is not coming from expertise and an understanding of the scientific process,” he told me.

[Read: What it’s like to work inside a broken CDC]

To some extent, Americans don’t have much of a choice about whether to follow the CDC’s guidance. It determines, for instance, what vaccines are administered through a federal program called Vaccines for Children that offers free shots to more than half of American kids. Some state governments have updated their policies in response to the vaccine chaos the federal government has inflicted in recent weeks, but many states still follow CDC recommendations to shape school vaccine requirements and regulations on insurance coverage.

When Americans do need vaccine advice, Jha said, most turn to their health-care providers, who themselves generally go to the CDC for information. Physicians “used to have a single place to look, and now we don’t,” Offit said. All of the experts I spoke with agreed that, as an alternative, professional medical organizations are among the most trustworthy sources for vaccine information right now. For many years, these groups have released guidance on vaccination, largely intended for health-care providers, based on the latest science. “The difference today is that they just don’t align with the federal government,” Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the public-health newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told me. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for instance, recently published their own guidelines contradicting the CDC’s stance on vaccination for children and during pregnancy, respectively.

Medical organizations form their recommendations based on their review of the scientific evidence, not the CDC’s, Jennifer Kates, a public-health expert at KFF, told me. According to other experts I spoke with, additional trustworthy sources include the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. These groups can be trusted because they review updated scientific evidence every year, Jetelina said. Their leaders are also, crucially, not appointed by politicians.

[Read: A massive vaccine experiment]

Science organizations are also working to interpret the latest evidence for providers and policy makers. Multiple experts applauded Osterholm’s Vaccine Integrity Project, which describes itself as “dedicated to safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S. so that it remains grounded in the best available science.” Caitlin Rivers, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recommends Immunize.org, a nonprofit that gears similar advice toward health-care providers. The Pandemic Center at Brown University publishes a weekly tracking report on infectious diseases. During the recent measles outbreak centered in Texas, the Pandemic Center’s data contradicted Kennedy’s assertions that the crisis was subsiding, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center, told me.

All of these sources provide good information, but they also offer slightly different takes on the available research and data. In the past, the CDC helped unify varying scientific interpretations, incorporating them into consensus guidance. “You really can’t replicate that, not in any academic institution, not any state health department, not in any professional society,” Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who is now the president and CEO of the global-health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, told me. Without sound input from the agency, the vaccine-information landscape is fragmented—which, Jetelina told me, will likely accelerate the atomization of American vaccine policies, behaviors, and beliefs. Already, state-level vaccine recommendations are diverging along political lines. After the CDC changed its recommendations to restrict eligibility for annual COVID shots, more than a dozen blue states began changing their vaccine policies to expand access. Meanwhile, Florida and Idaho have attempted to cancel schools’ vaccine mandates. In Louisiana, the health department has forbidden its employees from promoting “mass vaccination.”

The divided vaccine-information landscape will make it even harder for doctors and everyone else to sort fact from fiction. Some of the advice physicians receive from medical societies is already at odds with what the CDC recommends. “It’s going to create real conflict for them about what they should do,” Jha said. Ultimately, politics may determine whom providers end up trusting, Offit said. Jetelina worries that the mixed messages, combined with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine signaling, will decrease confidence in vaccines. An obstetrician I interviewed recently told me that she has already observed a rise in vaccine hesitancy among her pregnant patients since the CDC stopped recommending COVID vaccines for them.

[Read: Moms are losing options to protect newborns from COVID]

The experts I spoke with agreed that as long as Kennedy oversees the CDC, its trustworthiness is at stake. The continued gutting of its staff—and their replacement with non-experts—will further weaken its ability to vet and publish science-based guidance. Americans have long valued medical autonomy. But we’re now getting a sense of what happens when it’s all we have.

Moms Are Losing Options to Protect Newborns From COVID

2025-09-16T13:46:12-04:00

At 38 weeks pregnant with her second child, Hannah Robb has no time to waste on red tape. Yet she’s lost hours in her struggle to figure out whether and when she can get a COVID booster. Her doctor said she could—and should, she told me. According to her doctor, she wouldn’t need a prescription; according to her local New York City Walgreens, she would. When Robb finally arrived at her appointment at the pharmacy, prescription in hand, she wasn’t sure whether the shot, which can cost $250 out of pocket, would be covered by insurance; so far, no one has billed her, so she assumes it was. “It’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong until you show up to the pharmacy and see what they’ll do,” Robb told me.

Similar scenes are playing out at drugstores across the country. The Trump administration’s recent swerves in COVID-vaccine policy have left many Americans—including pharmacists and physicians—confused about where the shot will be available, who is eligible to receive it, and who will be covered by insurance. Pregnancy raises the stakes of that confusion: Pregnant women face an elevated risk of becoming severely ill from COVID, as do newborns, who cannot be immunized against the coronavirus before they’re six months old. The federal government’s guidance on pregnancy and COVID vaccines is now so tangled that Jennifer Lincoln, a board-certified ob-gyn in Oregon, told me that people have asked her whether they should hide the fact that they’re pregnant to more easily receive a shot.

Previously, the COVID-vaccine approval process went something like this: The FDA reviewed the safety and efficacy of updated versions of the shots, then approved them for certain groups of people. Next, the CDC translated the FDA’s guidance into public-health recommendations, on which individual states based their own immunization policies. Although states ultimately determine who is eligible and whether a prescription is necessary, the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover any vaccine the agency recommends. Annual COVID shots have, until now, been recommended by the CDC for all adults, including pregnant women, and have thus been covered by insurance.

The process this year has taken a wildly different trajectory. In May, the FDA announced that it would narrow eligibility for annual COVID vaccines to only adults over 65 and people with certain high-risk conditions, including pregnancy. Days later, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the CDC would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children or healthy pregnant women, claiming, inaccurately, that no evidence supports the use of the booster in children. The CDC clarified that healthy children could get the vaccine after consulting with their doctor, and last month, the FDA approved three updated COVID vaccines that healthy children can receive (again, after a medical consult). But neither agency has offered any new guidance about pregnancy and COVID vaccination since then. (The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees both the CDC and the FDA, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The chaos has left pharmacies in a bind. At the beginning of this year, roughly half of states based their policies on the CDC’s recommendations, Brigid Groves, the American Pharmacists Association’s vice president of professional affairs, told me. (Other states, she said, incorporate the guidance of the FDA, the state health department, and other groups that issue vaccine recommendations.) According to Groves, after the CDC changed its recommendations, pharmacists in those states lost the authority to vaccinate pregnant people. Even in states whose policy deviates from the CDC, each pharmacy can set its own boundaries on who can be vaccinated, and individual pharmacists may fear liability for vaccinating pregnant customers, Groves said. Last month, CVS stopped offering COVID vaccines entirely in three states. A CVS spokesperson told me that COVID vaccination has resumed in the three states where it was paused, and that people must attest to their eligibility when scheduling an appointment.

[Read: A massive vaccine experiment]

Doctors are unhappy with the confusion. Last month, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) reaffirmed its stance that women should get a COVID vaccine or booster while pregnant, trying to get pregnant, postpartum, or lactating. “To act like they’re not high-risk just by virtue of being pregnant shows no actual understanding of data and science,” Lincoln said. Pediatricians are concerned too. The COVID vaccine “protects both the mom and the baby” because the mother’s antibodies are passed to the fetus, says James Campbell, a pediatrics professor at the University of Maryland who is also the vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases. According to the CDC, newborns have a higher COVID-related hospitalization rate than that of any other age group besides people 75 and older. “The younger the child, the more likely that they’re going to be hospitalized,” Campbell told me.

A long-awaited meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—the group that informs the CDC’s recommendations, which Kennedy recently repopulated with several members who are hostile to vaccination—may clarify later this week where pregnant women stand. But in the meantime, states in favor of offering the vaccines are taking matters into their own hands. In recent weeks, 16 states have moved to expand access to COVID vaccines, some by granting state health departments the authority to set vaccine policies or allowing pharmacists to defer to medical organizations such as ACOG rather than the CDC. Massachusetts became the first state to require insurers to pay for all vaccines recommended by the state health department, regardless of CDC guidance. Several West Coast states have allied to develop joint vaccine recommendations; some states in New England appear to be doing the same. Jennifer Kates, a public-health expert at KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, told me she expects more blue states to follow suit.

