Just a few short years ago, if you believed that weedkillers cause cancer, vaccines cause autism, and supplements were medicine, your political leaning was so predictable you draw a county-size circle around a Whole Foods and declare election results with spooky accuracy.
Counties that had a Whole Foods voted 80 percent Democrat. Whole Foods was founded by a guy, John Mackey, who was personally to the right of Ayn Rand but he knew where the wealthy customers are; the left who saw corporate conspiracies everywhere. Especially in food, medicine, and energy.
In the past few years, two huge things happened. First, COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan and devastated the world. The Trump administration told FDA to get bureaucrats out of the way fast-track a vaccine, which his political opponents said was going to unleash unknown terrors on the world. After they won the election, the vaccine that the Trump administration had approved over the criticism of Democrats was rolled out, and the wealthy progressives that had been promoting measles parties in Whole Foods and other woo merchants and protesting the racism of travel bans in February of 2020 somehow found their way to the front of the COVID-19 vaccine line.
Measles parties hotspots in Los Angeles in February of 2020.
Suddenly, they were claiming to be the Party of Science again and a second thing happened. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and Obama's hope to run EPA, joined the Republican administration of president-elect Trump. A lot of people who had opposed vaccines and medicine in general as a vast right-wing conspiracy went with him. They took President Reagan's old slogan, Make America Great Again, given new life by Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, and changed a letter to Make America Healthy Again. MAHA was born.(1) Now they claim things that wacky groups like Democracy Now! believed just a few years ago; makeup is disrupting your hormones, raw milk will save your microbiome, and food coloring gives you ADHD or diabetes or whatever disease is trending among World Music listeners this year.
There are two kinds of anti-science beliefs, though. 'Teh chemicals are killing us' side has always been augmented by the 'Suppressed folk medicine will save us' contingent. Often, pseudoscience beliefs are adapting the veil of science, like antioxidants and natural viagra. The former don't work at all and the latter don't unless they've been illegally adulterated with a real drug.
That's where the MAHA world is with peptides. Though they have adopted the denial of vaccines long embraced by the progressive left, they are fine with medicine if they feel like it's gotten using an end-run around government. Peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as signaling molecules and help our bodies maintain blood sugar and tissue repair. Insulin and oxytocin are good examples and rigorously tested products like GLP-1 receptor agonists and insulin injections help lots of people. That has led to an odd grey area of peptide use led by, as always, celebrities who brought the anti-vaccine craze to America. Body Protection Compound-157 (BPC-157) is an example of a peptide similar to a protein in our gastric juice that has been synthesized and sold and is promoted by actors and other celebrities as curing basically everything.
Thanks to President Clinton, Commander in Woo of the 20th century, exempting supplements from any real FDA oversight, it's being sold without human clinical trials or FDA approval. And that problem could be getting worse. Secretary Kennedy has been pushing to get the FDA Compounding Advisory Committee to add six peptide substances to the Section 503A Bulks List, which would allow them to be sold by state compounding pharmacies in politically-aligned states (aligned to him personally, like California, definitely not Republican) despite lacking FDA approval.
It rare that Center for Science in the Public Interest is right. Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., a Ralph Nader acolyte when corporate conspiracy theories were as popular as astrology, claimed coffee causes cancer and was the kind of venomous sexist that young women think only exist in stories. But even their current executive director, Dr. Peter Lurie, a long-time corporate conspiracy theorist, has defied the same Kennedy he aligned with when they were both claiming Red Dye #3 causes ADHD, the go-to breezy claim before the Public Citizen Health Research Group (also a Ralph Nader front group - you can see a money-making pattern by now) claimed vaccines caused autism.
This is the same CSPI that claimed the American Council on Science and Health were Big Pharma toadies for asking Columbia University to remove Dr. Oz from their faculty due to his supernatural beliefs. Who opposed Dr. Oz once he became a Republican? Those same anti-science groups like CSPI, EWG, etc. and their political allies like Slate, Huffington Post, etc. And Columbia University.
Kennedy banned the harmless food coloring (sorry, activists, mice are still not little people, epidemiology is still not science) CSPI wanted banned and they still turned on him.
You know you are being reckless with unapproved products when groups like CSPI side with pharmaceutical companies over the FDA they once gleefully infected when President Obama, who also suggested vaccines might cause autism, got into power and let them do for the left what Trump has done for...well, the left of 2010.
Maybe FDA is only bad again because another Republican is in the White House?
If it was anyone except Secretary Kennedy, we'd have to dismiss it as the usual left-wing psy-op work against science. But when it comes to peptides, Crossfit may have been started by a dangerous anti-science lunatic so we shouldn't let him or them be making that dark web business more lucrative than it already is. For their own safety.
NOTE:
(1)
There had been worrisome signs in the past. In January of 2017, when Mr. Kennedy asked for a meeting with President-Elect Trump, Dr. Alex Berezow and I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal outlining why the president-elect should avoid him. A few hours after our piece hit newsstands, the Trump team stated that he had met with Kennedy but there was no vaccine commission happening. He was signaling that he was not like Senator Obama in 2008, who wondered if vaccines might cause autism. It was clearly different in 2024. Like Nixon after 1960, President-elect-again Trump may have felt cheated(2)
To the shock of many, Mr. Kennedy did receive a high-profile job in 2025 and got Senate approval, and then Secretary Kennedy turned his beliefs into policy. Some changes were sensible. It is not wrong to cap how much universities can charge taxpayer-funded scientists to change lightbulbs(1) and I had ridiculed the claims that animal fat in french fries caused heart attacks while vegetable oil did not for years. Some were strange, like his diet of meat and sauerkraut.
Shoutout to Jeanette Rubio. Hilarious wives won't let husbands skirt the political edges, even in interviews.
