Clint Fuqua was MAHA before MAHA. In fact, the 48-year-old personal trainer and gym owner says he was one of the first people to hashtag “make America healthy” (his was #MAH; the “again” hadn’t come along yet) in 2010. Fuqua had then gone through a bit of a “reinvention” himself and decided to dedicate his life to helping others with what he calls “personal health care reform,” he tells Yahoo. “The goal was: How do we get people healthy, for real? It comes down to people taking control of their lives.”
So, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came onto the scene in 2024 with his plan to “Make America healthy again,” Fuqua was naturally on board. The principles he’s now hearing from the Trump administration align with his ethos: “I’m gonna take care of myself, and I’m not gonna rely on somebody else to take care of me.”
“MAHA moms” have made headlines advocating for RFK Jr.’s plans on behalf of their children’s health, whether through better food or “informed consent” vaccine regulations. But what about the MAHA men? We went looking for what the movement means to these guys.
What is MAHA to men?
For Fuqua, MAHA means “taking better care of yourself: Eat what you’re supposed to eat, do what you’re supposed to do, exercise daily … set yourself up to live a good life and take care of people,” he says.
That sense of autonomy, of taking your fate into your hands rather than trying to “shove it back on a doctor or family member,” as Fuqua puts it, is a big part of MAHA’s appeal to men like him. There’s plenty of overlap between what MAHA moms and MAHA men want, but this self-determination is especially compelling to the males of the group, says Jess Steier, founder of Unbiased Science. The MAHA movement offers “a sense of control: If you do this or don’t do this, you will live longer and you will have a better life,” she explains.
Of course, wanting autonomy is nothing new. But when COVID-19 hit the U.S., that desire was put into a pressure cooker. Amid lockdowns and ever-changing public health guidance, many Americans, particularly young ones and especially young men, felt like “guinea pigs in this trial period of restrictions,” Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Up and Up, a qualitative research firm that studies Gen Z, tells Yahoo.
In the listening sessions Janfaza hosts across the country, Gen Z men have pointed out the frustrating contradictions they saw during the pandemic. One said he was told he could go to wrestling practice but had to wear a mask, for example. “That didn’t make sense to him when he was literally on top of people,” says Janfaza. That period of sometimes confusing restrictions “set the tone for the rest of their lives,” she says. “Young people, and men in particular, are looking for that control and sense of autonomy in many walks of life,” including their health, she adds.
Between the pandemic and headlines about the rising rates of cancer, chronic illness and obesity among young adults, Gen Z-ers may “feel like something is broken, and they want to take it into their own hands,” and that may particularly be the case for men, Janfaza says.
Masculinity and MAHA
Health Secretary Kennedy has posted some instantly viral videos of himself doing push-ups and exercising — shirtless and in jeans. In one of those videos, he said he was “practicing” for his then upcoming confirmation hearing. While health experts aren’t sure how these displays demonstrated his fitness for the role, they did show that he was physically fit, especially for a then 70-year-old man. And that matters to the men of MAHA.
“There’s a real physicality” to a MAHA man, Kathryn Olivarius, a Stanford University science historian who’s working on a book about the MAHA movement, tells Yahoo. And that physicality — big muscles, a chiseled jawline, a tanned physique — “is tied to a return to a masculinity that feels very situated in the past,” Olivarius adds.
For many men who support the movement, MAHA is synonymous with this kind of masculinity. “Men are protectors and builders,” says Fuqua. “You’ve gotta be able-bodied to build stuff and to be able to protect what you love.” In particular, the goal is for “men to get back to being men,” he says.
The MAHA men — and Kennedy’s videos — also closely resemble the countless male influencer (man-fluencer) videos that populate social media. A recent Common Sense Media report found that three-quarters of adolescent boys in the U.S. regularly encounter masculinity content online. “People are seeking to ‘reclaim’ something that society has lost,” says Olivarius. And that desire is “amped up by our online culture,” she adds.
Looking back on ‘healthier’ times
Like their female counterparts, many MAHA men look to the past for solutions to problems they see in the current food, health care and wellness landscape. A MAHA man is the “cave person” to the trad-wife woman, says Steier. Some male influencers take this as far as promoting beef tallow, carnivore or caveman diets and eschewing sunscreen altogether. In fact, 64% of men who responded to a Yahoo/YouGov survey of 1,690 U.S. adults said they rarely or never wear sunscreen.