Policy is far from the only factor that will determine whether Americans—pregnant or otherwise—receive their COVID shots this fall. COVID vaccines have never been particularly popular among pregnant women; since 2023, uptake has hovered below 15 percent. People tend to be more anxious about what they put into their body during pregnancy, especially vaccines, Lincoln said. One 2024 study found that mothers worried that getting a COVID shot while pregnant would endanger their baby; a 2023 KFF poll found that a quarter of American adults thought COVID vaccines had “definitely or probably” been proved to cause infertility. Today, copious evidence shows that vaccination protects both mother and child. But fears about the safety of getting the shot during pregnancy have been stoked by politicians and public figures airing anti-vaccine talking points on the national stage. “I hear an increase in vaccine hesitancy in my clinic every week,” Anne Waldrop, an ob-gyn and a clinical professor focusing on maternal fetal medicine at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, told me. Meanwhile, Kennedy has reportedly asked health officials to compile data linking COVID vaccines to poor pregnancy outcomes—a measure that seems destined to provoke even greater anxiety. (HHS responded to the report by restating its commitment to transparency, and the White House reiterated its support for Kennedy’s leadership.)

[Read: Why RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign is working]

When health care becomes complicated, the standard response is to ask your doctor for advice. Yet even some providers aren’t offering straight answers. Francesca Cohen, who is 37 weeks pregnant, told me that her obstetrician never recommended that she get a COVID booster. “I live in Austin, Texas. I assume they have a mix of perspectives in their patient base,” she said. When Cohen brought up the vaccine, her provider shared ACOG’s guidance and said that the choice was up to her. Cohen is still deciding.

*Illustration sources: How Wee Choon / Getty; Grace Cary / Getty; Sergey Ryumin / Getty (edited)

MAHA Is Complicating One of the Hardest Parts of Parenting

2025-09-14T08:00:00-04:00

For parents, especially of young children, the question “What’s for dinner?” has high stakes. The answer can determine whether you’ll get to bed early or spend the night struggling to feed a shrieking toddler. It can stoke anxiety about budgeting and dread for the next appointment with the pediatrician.

Parents are worried not just about getting food on the table, but whether that food is good for their kids. That’s partly why Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign resonates with so many people: If the American food supply can be purged of its unhealthiest elements, surely it will be easier for parents to feel good about feeding their children. But instead, MAHA may be piling on the stress.

Kennedy and other MAHA figures consider a long list of foods unhealthy, and only some of their reasoning is supported by science. They condemn seed oils, which Kennedy believes are toxic but are widely shown to be safe. They also decry ultra-processed foods, which health researchers have serious concerns about. The MAHA movement has raised concerns about other ingredients with unknown health effects: synthetic additives, pesticides, and chemicals in the environment.

Even before MAHA, many parents faced enormous pressure to feed their kids in a healthy way. Online parenting communities are rife with guidance: avoid added sugars, buy organic, limit processed foods, and so on. MAHA’s guidance overlaps with many of these principles, but it carries more weight because it comes from the health secretary himself. “What MAHA did was turn that mom-powered movement into a message that could not be ignored,” Michelle Magno, a Texas-based mother of three, told me.

Those who choose to take that message seriously should brace for extra work. Seeking out MAHA-aligned foods is a scavenger hunt that parents have little time to play. When shopping, Summer Scolaro, a Texas-based mom of two toddlers, aims to buy organic produce, minimally processed foods, and foods with low sugar, no seed oils, and no artificial dyes or flavors. Her purchases are informed by the “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen,” lists that have long been popular on social media and that rank foods that are most and least contaminated with pesticides, respectively. (According to these lists—which are published by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that has drawn criticism from scientists—grapes and strawberries are dirtier than pineapples and avocados.) “It takes multiple places to get what I want,” Scolaro told me. Zen Honeycutt, the North Carolina–based founder of Moms Across America, a nonprofit that advocates for removing GMOs and pesticides from the food system, told me that buying only organic foods simplifies her shopping because the label encompasses many of MAHA’s criteria. But organic foods are not necessarily seed-oil-free, and only certain brands tick both boxes.

Organic and MAHA-coded foods, as I’ve written previously, can be more expensive. Plus, because organic products aren’t made with artificial preservatives or irradiated (to kill microbes and insects), they tend to spoil faster, which can mean more frequent trips to the grocery store or more money wasted on food that goes bad. Many of the MAHA moms I spoke with told me that they shop at a mix of big-box stores and specialty groceries to balance their health standards with their budgets; some said they eschewed vacations and new clothes to save money for healthy food. “It’s not just the cooking—it’s the planning, the shopping, the prepping, and then hoping they’ll actually eat what’s on the plate. Some days it feels like a full-time job in itself,” Scolaro, who is a Pilates instructor and the founder of a lifestyle brand, told me.

[Read: The MAHA trend in groceries will backfire]

Feeding infants according to MAHA principles gives parents an even narrower road to walk. In recent years, as American moms have been enthusiastically encouraged to breastfeed, many experts have emphasized that making sure infants are fed, period, should be parents’ highest priority. MAHA hems and haws over this point. The Trump administration’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” report, released this week, says that the health and agriculture departments will work to increase breastfeeding rates (and the supply of milk from human donors), but offers few specifics. Pediatricians widely recommend exclusively breastfeeding for the first six months of an infant’s life, but many parents can’t, for a range of medical, economic, and personal reasons—not least that feeding and pumping are incredibly time-consuming. Baby formula is the recommended alternative, but it relies on seed oils to mimic the fatty acids in breast milk. (Earlier this year, the Trump administration launched Operation Stork Speed to scrutinize infant formula, but seed-oil-free formula alternatives are hard to come by.) Before he became health secretary, Kennedy raised the alarm about trace amounts of heavy metals that are found in some American baby formulas; after his nomination, as part of Operation Stork Speed, he directed the FDA to increase testing. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

American moms have long taken on the responsibilities of primary caregiver, health-care administrator, household manager, and cook on top of their paid work. MAHA strains them further by creating more labor, more costs, and more questions about what is actually healthy for kids. “When parents are stressed and angry and irritable, the kids get stressed. It can affect their appetite and their eating behavior, and then that makes the parent even more stressed,” Eugene Beresin, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, told me. Stressed parents are also more likely to feed their kids fast food, and their kids are more likely to be picky eaters, he said. In order for families as a whole to be healthy, “you really have to support the mothers,” Kathryn Schubert, the CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research, an advocacy nonprofit, told me.

So far, though, the federal government has offered little to help parents fulfill MAHA ideals. The new report includes a plan to send “MAHA boxes” full of fresh food to poor American families, but it depends on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, from which the Trump administration has slashed funding; in fact, one in five children is expected to lose food assistance because of the cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. Nor do any of MAHA’s plans meaningfully address systemic factors, such as poverty and historical discrimination, that can prevent children from accessing healthy food in the first place. Nearly 14 percent of households across the country experienced food insecurity in 2023. In these homes, the conflict between budgeting and feeding kids well creates huge psychological stress for parents, which can lead to anxiety and depression, fueling the vicious cycle of stress and unhealthy eating, Beresin said.

Certainly, the new strategy report gestures toward making fresh produce cheaper and more accessible. Its proposals to support grocery stores in stocking more produce, introduce markets to food deserts, serve healthy meals to students and veterans, and limit junk-food ads targeted at children all sound promising, but the report offers few specifics on implementation. To date, MAHA’s most significant policy changes include banning the food dye red 3 and getting companies to voluntarily phase out synthetic dyes—changes that some MAHA moms say don’t go far enough to support children’s health.

