Why is this popular public-health nutritionist so uncritical of RFK?
Plus, the links: The worst person to put in charge of a study, how to think about midlife, Dr. Oz goes to Washington, and more
Welcome to another installment of the Rethinking Wellness link roundup. Here I’m offering a small collection of links from around the internet that are relevant to the conversations we have here, along with some quick takes and occasional deeper dives for paid subscribers. (I accidentally sent this one out without the paywall, so this time it’s free!)
Fyi, two weeks from now I’ll be away for yet another weeklong school closure (😑), so I’ll send out the second April roundup on or before the 24th.
Today’s take/dive is about food-politics writer/researcher Marion Nestle’s partial embrace of MAHA.
Links
Here are some pieces that got me thinking in the past few weeks. I found value in all of these, but links are not endorsements of every single detail in the piece or everything the writer ever wrote.
MAHA Moms Are Wrong About Wellness (
)Kennedy Turns to a Discredited Vaccine Skeptic for Autism Study (NYT)
Related: The Appointment of David Geier: A Predictable Breach of Scientific Integrity in Vaccine-Autism Research (, , , et al.)
HHS starts layoffs of thousands of workers across its agencies (STAT)
Exclusive Videos Show Dr. Joe Mercola’s Dangerous Ideas Whipped up by Alleged Medium (McGill Office for Science and Society)
)The Great and All Powerful Oz Goes to Washington (
)In Case You Missed It
How RFK’s Attack on Food Ingredients Promotes Disordered Eating
Why Ozempic Isn’t a Miracle Weight-Loss Drug with
Think You Might Be in Perimenopause? Don't Fall for These Wellness Traps.
Take/Dive: Marion Nestle and MAHA
Buried in a recent New York Times piece about RFK Jr.’s impact on policy and industry, there were a few paragraphs about two well-known nutrition researchers who “applaud his focus on obesity and healthy eating” while still being critical of his other positions. “So long as he is not talking about vaccines, Mr. Kennedy’s ideas are winning cautious support in some surprising places,” correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote.
But to me, it’s not really all that surprising that these researchers would support Kennedy’s views on food and body size. Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University (with whom I took a class while getting my master’s in public health nutrition at NYU), and Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, have both spent decades promoting the stigmatizing notion of an “obesity epidemic” and spreading black-and-white beliefs about food based on mostly correlational evidence (which in some cases is extremely shoddy). The two academics share the same fundamental diet- and wellness-culture values as RFK—demonizing some foods while elevating others, equating thinness to wellness, promoting weight loss as a means of attaining health, and stigmatizing larger bodies. And all three speak in similarly strident tones about the nation’s weight and food environment.
Of course, Kennedy’s ideas are hugely problematic not just with respect to vaccines, but also regarding a whole host of other public-health issues. He’s promoted many baseless conspiracy theories, including the false claims that Covid vaccines contain microchips to control people, that antidepressants are linked to school shootings, and that the FDA is “suppressing” products like raw milk and ivermectin (which in reality have been studied extensively and found to be harmful or ineffective). He’s denied that HIV causes AIDS, and denied germ theory in general—instead embracing a view of infectious disease that was disproven 150 years ago. He’s claimed seed oils cause weight gain and that people are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them, which is false—there’s no good evidence to suggest seed oils are harmful, and considerable research showing they may have health benefits, such as reducing levels of unfavorable blood lipids. And since he’s been in office, he’s already taken numerous steps to dismantle the U.S.’s vaccine infrastructure.
Why aren’t Willett and Nestle talking about all of that?
Granted, Willett seems appropriately skeptical of Kennedy, whom he said was “destroying science in America” even while agreeing that the National Institutes of Health should spend more money on disease-prevention research (though recent DOGE cuts are likely to undermine that goal). Nestle, on the other hand, had more positive things to say about RFK. As she told the Times:
“When President Trump announced on Twitter that he was appointing R.F.K. Jr., he used the words industrial food complex... I couldn’t believe that. It sounded just like me, and RFK sounds just like me.”