This skepticism of modern products and medicine runs deep. Fuqua believes there’s a lot of “trash” on the sunscreen market, so he sticks to versions that use natural minerals like zinc instead of chemical sunblocks. But he also believes that sun is important to health (it is, to a point) and suggests that skin cancer is a problem of modern behavior. People are “big overgrown plants with emotional issues: We need water, food, sunlight and some emotional support,” he says. “Was skin cancer as big of an issue [in the past]? No, because people got out of the sun as much as they could or wore coverage; they weren’t out there in a thong doing gardening.” (Skin cancer has existed for many years, but Fuqua is right that covering up and staying in the shade are also effective forms of sun protection.)
Similarly, Fuqua sees modern food as the result of “frankenscience.” So, he gets his eggs directly from a local farm. It’s too inconvenient to get in Dallas, where Fuqua now lives, but he grew up drinking raw milk from his aunt and uncle’s cows (“there’s nothing better”), and is among the 40% of men who think it should be fully legal across the U.S., according to Yahoo/YouGov polling. And while he’s not wholly against vaccination, Fuqua doesn’t think shots and their schedules should be one-size-fits-all for kids. He cites his mother, who was a teacher who questioned vaccines and blended up baby food for him rather than ever buying formula.
Fuqua’s beliefs illustrate a central tension public health experts see in the MAHA movement: “There are kernels of truth buried in some places,” says Steier. Yes, whole foods are best, but consuming some ultra-processed food is fine, as long as it isn’t the majority of your diet. Alternative vaccination schedules are better than no vaccines at all, but there’s no proven danger in kids getting more than one at a time — and there is a risk of infection if vaccination is delayed. And physical sunscreens like zinc work well, but chemical ones are also effective and perfectly safe. The movement is characterized by “this very binary way of thinking, and that to me is the most dangerous part of MAHA,” Steier says.
The tech-nostalgia paradox of MAHA men
Even as Fuqua looks back to the past for guidance about what is healthiest now, he also places hope in certain technologies. He would like to see genetic testing used to help determine which kids get which vaccinations and when. Fuqua also believes that at-home testing and annual full-body scans should become routine. This combination of retrograde and futurist beliefs is a theme among the men of MAHA in particular, according to experts.
The distinction between good and bad tech seems to lie, for MAHA men, in the difference between corporatized and institutionalized products (vaccines, Big Food) and ones marketed as personalized (supplements, at-home blood tests). “MAHA is presented as being about asserting agency and control, and there’s a tech component that [makes you feel] like you’re optimizing your own body and own self,” says Olivarius. Everything from high-protein diets to wearable trackers falls under “biohacking, in a way that makes you feel like an active participant in a kind of gamified [approach to health],” she adds.
Experts say this is fine — to a point. “You want to get healthy and fit, and you’re going to biohack and run and lift weights? That’s great if you want to do that and it makes you happy,” says Olivarius. “What scares me is, [if] you start to slip into the anti-vaccine territory, then it becomes less about lifestyle and more about a worldview,” she says.
The good, the bad and the hopeful for MAHA men
Many of the practices that Fuqua and men like him incorporate into their own lives are good for health and well-being. It’s also apparent that Fuqua is acting in good faith; he genuinely cares about the student-athletes and clients he trains. But this is exactly what presents a problem for scientists. When it comes to public health, it’s dangerous to take the bad with the good. It’s the job of scientists to think and communicate in relative risks — to talk about nuance and why any given behavior won’t guarantee better health. But that messaging just isn’t as direct and satisfying as MAHA’s — and because basic healthy behaviors have become wrapped up in political identity, it’s difficult for science communicators to support some MAHA beliefs while countering others without alienating those involved. “Public health needs better PR,” says Steier. “But we can’t get it because by definition science is all about the nuance; we’re never proving anything, we’re accumulating evidence — that’s a mouthful, and people don’t want a mouthful.”
Rather than fight or disagree with the MAHA men, Steier thinks the way forward is through “empowering” them. “All right, men, you’re smart enough to see through the grift” of the marketing of ultra-processed foods, for example, she says. But Steier points out that wellness is now a bigger industry than Big Pharma, but with none of the regulation. So perhaps MAHA men can turn that same skepticism on supplements or vaccine misinformation. “There are some red flags here, but you’re in the driver’s seat, you can make the best decision — just know there are people who are taking advantage of you.”