[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]

I’ve criticized many of Kennedy’s MAHA initiatives, including his promotion of raw milk and beef tallow, his misplaced focus on food additives, and his baseless campaign against vaccines. But I felt empathy for the MAHA moms I spoke with. We want the same thing: to keep our kids nourished and safe. I, too, try to cook at home when I can; I fret about feeding junk to my toddler. Near the end of our conversation about the organic, home-cooked meals she made for her kids when they were younger, Lisa Sulsenti, a New Jersey–based chiropractor who co-hosts a podcast called MAHA Moms, asked me: “I think we put a lot of stress on ourselves to be the perfect mom. Do you think that?” I couldn’t help but agree.

The MAHA Trend in Groceries Will Backfire

2025-08-23T08:00:00-04:00

Both batches of french fries that my family had for dinner were from the frozen-food aisle. They appeared nearly identical when cooked, one batch faintly darker than the other. And we all noticed: Those bronzed fries were exceptionally tasty. My toddler devoured a small mountain of them. They left a meatiness on my tongue, as if I’d eaten them alongside a steak. After my husband unblinded the taste test, I realized that, in a way, I had. The paler fries had been cooked in avocado oil, and their more delicious counterparts in beef tallow. Damn, I thought. The MAHA fries are amazing!

They weren’t, of course, actually produced by the Make America Healthy Again campaign; both bags were from Jesse and Ben’s, a frozen-french-fry brand whose tallow fries predate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as secretary of Health and Human Services. Jesse and Ben’s, like many food companies, had already released so-called clean-label products, which cater to long-standing wellness trends such as avoiding artificial ingredients and added sugar—trends that overlap considerably with the MAHA approach to food.

Now companies are capitalizing on some of Kennedy’s favored dietary principles—including his assertion, which is refuted by most nutrition experts, that beef tallow is a healthy substitute for seed oils—by further overhauling the branding and recipes of their products. Unfortunately, MAHA-washing groceries in this way won’t make Americans any healthier. It might even change our diets for the worse.

Many product labels and ad campaigns decry ingredients on Kennedy’s hit list—besides seed oils, it also includes high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food dyes and flavors—and showcase those he deems healthy. This summer, Sam’s Club started selling beef-tallow-fried chicken strips. A brand of seed-oil-free instant ramen launched in August and is available at Kroger. This spring, PepsiCo relaunched its “Simply” line, which sells versions of snacks such as Cheetos and Doritos that are made without artificial flavorings and dyes; it later announced plans to extend the line with new products. A company spokesperson told me in an email that Lays and Tostitos will have no artificial colors or flavors by the end of the year. PepsiCo is investing in products without artificial dyes and flavorings “to make it easier for everyone to find snacks and drinks they feel good about,” the spokesperson told me. “The Make America Healthy Again movement has sparked important dialogue, and we share the belief that the food system should evolve—responsibly, at scale, and grounded in science and consumer trust.” Meanwhile, Coca-Cola announced that it would sweeten its sodas with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. President Donald Trump, who said he had previously discussed the change with the company, thanked its leaders; Kennedy subsequently thanked Trump.

Of course, fried chicken, instant ramen, soda, and chips share a certain inherent junkiness. Even without their shocking-orange hue, Cheetos are mostly empty vectors for salt and fat. A 12-ounce bottle of Mexican Coke still contains more than three-quarters of the added sugar that the FDA says an adult should limit themselves to in a day. MAHA-washing therefore “misses the bigger picture of the food landscape,” which is characterized by heavily processed food, fast food, and sugary drinks, Marie Bragg, a population-health professor at New York University, told me.

These reformulations may have some benefits; as my colleague Nick Florko has written, artificial food dyes in particular are both unnecessary and probably not great for health. But at best, the changes championed by the MAHA movement will likely yield marginal health improvements, Alyssa J. Moran, a director at the University of Pennsylvania’s food-policy laboratory, told me. Research has long shown that the most harmful elements of junk food are high levels of salt, saturated fat, and sugar, combined with minimal fiber and nutrients—not fructose, seed oils, or trace amounts of additives. Despite widespread concern resulting from studies linking high-fructose corn syrup to obesity in the 2000s, the evidence that it is less healthy than other forms of sugar is weak. Seed oils have repeatedly been shown to be not only safe to consume, but healthier than animal-based fats such as butter and beef tallow, which are rich in saturated fat and are linked to higher risk of heart disease. As I read the nutrition labels of my frozen fries, my heart spasmed: The beef-tallow version contains seven times more saturated fat than the avocado-oil kind.

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

Unfortunately, Americans have proved themselves to be suckers for packaging that conveys a food’s healthiness, Bragg said. Shoppers are willing to pay more for food labeled “all natural” and prefer produce marked as “pesticide-free.” One study that Moran co-authored found that parents are more likely to give their kids sugary drinks labeled with images of fresh fruit than similar products without those images. People tend to falsely believe that Oreos labeled “organic” have fewer calories than their conventional counterparts, and that the cookies can be eaten more frequently, even if they are pointed to labels showing that both options are nutritionally identical. They are also more likely to forgo exercise if they choose an organic dessert over a conventional one. All of this bodes poorly for American shoppers, who seem likely to eat more of the MAHA-washed junk foods that will still contain just as much salt, saturated fat, and sugar.

These issues do not concern food companies, whose primary mission is, of course, to sell food. Jesse Konig, one of Jesse and Ben’s co-founders, told me that the company was pursuing taste, not health, when it started selling tallow fries, in 2024. “We’re restaurant guys, not doctors,” he said. The labels on my packages of Jesse and Ben’s fries, however, noted that the company doesn’t use conventional seed oils, because they “leave you feeling icky and inflamed,” referencing a common health claim made by seed-oil critics.

Other companies are more outspoken about changing their products for the purpose of health. Mike’s Mighty Good describes its seed-oil-free ramen as “wholesome,” and similar instant-ramen products as “low-quality junk food.” Real Good Foods launched its tallow-fried chicken because customers kept asking for a “seed-oil-free solution,” Rikki Ingram, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me. Compared with conventional products, she said, the brand’s tallow-fried chicken offers health advantages unrelated to its lack of seed oils: more protein, fewer carbohydrates, and no highly processed flour.

[Read: America is done pretending about meat]

Changes such as these make good business sense. A company that agrees to, say, phase out food dyes from soft drinks improves its public image. It also courts a relatively affluent audience, says Trey Malone, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. MAHA-washed foods are likely to be more expensive, in part because reformulating products is costly; companies aren’t trying to market those goods to people already struggling to afford conventional food. Mike’s Mighty Good seed-oil-free instant ramen costs more than $3 a cup on its website; its conventional counterparts can be 99 cents or less apiece. At Walmart, a bag of Simply Lays costs nearly three times as much as regular Lays. The rise of MAHA has been good for Jesse and Ben’s business, Konig told me. Both the avocado-oil fries—which tick MAHA’s seed-oil-free criterion—and the beef-tallow version have been hits with customers, but recent public discussion about beef tallow especially has “generated a lot of curiosity,” he said.

To Kennedy’s credit, he’s never called french fries a health food. MAHA’s vision of an ideal food landscape is one where people eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and minimally processed food (in addition to beef tallow and raw milk). Kennedy has long condemned processed foods and the companies that make them for poisoning Americans. Earlier this month, he lauded states for announcing plans to restrict SNAP recipients from using the benefits to buy candy and soda. Yet so far, his dealings with food companies themselves have been fundamentally friendly: asking them to voluntarily phase out food dyes, congratulating Coca-Cola for its commitment to sugar as a sweetener.

If Kennedy shies away from using the government’s real power, he could blow a genuine opportunity to overhaul America’s food landscape. Food companies have enormous power over what we eat and could effectively nudge Americans toward healthier habits, Bragg said. In the mid-aughts, for example, companies such as Campbell’s, Heinz, and Kraft committed to reducing salt levels in foods, including in breads, cold cuts, and cheese. It worked: From 2009 to 2018, the amount of salt in packaged food decreased by 8.5 percent. This outcome was partly driven by voluntary goals set by the National Sugar and Salt Reduction Initiative, a nongovernmental organization. The companies, however, also faced threats of regulation from the federal government if they did not comply. In 2016, the FDA proposed its own salt-reduction guidelines, further pressuring the food industry. “There has to be a threat of mandatory policy,” Moran said. “Otherwise, we’re just going to continue to see them making these changes around the margins that are very unlikely to meaningfully impact health.”