I was surprised at her tone and lack of strong criticism, and I wondered if those quotes just got left on the cutting-room floor, so I dug into her blog. There, I found that Nestle has been quite kind to Kennedy, praising his approach to food, failing to mention his tortured relationship with the truth, and dramatically downplaying the threats he poses to public health.
Take this February 25 blog post she wrote about RFK’s confirmation:
“I’m totally for making chronic disease a national priority for intervention, for getting conflicts of interest out of the FDA, and for focusing on child health. And for Making America Healthy Again (MAHA).
I am eager to see what he does.
The FDA has long been plagued by cumbersome procedures (many of which do protect the public), conflicts of interest (especially the “revolving door” between the agency and industry), and apparent capture by the industries it is supposed to regulate.
Can RFK Jr address those problems in a way that promotes the public interest? We shall see.”
Recently she’s been a bit more critical—but not much. In discussing the massive cuts he’s making to HHS staff, she wrote:
“My question here is to what end? What, exactly, does RFK Jr plan to do to Make America Healthy Again?
…I am all for getting rid of artificial colors and closing the GRAS loophole but neither of those is a major cause of obesity and its health consequences. Nor will replacing seed oils with beef tallow addresss that problem; both have about the same number of calories.
…I’m eagerly waiting to hear what RFK Jr plans to do to help Americans reduce calorie intake, reduce intake of ultra-processed foods, stop smoking, avoid drinking too much alcohol, become more physically active, and eat more vegetables.”
In these and other blog posts, I get the impression that Nestle is fiddling over the details of Kennedy’s diet-culture plans while he burns our public-health capacities to the ground.
This feels like an odd oversight for someone so eminent in the field of public health nutrition, which might be what the NYT’s Stollberg was alluding to when she called Nestle’s support for Kennedy “surprising.” In my view, Nestle should be speaking out about how RFK’s policies and positions undermine public health, even if she agrees with some of his ideas. Instead, it seems she’s giving him the benefit of the doubt because he’s poised to make her beliefs about food and nutrition into the law of the land.
I’m disappointed that Nestle isn’t vocally calling out RFK’s failings to her readers, many of whom I’m sure are very much aligned with him on questions of food and weight—and some of whom may also be on board with his anti-vaccine views, given the slippery slope between “crunchy” food values and anti-vax beliefs. And maybe that’s part of why Nestle isn’t going hard here: she knows that she would alienate a good portion of her audience.
I used to be among that audience, and I can’t help but wonder how I’d be thinking about RFK now if I still approached food the same way Nestle does. Back in the early 2000s I read her book Food Politics, which my then-hero Michael Pollan cited as an inspiration for his work, and its scathing critiques of the food industry had a major influence on my early career as a journalist. (Unfortunately, they also helped fan the flames of my eating disorder.) I chose to get my master’s degree in public health nutrition at NYU partly because Nestle had helped shape the department, and I took a class with her on food policy that I ate up. I was all-in on the “food movement”—at least until I started training to specialize in eating disorders, when I began to find that movement’s rhetoric (including Nestle’s work) overly alarmist, weight-stigmatizing, and potentially triggering to anyone with a disordered/orthorexic relationship with food.
Now, I worry that MAHA is leading a whole new crop of people into that trap—while also undermining our ability to actually help improve people’s well-being by taking away resources from programs to fight infectious disease and improve social determinants of health.
And the food movement is too excited about the prospect of victory under RFK to care.
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I hope this roundup gave you some food for thought, and I’d love to hear from you. Also, please let me know if there are any recent pieces (published within the last few weeks) you’d like me to consider for the next installment! Feel free to comment below, or submit them here.
Thank you so much for having the courage to speak out about your former teacher,Marion Nestle, and her stance on RFK. I couldn’t helping thinking of the quote, “The student has become the master”.
I have Food Politics sitting on my shelf, but I've never actually read it! Any suggestions for books on food policy that are more nuanced and less triggering for people with an ED?