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MAHA wellness culture is coming for teens. Grown-ups aren’t ready.

A new generation of influencers is changing the face of the movement.

For years, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement was driven by moms.

Concerned about the safety of childhood vaccines and about chemicals in the food their kids were eating, they helped propel Donald Trump to the White House — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the role of the nation’s top health influencer — with a message centered on fear for the next generation.

Now, that next generation is here.

A new group of young influencers is changing the face of MAHA.

Gen Z Americans, with their low trust in mainstream medicine and other institutions, may be especially susceptible to MAHA messaging.

Educators can teach young people to evaluate MAHA and other health claims, but it requires meeting Americans where they are.

The latest MAHA advocates to gain public attention are women in their teens or early 20s. Lexi Vrachalus, 20, posts videos of her seed-oil-free, sugar-free meals, snacks, and shopping trips. In a post around Easter, she made her own Peeps with maple syrup and beef gelatin.

Her message: “You can take back health into your own hands,” she told me. “You have the power to heal your body.”

She and other influencers, like the young filmmaker Grace Price and clean-living maven Ava Noe, are creating videos with a younger sensibility than their forebears — think baking sourdough for siblings rather than talking about kids’ vaccines. And their version of MAHA (that’s Make America Healthy Again, for the uninitiated) is breaking through to American teens.

“I get questions from my younger audience like, how can I encourage my parents to eat healthy?” Vrachalus said. “Or, how can I eat healthy when all my parents do is buy junk food?”

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with young people trying to eat healthy. But educators and misinformation experts are worried about what comes next: Among adults, MAHA influencer culture has served as a funnel for a host of beliefs and behaviors that start with skepticism, veer into suspicion of all authority, and end up with actively dangerous behavior, including a resistance to vaccines that has led to outbreaks of disease.

“There’s this focus on healthy foods and environmental concerns, but running under the surface of some of those more superficial connections is this idea that there’s this cabal,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon. “There’s this kind of conspiratorial thinking that ‘they,’ coded as liberal, are lying to you.”

So far, polling shows that young people are less likely to identify with MAHA than Americans in their 30s and 40s. But MAHA-inflected wellness videos are reaching more teens, and there’s evidence that more young people are falling for health misinformation that they see online.

In a 2024 survey by the News Literacy Project, 80 percent of teens said they saw conspiracy theories on social media platforms, and a majority of those teens said they were inclined to believe one or more of those theories. The second most common type of conspiracy theory mentioned by teens in the survey (after “aliens & UFOs”) was content around Covid-19 and public health issues.

The rise........

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