[Read: A ‘MAHA box’ might be coming to your doorstep]

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS hasn’t instituted or threatened any binding regulations on food companies; indeed, it seems strongly opposed to doing so. A leaked draft of the second MAHA report, a document outlining HHS’s policy strategy that has yet to be finalized, explicitly details plans to deregulate food and agriculture. “The Trump administration has initiated a robust food policy agenda to Make America Healthy Again, from phasing out artificial food dyes to updating Dietary Guidelines for Americans to reforming the ‘Generally Recognized as Safe’ Standard,” the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email. (Under Kennedy, the FDA has so far revoked the authorization of one dye, Red 3. Formal changes to GRAS have not yet been announced.) “Every stakeholder in this movement—from parents to food companies to physicians to farmers to restaurants—has a role to play to transform how Americans view and make decisions about our health and nutrition.”

The superficial changes that companies have made to align with MAHA’s goals offer a glimpse of what could change if Kennedy were willing to enforce his more science-backed policy proposals. But as things stand, HHS is attempting to clean up America’s food supply with a spray bottle. What it really needs is a power washer.

Americans Are All In on Cow-Based Wellness

2025-08-11T12:33:37-04:00

A not-insignificant number of TikToks aim to convince the viewer that beef-tallow moisturizer will not make your face smell like cow. The beauty influencers who tend to appear in these videos—usually clear-skinned women rubbing tallow into their face as they detail their previous dermatological woes—describe the scent as “buttery” or “earthy” or grass-like. Many of them come to the same conclusion: Okay, even if the tallow does smell a little bit, the smooth skin it leaves behind is well worth it.

Beef tallow (as both a moisturizer and an alternative to seed oils) is one of many cow-based products that have crowded the wellness market in the past five or so years. Beef-bone broth is a grocery-store staple. Demand for raw milk has grown, despite numerous cases of illness and warnings from public-health officials that drinking it can be fatal. In certain circles, raw cow organs—heart, liver, kidney—are prized superfoods. Target and Walmart sell supplements containing bovine collagen (a protein found in cowhide and bone) and colostrum (the rich liquid that mammals produce for their newborn offspring); they promise healthier skin, a happier gut, and stronger immunity, and come in flavors such as watermelon lime, lemon sorbet, and “valiant grape.” You can buy cow-placenta pills for postpartum healing, or powdered bull testicle for testosterone support. The slightest interaction with clean-beauty Instagram can fill your feed with ads for beef-tallow lip balms, cleansing creams, sunscreen, and deodorants. (One brand even offers creamsicle-flavored beef-tallow personal lubricant, which is currently out of stock online.) Influencers praise tallow for clearing their acne and eczema—and offer discount codes so you can experience the same.

Even the government’s recent public-health messaging has veered toward the bovine. During his tenure as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed cooking in beef tallow (which he says is healthier than seed oils) and drinking raw milk (one of many items that he claims are suppressed by the FDA). Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, also supports raw milk; she has suggested that Americans can decide whether a given bottle is safe to drink by looking the dairy farmer in the eye and petting his cow. Means and Kennedy have largely avoided engaging with the many public-health experts who reject their views. But in May, after months of such critiques, Kennedy took shots of raw milk at the White House to celebrate the release of the “Make America Healthy Again” report.

Woo-woo, it seems, is becoming moo-moo. America has entered its cowmaxxing era.

Like most wellness offerings, cow products are marketed with vague health claims that are virtually impossible to confirm or deny, such as “deeply nourishes and supports the skin barrier,” “activate cellular health,” and “supports memory.” One of the many promises of the Ancestral Supplements Starter Pack of organ-based capsules is simply “vitality.” (The company also includes a disclaimer that the FDA has not reviewed said vitality benefits.) Advocates of these goods tend to be more specific in their praise. Raw-milk enthusiasts claim that unpasteurized milk contains bioactive chemicals that improve human health. In one video, a woman drinks raw milk that’s been in the fridge for more than a month; she claims it is safer to consume than store-bought pizza or salad and that it reduces rates of eczema, fevers, and respiratory infections. One smooth-skinned influencer, who says she hasn’t washed her face in two years, claims that beef tallow is “bioidentical” to the sebum produced by human skin. (It’s not, because it’s from cows.)

[Read: The real appeal of raw milk]

Some of these products are more likely to provide benefits than others. Bone broth is indeed rich in collagen (which, when produced by the human body, strengthens hair and skin). Whey powder, made from leftover cheese water, does contain protein. But very few studies support the idea that eating more collagen strengthens hair and skin. Whey protein can help build lean muscle, but the body can only absorb so much at a time. Some dermatologists say tallow can strengthen and hydrate the skin; others say it clogs pores and should be avoided. Other products can be downright dangerous: Just this week, Florida officials announced that 21 people fell sick after consuming contaminated raw milk.

At least part of the appeal of cowmaxxing is the cows themselves: The products evoke the pastoral ideal of a cow grazing freely in the plains, milked lovingly by human hands. It’s an image that’s been embedded in American culture for centuries. Consider how Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was no stranger to the harsh reality of farm life, described cow-raising in Little Town on the Prairie: “Warm and sweet, the scent of new milk came up from the streams hissing into the rising foam, and it mixed with the scents of springtime.” It’s enough to persuade a microbiologist to drink raw milk.

In 21st-century America, cows still summon images of fields and clover and wide blue sky, enough to trigger the human tendency to believe that what’s natural is “fundamentally good,” Courtney Lappas, a biology professor at Lebanon Valley College, told me. Her research has shown that some Americans prefer natural over man-made products even when the former is described as objectively worse—a phenomenon her colleague Brian Meier has called the “naturalness bias.” This tendency, which is prevalent across cultures, likely leads people to assume that unprocessed cow-based products are safe and healthy, she said. Tallow, some skin-care enthusiasts claim, is a healthier, safer alternative to conventional moisturizers, which supposedly contain toxic chemicals. The branding of such products, too, leans into the notion that natural is best: Fat Cow Skincare markets its tallow cosmetics as “pure skincare, powered by nature”; Heart and Soil sells capsules of “nature’s superfood” (that is, organ meats). Other brands invoke nature through the prehistoric, with names such as Primal Harvest, Primal Kitchen, Primal FX, Primal Being, and Primal Queen. Ancestral Supplements’ ad copy reads: “Putting Back In What the Modern World Left Out.”

[Read: How organ meat got into smoothies]

America’s current health landscape is the perfect setting for cowmaxxing to thrive. The naturalness bias is deeply ingrained in Kennedy’s MAHA campaign, which aims to improve public health by returning to a more natural lifestyle. In Kennedy’s view, beef tallow is superior to seed oil because it’s less processed (some people even render it at home). The carnivore and tradwife movements embody a similar message, promoting the consumption of raw cow organs and making butter from scratch. You may not know what’s in store-bought products, the thinking goes, but you do know what’s in tallow: pure, unadulterated cow fat.

And yet most modern cows live in a decidedly unnatural environment. The majority of U.S. cattle are fed genetically modified crops, and some genetically modified cows are allowed to be sold as food. Many cow-based wellness products bear the label “grass-fed,” which suggests cows that were raised on pastures rather than feedlots. But the label is not strictly enforced, and it doesn’t necessarily prohibit farmers from giving cows antibiotics or hormones. There’s no guarantee that a cow whose colostrum is harvested to be sold by a tradwife on Instagram had a happy, bucolic existence. Not to mention that colostrum, whey, and placenta do not come out of the cow in the form of powders or pills.

The spread of science misinformation, along with legitimate concerns about the state of public health in the United States, has left many Americans understandably confused about whether conventional science and Western medicine can be trusted in 2025. Getting to the bottom of, say, the seed-oil controversy requires engaging with thorny scientific debates that reference inscrutable research papers; embracing the natural and ancestral by opting for tallow is an attractively simple-seeming alternative. “It brings with it a sense of purity or wholesomeness that is desirable right now,” Marianne Clark, a sociologist at Acadia University who studies wellness trends, told me. In this sense, cowmaxxing is not so much a health endeavor as it is a spiritual one, its promise downright biblical: Cowliness is next to godliness.

The Dangerous Logic of CTE Self-Diagnosis

2025-07-29T18:41:07-04:00

Police are still investigating what exactly prompted a gunman to kill four people in a Manhattan office building yesterday evening, but perhaps the clearest aspect of his motive is the condition that he evokes in a note found on his body: chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The 27-year-old gunman, Shane Tamura, was a former high-school football player. He targeted the Midtown skyscraper that houses the National Football League, though none of the four people he shot and killed before ending his own life was an NFL employee. (According to a statement from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, one league employee was “seriously injured” and in stable condition at a hospital.) In his note, Tamura reportedly speculated that CTE might have been a cause of his mental illness, but it’s still too early for medical examiners to offer a diagnosis. (And even if an autopsy were to show anomalies in his brain, it could never reveal what precisely drove him to homicide.) Like at least one NFL player who died by suicide, Tamura asked that his brain be studied after he died.

Concerns about CTE and football have been mounting for more than two decades. In 2013, the NFL settled a lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 former players who claimed that the league had concealed from them the risks of brain injury, including CTE. CTE is both rare and difficult to diagnose, so scientists haven’t definitively established its symptoms. They’re thought to include memory loss, personality changes, suicidality, and loss of motor control—all of which can be both devastating and caused by any number of disorders. Research overwhelmingly validates the link between the condition and professional football careers.

But the consequences of playing high-school football are not well studied—a major oversight, given that most people who play do not end up in the NFL, Eleanna Varangis, a University of Michigan professor who studies brain injury, told me. “The majority of the experience is at the youth level, and we still don’t know a lot about how those people look later in life,” she said.

Because CTE can be diagnosed only after death, whether Tamura had it is not yet known. Clearly, based on his note, something appears to have led him to suspect that he did. But two experts I spoke with about the condition—both of whom are advocates for better research and care in understanding CTE—told me that they had little reason to suspect that a person like Tamura would in fact have had the condition just because he played high-school football. (So far, a high-school teammate and a coach have told NBC News that Tamura was a talented player, but no further details have emerged about his time in the sport.) Jesse Mez, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and a co-director of clinical research at its CTE Center, has studied the risks of CTE across football careers ranging from one year up to 30—high schoolers to professional players. He found that the longer people play, the greater their risk of developing CTE. After five and a half years of playing, the relationship starts to be linear. But in careers shorter than that, “the likelihood of getting the disease is quite low,” Mez told me.

CTE is thought to be caused by repetitive blows to the head, whether or not they lead to concussions. But scientists have not been able to pin down the precise number of impacts (or concussions) that cause someone to tip over the threshold into CTE, and even if they could, the length of a player’s career is an imperfect proxy for how many times they hit their head, Kristen Dams-O’Connor, the director of Mount Sinai’s Brain Injury Research Center, told me. There is variability, too, in susceptibility: Some people might develop CTE after fewer blows to the head. Genetics may also play a role. Although research shows the chances that a high schooler would develop CTE are extraordinarily small, “it’s hard to say what small is,” Mez said.

[Read: Tua Tagovailoa’s impossible choice]

The ambiguities around diagnosing CTE are made only worse by the fact that it cannot be confirmed before death. “I think it would be a huge service to be able to diagnose it in life, even without absolute certainty,” Mez said. Some signs indicate that all of that fear and confusion has led to excessive self-diagnosis. CTE appears to be “uncommon” in professional football if you take all players into account, Dams-O’Connor told me. And yet, in a 2024 study of former NFL players, more than one-third believed they had CTE. To assume that CTE is to blame for, say, depression, just because a person played football, is “really harmful logic,” Dams-O’Connor said: It suggests that nothing can be done, that a person is doomed to a life of irreversible decline from a disease with no direct treatments. Whether or not Tamura had CTE, it’s chilling to think that his conjecture that it contributed to his mental illness may have driven him to violence.

Plenty of other factors, football-related or not, may have also caused or exacerbated Tamura’s mental illness, Mez said. Some research suggests that high-school football players may have greater risk for comorbidities that affect brain health, such as cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease. A 2018 study found that people who start playing football before age 12 are at risk of experiencing cognitive, behavioral, and mood-related problems earlier in life than those who start playing when they’re older. And studies have shown that brain injuries (from football or any other cause) are associated with mental-health issues, including a higher risk of suicide, homicide, and criminal tendencies. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a press briefing last night that the gunman had a “documented mental-health history,” and multiple outlets have reported that he was placed on psychiatric hold in both 2022 and 2024.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said in a statement today that it would examine Tamura’s brain during an autopsy—just as he wished. Perhaps the findings will add to the messy, ongoing science of CTE. Or perhaps they will prove a lesson in what happens when players are too quick to suspect it.

American Summers Are Starting to Feel Like Winter

2025-07-26T07:30:00-04:00

Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, the author Arthur Miller described urbanites’ Depression-era coping mechanisms: People caught the breeze on open-air trolleys, climbed onto the back of ice trucks, and flocked to the beach. In the evenings, they slept in parks or dragged their mattresses onto fire escapes.

But since air conditioning went mainstream, in the 1960s, the easiest way to beat the heat has been by staying indoors—at home, the office, the mall—where cool air is a constant and blinds are often drawn to prevent homes from overheating (and electric bills from skyrocketing). For this convenience, Americans sacrifice the benefits of sunshine and the opportunities for fun it creates. As climate change turns up the temperature, summers in America are coming down to a choice between enduring the heat and avoiding it—both of which might, in their own ways, be making people sick.

In cities across the country, summers are, on average, 2.6 degrees hotter than they were some 50 years ago. In Phoenix, where a 95-degree day is a relief, schedules are arranged around the darkness; Jeffrey Gibson, an accountant who works from home, takes his eight-month-old daughter out for walks before 6:30 a.m.; after that, it’s so hot that she flushes bright red if they venture outside. He spends the rest of his day indoors unless leaving is absolutely necessary. It’s like this from April to October. Gibson recently told his wife, “Man, I think I’m a little depressed.”

Josef A. Von Isser, a therapist in Tucson, Arizona, told me that feeling low in the summer comes up a lot with his clients. Some feel that the heat affects them directly; others struggle with its indirect effects, such as fewer opportunities to socialize and be somewhere other than home or the office. All of them, he suspects, might be experiencing seasonal affective disorder.

The DSM-5 categorizes SAD as a type of major depression with a seasonal pattern, with symptoms such as sadness, feelings of worthlessness, and low energy. Usually, it presents in the winter, though scientists don’t agree on why. Some suspect that it’s because a lack of sun exposure may contribute to decreased levels of serotonin, a hormone that regulates mood, as well as vitamin D, which helps stimulate serotonin activity. Another theory links low exposure to sunlight with unusually high levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep.

[Read: The surprising truth about seasonal depression]

Summer SAD is generally accepted as a variety of the disorder, but it’s much rarer than the winter form; one study from earlier this year puts its prevalence at about 0.6 percent. That makes summer SAD especially hard to study. “It’s clearly a different kind of illness,” Paul Desan, a psychiatry professor at Yale, told me, but “it’s not in their imagination.” Unlike the winter form, which comes with a tendency to overeat, oversleep, and withdraw from society, summer SAD involves reduced appetite, insomnia, and restlessness—all of which can also be effects of heat. The scientific literature shows that heat is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, aggression, and reduced cognitive abilities. Uncomfortably hot nights, longer periods of daylight, and extended stretches of time spent indoors all disrupt sleep, which can in turn fuel mood disorders, Amruta Nori-Sarma, an environmental-health professor at Harvard, told me. Extreme heat can also be an obstacle to exercising, spending time in nature, and socializing, all of which can make people feel good and also double as important coping mechanisms for emotional distress.

Taking comfort in air conditioning when it’s too hot out is a natural human response. But air-conditioned spaces can be stifling in their own way. Staying home where it’s cool also means socializing less; some offices and homes hardly let in a wink of sunlight all day. It’s plausible that in the summer, people experience SAD symptoms not only from excessive heat but also because they spend all of their time avoiding the sun, Kim Meidenbauer, a psychology professor at Washington State University, told me. “It does make sense to me that you’d have, potentially, an analogous pattern of effects” to winter SAD, she said. The link between indoor time and summer SAD hasn’t been studied, but plenty of Americans, even if they don’t meet the DSM-5 criteria, are noticing that summer is starting to feel a lot like winter. Reddit abounds with users who lament that being forced indoors by the heat gives them “summer depression.”

America’s summer quandary—suffer inside or out?—will become only more persistent as climate change intensifies. In the United States, heat waves have grown more frequent and intense every decade since the 1960s. During a single heat wave last month, people in 29 states were warned to stay inside to avoid dangerously high temperatures. All of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the impacts of escalating heat on mental health. “I am not optimistic,” Ayman Fanous, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona, told me, noting that heat also has a well-established link with suicide risk and can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Many Americans don’t have access to air conditioning, or they work jobs that require them to be outside in the heat. Those who can stay cool inside may avoid the most severe consequences but still end up miserable for half of the year.

[Read: Earth’s new gilded era]

As long as summer SAD remains poorly understood, the options for addressing it will be limited. Treatment for winter SAD usually involves exposure to light boxes that mimic sunlight, but these aren’t recommended for summer SAD, because it might have a different neurobiological basis, Fanous said. For now, the first-line treatments are SSRIs such as Prozac—which can make people even more sensitive to heat.

For those with the means, the best strategy for beating summer SAD might be to move somewhere cooler. After eight years in Phoenix, Gibson has had enough of hiding from the heat for six months at a time and is ready to leave behind what he believes is his own summer SAD. Later this year, he plans to move his family to Colorado, where he hopes to be able to bring his daughter out during daylight hours. Yet Colorado summers, too, are becoming uncomfortably hot—and the same goes around the country. Last month, Alaska issued its first-ever heat advisory. As summer temperatures continue to rise, perhaps Americans will start to look back with envy on the ways our forebears beat the heat. The hotter summer nights get, the more sleeping on the fire escape starts to sound like a luxury.

The New Sun Worship

2025-07-19T10:00:00-04:00

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore ethos of “gym, tan, laundry” infamously encapsulated an era in which tanning salons were after-school hangouts, and tanning stencils in the shape of the Playboy bunny were considered stylish. Self-tanning lotions, spray tans, and bronzers proliferated, but people still sought the real thing.

By the end of the decade, tanning’s appeal had faded. Americans became more aware of the health risks, and the recession shrank their indoor-tanning budgets. But now America glows once again. The president and many of his acolytes verge on orange, and parties thrown by the MAGA youth are blurs of bronze. Celebrity tans are approaching early-aughts amber, and if dermatologists’ observations and social media are any indication, teens are flocking to the beach in pursuit of scorching burns.

Tanning is back. Only this time, it’s not just about looking good—it’s about embracing an entire ideology.

Another apparent fan of tanning is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s perpetually bronzed health secretary, who was spotted visiting a tanning salon last month. What tanning methods he might employ are unknown, but the secretary’s glow is undeniable. (The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to a request for comment about the administration’s views on tanning or Kennedy’s own habits.)

On its face, the idea that any health secretary would embrace tanning is odd. The Obama administration levied an excise tax on tanning beds and squashed ads that marketed tanning as healthy. The Biden administration, by contrast, made sunscreen use and reducing sun exposure central to its Cancer Moonshot plan. The stated mission of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy again” movement is to end chronic diseases, such as cancer, by addressing their root causes. Yet the Trump administration’s MAHA report, released in May, doesn’t once mention skin cancer, which is the most common type as well as the most easily preventable. It mentions the sun only to note its connection with circadian rhythm: “Morning sun synchronizes the body’s internal clock, boosting mood and metabolism.”

In fact, there’s good reason to suspect that Kennedy and others in his orbit will encourage Americans to get even more sun. Last October, in a post on X, Kennedy warned that the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of sunlight, among other supposedly healthy interventions, was “about to end.” Casey Means, a doctor and wellness influencer whom President Donald Trump has nominated for surgeon general, is also a sun apologist. In her best-selling book, Good Energy (which she published with her brother, Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy), she argues that America’s many ailments are symptoms of a “larger spiritual crisis” caused by separation from basic biological needs, including sunlight. “Shockingly, we rarely ever hear about how getting direct sunlight into our eyes at the right times is profoundly important for metabolic and overall health,” she writes. An earlier version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tried to repeal the excise tax on tanning beds. (The provision was cut in the final version.)

The alternative-health circles that tend to attract the MAHA crowd are likewise skeptical of sun avoidance. “They don’t want you to know this. But your body was made for the sun,” says a “somatic energy healer” with 600,000 followers who promotes staring directly into the sun to boost mood and regulate the body’s circadian rhythm. (Please, don’t do this.) On social media, some influencers tout the sun’s supposedly uncelebrated power to increase serotonin and vitamin D, the latter of which some erroneously view as a cure-all. Some promote tanning-bed use as a way to relieve stress; others, such as the alternative-health influencer Carnivore Aurelius, promote genital tanning to boost testosterone. Another popular conspiracy theory is that sunscreen causes cancer and is promoted by Big Pharma to keep people sick; a 2024 survey found that 14 percent of young adults think using sunscreen every day is worse for the skin than going without it.

These claims range from partly true to patently false. The sun can boost serotonin and vitamin D, plus regulate circadian rhythm—but these facts have long been a part of public-health messaging, and there’s no evidence that these benefits require eschewing sunscreen or staring directly at our star. Tanning beds emit little of the UVB necessary to produce vitamin D. Some research suggests that the chemicals in sunscreen can enter the bloodstream, but only if it’s applied to most of the body multiple times a day; plus, the effects of those chemicals in the body haven’t been established to be harmful, whereas skin cancer has. And, if I really have to say it: No solid research supports testicle tanning. Nor does any of this negate the sun’s less salutary effects: premature aging, eye damage, and greatly increased risk of skin cancer, including potentially fatal melanomas.

The specific questions raised in alternative-health spaces matter less than the conspiracist spirit in which they are asked: What haven’t the American people been told about the sun? What lies have we been fed? Their inherent skepticism aligns with Kennedy’s reflexive mistrust of the health establishment. In the MAHA world, milk is better when it’s raw, beef fat is healthier than processed oils, and the immune system is strongest when unvaccinated. This philosophy, however flawed, appeals to the many Americans who feel that they’ve been failed by the institutions meant to protect them. It offers the possibility that regaining one’s health can be as simple as rejecting science and returning to nature. And what is more natural than the sun?

[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]

Now is an apt moment for American politics to become more sun-friendly. Tanning is making a comeback across pop culture, even as “anti-aging” skin care and cosmetic procedures boom. Young people are lying outside when the sun is at its peak—new apps such as Sunglow and Rayz AI Tanning tell them when UV rays are strongest—to achieve social-media-ready tan lines. Last year, Kim Kardashian showed off a tanning bed in her office (in response to backlash, she claimed that it treated her psoriasis). Deep tans are glorified in ads for luxury goods, and makeup is used in fashion shows to mimic painful-looking burns. Off the runway, “sunburned makeup,” inspired by the perpetually red-cheeked pop star Sabrina Carpenter, is trending.

Veena Vanchinathan, a board-certified dermatologist in the Bay Area, told me that she’s noticed more patients seeking out self-tanning products and tanning, whether in beds or outdoors. Angela Lamb, a board-certified dermatologist who practices on New York’s well-to-do Upper West Side, told me her patients are curious about tanning too. “It’s actually quite scary,” she said. A recent survey by the American Academy of Dermatology found that a quarter of Americans, and an even greater proportion of adults ages 18 to 26, are unaware of the risks of tanning, and many believe in tanning myths, such as the idea that a base tan protects against a burn, or that tanning with protection is safe. (“There is no such thing as a safe tan,” Deborah S. Sarnoff, a dermatologist who serves as the president of the Skin Cancer Foundation, told me.)

Recently, some experts have called for a more moderate approach to sun safety, one that takes into account the benefits of some sun exposure and the harms of too much shade. “I actually think we do ourselves a bit of a disservice and open ourselves up to criticism if the advice of someone for skin-cancer prevention is ‘Don’t go outside,’” Jerod Stapleton, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies tanning behaviors, told me. But the popular rejection of sun safety goes much further. Advances in skin-cancer treatment, for example, may have lulled some Americans into thinking that melanoma just isn’t that serious, Carolyn Heckman, a medical professor at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, told me. Skin-cancer treatment and mortality rates have indeed improved, but melanomas that metastasize widely are still fatal most of the time.

[From the June 2024 issue: Against sunscreen absolutism]

In previous decades, tans were popular because they conveyed youth, vitality, and wealth. They still do. (At least among the fairer-skinned; their connotations among people of color can be less positive.) But the difference now is that tanning persists in spite of the known consequences. Lamb likened tanning to smoking: At this point, most people who take it up are actively looking past the well-established risks. (Indeed, smoking is also making a pop-culture comeback.) A tan has become a symbol of defiance—of health guidance, of the scientific establishment, of aging itself.

New York Is Hungry for a Big Grocery Experiment

2025-07-02T11:04:09-04:00

New York City—where takeout is a food group and ovens are for storing clothes—may soon get into the grocery business. If he wins the general election this November, Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic nominee for mayor, has said he will build a network of municipally owned, affordable grocery stores, one in each of the city’s five boroughs. According to Mamdani, the city could help pay for the stores’ rent and operating costs by taxing the wealthy, and the stores won’t seek to turn a profit, enabling them to sell food at wholesale cost. In the vision Mamdani laid out in a campaign video, the stores’ mission would be combatting “price gouging” by offering lower prices than corporate grocery stores.

If Mamdani is able to pull this off—a huge if, given the economic considerations, as critics are quick to point out—it will be the first time in American history that a city of New York’s size has commanded its own grocery stores. New Yorkers are in favor of the idea: Two-thirds of them, including 54 percent of Republicans, support public groceries, according to a March poll by the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. But because nothing exactly like Mamdani’s plan has ever been tried before in a large city, no one can be certain whether it will really be able to sell more affordable food, let alone help address food insecurity and health disparities in the city. What Mamdani has proposed is a $60 million experiment, with New Yorkers as test subjects.

A couple of other large American cities are trying out similar plans, but what little real precedent exists for Mamdani’s plan comes mostly from rural America. A handful of towns have opened municipally owned groceries, mostly because they had no choice: Small towns once relied on mom-and-pop shops, but these are vanishing as dollar stores proliferate and big-box retailers in larger rural cities monopolize the wholesale supply. Without a supermarket, residents have to either drive out of town for food or rely on convenience stores and dollar stores, which don’t stock many healthy options. In 2018, the town of Baldwin, Florida (current population 1,366), lost its only grocery when the local IGA closed. It became a food desert: The next-closest supermarket was 10 miles away—not a simple trip for older adults who don’t drive or for people without a car. The mayor proposed a municipally owned store, which opened the next year. In Kansas, the cities of St. Paul (population 603) and Erie (population 1,019) started their own grocery stores in 2008 and 2021, respectively. St. Paul had not had a supermarket since 1985.

The fates of these stores and their hometowns have varied. Baldwin Market became a lifeline for many residents, particularly during the pandemic. But it struggled to break even and closed in 2024. Now the town largely relies on a handful of convenience stores and a Dollar General as it awaits the rumored opening of a new private grocery. Erie Market similarly struggled to balance its books. Operations were a challenge; the store sometimes stocked expired food, and its refrigerated section lost power after a thunderstorm. Last year, the city leased it to a private owner, who has yet to reopen the store.

By contrast, St. Paul Supermarket has operated as a fully municipally owned grocery since 2013 (before that, it was funded by a community-development group) and shows no signs of closing. Its success has been attributed to community buy-in. Locals were motivated by the desire to preserve their city, fearing that the lack of a grocery store would drive away current residents and scare off potential new ones. “It’s a retention strategy, but it’s also a recruitment strategy,” Rial Carver, the program leader at Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative, told me.

The primary goal of a municipally owned store is to get food to people who need it. But the city will have to decide which food to stock and, inevitably, will face questions about how those choices influence the diet or health of potential customers. (Imagine the criticism a Mamdani administration might face for subsidizing Cheetos—or, for that matter, organic, gluten-free cheese puffs.) Theoretically, getting people better access to any sort of food can have health benefits, Craig Willingham, the managing director of CUNY’s Urban Food Policy Institute, told me. But so few examples of successful municipal grocery stores exist that there is virtually no research on their health effects.

Research on the health impact of opening a privately owned grocery in a food desert has had mixed results. An ongoing study of a food-desert neighborhood in Pittsburgh has found that after a supermarket opened, residents consumed fewer calories overall—less added sugar, but also fewer whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. A 2018 study set in a Bronx neighborhood with few grocery stores linked the opening of a new supermarket to residents eating more vegetables and fruit and consuming fewer soft drinks, salty snacks, and pastries, but their spending on unhealthy foods increased along with their purchases of healthy ones.

A new grocery alone won’t change food habits, according to a 2019 study led by Hunt Allcott, an economist at Stanford. “People shop at the new store, but they buy the same kinds of groceries they had been buying before,” Allcott told me. What does help nudge people toward buying healthier foods, he said, is making those foods affordable—while also taxing unhealthy items such as soda.

With so little background information to go on, there’s no telling how Mamdani’s experiment will play out in a big city—or whether it will even get off the ground. New York differs from the sites of other municipal-grocery experiments not only in its size and density but also in its general abundance of grocery stores. Proximity isn’t the major reason people can’t get food, healthy or otherwise, Allcott said—cost is. From 2013 to 2023, the amount of money New Yorkers spent on groceries rose nearly 66 percent—far higher than the national average. The city’s poverty rate—a metric based on the price of a minimal diet—is nearly twice that of the national average; from 2020 to 2023, one in three New Yorkers used food pantries. In Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that is known for its luxury high-rises and is also home to a large housing project, some residents would rather take the train into New Jersey to buy groceries than shop at the expensive local supermarkets, Willingham said.

Grocery stores are tough business. Profit margins are as slim as 1 to 3 percent, and prices are largely determined by suppliers, who tend to privilege volume. A single grocer (or the small network that Mamdani envisions) won’t get as good a deal as a large chain. And running a store is hard, Carver told me: A manager needs to be nimble and adjust to customer demands, skills that municipal bodies are not exactly known for. In New York, at least, there’s reason to expect that public groceries wouldn’t actually be cheaper.

Mamdani (whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment) has acknowledged that New York’s city government might not be cut out for stocking shelves. If the pilot plan doesn’t work, he said on the podcast Plain English last week, he won’t try to scale it up. Yet he believes that it’s worth trying. “This is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation,” he said.

National grocery costs are expected to increase 2.2 percent this year, according to the USDA. Price hikes will hit poor Americans even harder if Congress passes President Donald Trump’s megabill, which includes cuts to federal food-assistance programs such as SNAP. Among such threats to food affordability, the mere possibility of change could justify a trial of something new. Other large cities, too, are signing up as guinea pigs: Madison, Wisconsin, is in the process of opening a municipally owned store. Last year, Atlanta addressed food insecurity among public-school students and their families by opening a free grocery store—it functions like a food pantry but is stocked like a supermarket—funded by a public-private partnership. Its impact on health hasn’t yet been studied, but demand is high. “We do slots for appointments, and they’re immediately gone,” Chelsea Montgomery, the adviser to operations of Atlanta Public Schools, told me.

Mamdani’s proposal is hardly the first unorthodox policy experiment New York has considered. The city took a chance on congestion pricing to reduce traffic and fund public transit, on universal pre-K to guarantee access to early childhood education, and on supervised injection sites to curb the overdose crisis. All have achieved their objectives. Perhaps, in a decade, millions of New Yorkers will get their organic, gluten-free cheese puffs on the cheap at a city-owned market. Or perhaps the whole project will go the way of the city’s failed attempt to end poverty by offering cash in exchange for efforts to build healthy habits. The point of experimentation is to find out.

Brace Yourself for Watery Mayo and Spiky Ice Cream

2025-06-25T12:42:02-04:00

In the kitchen, an ingredient’s taste is sometimes less important than its function. Cornstarch has rescued many a watery gravy; gelatin turns juice to Jell-O. Yet the substances that make bread fluffy, hold mayonnaise together, and keep the cream in ice cream have, according to the new stance of the United States government, “no culinary use.”

These natural and synthetic substances, called emulsifiers, are added to processed foods to give them the textures that Americans have come to love. They’ve also become targets in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remove many food additives from the American diet. The “Make America Healthy Again” report, published in May, groups emulsifiers with other additives, some of which it says are linked to mental disorders, metabolic syndrome, and cancer. Online, the MAHA crowd echoes claims that emulsifiers are helping drive America’s chronic health problems.

Like seed oils and food dyes, emulsifiers have raised some real health concerns, particularly about gut health. But distinguishing their ill effects from those of the foods they’re in is challenging—and probably a distraction from the diet changes that would really make Americans healthier.

To anyone who’s attempted (and failed) to make a smooth vinaigrette using only oil and vinegar, MAHA’s assertion that emulsifiers have no culinary use is an affront. Any recipe that calls for blending two substances that don’t mix well together requires emulsifiers’ magic touch. Their molecular structure is drawn to watery substances on one end and fat-based ones on the other, bridging ingredients that would otherwise separate. In a vinaigrette, a dollop of mustard does the trick. Mayonnaise, essentially a blend of oil and a water-based acid, such as vinegar, is spreadable thanks to a natural emulsifier: egg yolks. Similarly, adding eggs to milk prevents ice cream from separating into solid milk fat studded with ice shards (yum).

Not all emulsifiers are as recognizable as eggs and mustard. Many commercial ice creams swap eggs for cheaper synthetic emulsifiers. Cake mixes are foolproof because chemicals called propylene glycol esters prevent powdered fats from clumping. Monoglycerides and diglycerides add structure to and extend the shelf life of bread. Xanthan gum thickens creamy salad dressings. The MAHA report makes no distinction between purely chemical emulsifiers and those that are naturally occurring, such as egg yolks and soy lecithin. So far, studies have not definitively identified differences in their effects on human health.

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

Perhaps because they are so useful, emulsifiers are in about half of supermarket foods sold in the United Kingdom, according to a 2023 study of the country’s four largest supermarkets; one study in France found that they account for seven of the top 10 most-consumed food additives among adults. So far, their prevalence in the U.S. food system hasn’t been studied, but given the dominance of processed food in the American diet, it’s safe to say that we eat a lot of them.

In Kennedy’s view, that abundance of emulsifiers is at least partly responsible for America’s chronic-disease epidemic. In May, he promised to investigate and ban food additives that are “really dangerous.” But so far, the research on emulsifiers doesn’t justify such a label. In 2017, an FDA-led study concluded that seven common emulsifiers didn’t raise any safety concerns at the usual levels of consumption. The agency’s calculations have “a lot of safety built in,” says Renee Leber, a food scientist at the Institute of Food Technologists, a trade group. There’s no reason to expect that Americans would ever consume enough emulsifiers to spark serious health concerns.

Still, looking further into emulsifiers’ health impacts isn’t a bad idea. A growing number of studies suggest that some can harm the gut, perhaps by shifting the balance of the gut microbiome. They may also damage the gut’s protective mucus layer, leaving it more vulnerable to inflammation and bacteria. A few studies suggest a link between the inflammation that some emulsifiers cause and certain illnesses, including Crohn’s disease, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes. But other research has turned up conflicting results; a study published last year linked a high-emulsifier diet to a better-protected gut.

Even emulsifier experts aren’t sure exactly what the substances do in the body. Research on how they affect intestinal health is “very much a work in progress,” Benoit Chassaing, a professor at the Institut Pasteur, in Paris, told me. It also still isn’t clear which ones, if any, have the most potential for harm. In a 2021 study, Chassaing and his colleagues used a model to test the effects of 20 common emulsifiers on the gut microbiome. Only two of them—the synthetic emulsifiers carboxymethylcellulose (found in vitamins and dietary supplements) and polysorbate 80 (usually in edible oils and cake icing)—were determined to have lasting negative consequences. Chassaing has also found that some people’s microbiomes are more sensitive to emulsifiers—which is to say, conceivably emulsifiers could have different effects on different people. Without large-scale human trials, none of the research on emulsifiers can be considered conclusive. As the authors behind the 2024 study wrote, “For now, do not feel guilty if you eat ice-cream!” (At least, not because you’re consuming emulsifiers.)

[From the May 2023 issue: Could ice cream possibly be good for you?]

None of this has deterred Kennedy from fearmongering about additives like emulsifiers. Instead, he’s continuing a pattern that by now has become a MAHA signature: In the health secretary’s campaigns against seed oils and food dyes, he has exaggerated modest scientific findings to justify grand allegations that additives drive chronic disease. Some skepticism of these ingredients may be warranted. But Kennedy’s critiques lack nuance at a stage when nuance is all that the current research can provide.

A MAHA-led deep dive into these questions could turn up some genuinely useful information. If certain emulsifiers are especially gentle on the gut, the food industry could use them to replace the ones that might be more irritating. Identifying what makes certain people more sensitive to them could shape criteria for prescribing emulsifier-free diets.

But what Kennedy plans to do about emulsifiers beyond investigating their safety is anyone’s guess. When I asked the Department of Health and Human Services about it, Emily G. Hilliard, a press secretary, told me that “Secretary Kennedy is committed to ensuring transparency in the food supply so that Americans know exactly what’s in their food.” Banning any emulsifiers that might be found to cause serious harm would be prudent, but then foods that contain them would have to be reformulated—a costly, time-consuming endeavor. For some foods, that might not even be an option: Without an emulsifier, natural or synthetic, ice cream “just wouldn’t be plausible,” Leber told me.

If Kennedy aggressively pursues bans or some other type of restrictions, it will be worth stepping back and asking what the administration is really trying to achieve. The health effects of emulsifiers haven’t yet been fully distinguished from those of the foods they’re in (which tend to have high levels of fat, sugar, or both), nor have those of seed oils and food dyes. In fact, the science points to the likelihood that emulsifiers’ potential harms are minor in comparison with more basic nutritional problems. But maybe ditching emulsifiers could act as some roundabout way of nudging Americans toward eating healthier, if Kennedy is prepared to rob us all of ice cream.

[Read: RFK Jr. is taking an axe to America’s dietary guidelines]

In May, Kennedy announced that food additives and processed foods would be the “central focus” of his health administration. But really, that indicates just how unfocused his movement is. The MAHA report rails against American overconsumption of high-sugar, high-fat, ultra-processed foods, yet so far, it hasn’t been able to do much to limit their consumption beyond eliciting a nonbinding promise from Kraft-Heinz and General Mills to remove dyes from foods like mac and cheese and Kool-Aid, and encouraging people to cook french fries in beef tallow. Removing or replacing emulsifiers could result in some health gains, but none that are likely to outweigh the health consequences of eating the foods that contain them.