RFK Jr. shakes up top staff at health department
Why it matters: Kennedy's time atop the huge federal health bureaucracy has already been marked by tensions with the White House over the measles outbreak, controversial vaccine policy changes and sweeping layoffs and grant cuts.
Driving the news: Kennedy this week ousted his chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson and deputy chief of staff for policy Hannah Anderson after losing confidence in them, CNN first reported, citing sources familiar.
An HHS spokesman confirmed Kennedy made a leadership change within the Immediate Office of the Secretary and that HHS' White House Liaison Matt Buckham will serve as Acting Chief of Staff.
Buckham was overseeing the recruitment and onboarding of political appointees across the agency.
"Secretary Kennedy thanks the outgoing leadership for their service and looks forward to working closely with Mr. Buckham as the Department continues advancing its mission to Make America Healthy Again," the spokesman said.
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Vox
44 minutes ago
- Vox
Is MAHA losing its battle to make Americans healthier?
covers health for Vox, guiding readers through the emerging opportunities and challenges in improving our health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017. On a Friday evening this July, the Trump administration announced it would lay off all of the health research scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Hundreds of investigators who try to understand how toxic pollution affects the human body would be gone. That wasn't a surprise. The EPA — which had a founding mission to protect 'the air we breathe and the water we drink,' as President Richard Nixon put it — has been busy dismantling policies that are in place to ensure environmental and public health. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the agency is drafting a plan that would repeal its recognition of climate change as a threat to human health, potentially limiting the government's ability to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has relaxed existing standards for mercury and lead pollution — two toxins that can lead to developmental problems in children. And the EPA has postponed its implementation of new Biden-era regulations that were supposed to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals Americans are exposed to. Meanwhile, House Republicans are attempting to grant widespread liability relief to pesticide companies and restrict EPA regulation of PFAS 'forever chemicals' through provisions that have been tucked into the spending bills currently moving through Congress. (Democrats, for their part, have offered opposing legislation that would protect an individual's right to sue over any harm from pesticides.) This collective assault upon America's environmental regulations targets not just the environment, but human health as well. Which means it sits oddly with the work of another Trump official whose office at the Department of Health and Human Safety is just a 15-minute walk from EPA headquarters: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, whose Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to, obviously, make Americans healthier. But Kennedy hasn't spoken up about these contradictions — and his supporters are beginning to notice. In response to the pro-pesticide industry proposals in Congress, MAHA leaders wrote a letter to Kennedy and Zeldin voicing opposition to a bill that they believe 'would ensure that Americans have no power to prevent pesticide exposure, and no path to justice after harm occurs.' In the letter, they also urged the EPA to ban two pesticides — atrazine and glyphosate — that have been linked to birth defects and liver and kidney problems. What you'll learn from this story: The Make America Healthy Again movement depends on not only improving the US food supply but eliminating environmental pollution. President Donald Trump's EPA has taken actions to deregulate pesticides, microplastics, mercury and lead pollution, and more substances that the MAHA movement has identified as dangerous to human health. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing pressure from leaders in the MAHA movement to reconcile the gap between their shared goals and Trump's environmental agenda. 'These toxic substances are in our food, rain, air, and water, and most disturbingly, in our children's bodies,' the MAHA letter says. 'It is time to take a firm stand.' Kennedy is no stranger to these issues: Earlier this year, the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again Commission report, which sought to document and explain the dramatic increase in chronic diseases like obesity among US children, identified both chemicals as health risks. Zeldin, however, has been working to deregulate both atrazine and glyphosate in his first few months leading the EPA. 'It is completely contrary to MAHA to relax regulations on PFAS and many different chemicals. We are calling upon them and to reverse some of these actions that [the administration] is taking or seemingly may allow,' said Zen Honeycutt, one of the letter signers and the founder of the MAHA-aligned group Moms Across America. 'We are extremely disappointed with some of the actions taken by this administration to protect the polluters and the pesticide companies.' MAHA burst onto the political scene as part of Kennedy's 2024 presidential campaign. It has become a vehicle for public health concerns, some exceedingly mainstream (like addressing America's ultra-processed food and reducing pollution) and some of them very much outside of it (such as undermining the effectiveness of vaccines). After dropping his own candidacy, Kennedy joined forces with Trump, and ended up running the nation's most important health agency. But now that he's in office, he and the movement he leads are running into the challenges of making change — and the unavoidable reality that MAHA has allied with a president and an agenda that is often in direct opposition to their own. 'In the case of Lee Zeldin, you have someone who's doing incredibly consequential actions and is indifferent to the impact on public health,' said Jeremy Symons, senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network and a former adviser to the EPA during the Clinton administration. 'In the case of Kennedy, you have someone that has spent his life thinking about public health, but seems unable or disinterested in stopping what's going on.' RFK Jr.'s HHS vs. Zeldin's EPA Kennedy has successfully nabbed voluntary industry commitments to phase out certain dyes from American food products. He has overhauled the government's vaccine policy, and one state has already followed his lead in banning fluoride from its drinking water. But his ambitions to reduce the sheer number of toxins that leach into America's children in their most vulnerable years are being stymied by an EPA and a Republican-controlled Congress with very different priorities. 'Food dyes are not as consequential as pesticides for food manufacturers. The ingredients they put into the food contaminate the food,' Honeycutt said. 'That issue is a much larger issue. That is the farmers, and changing farming practices takes longer.' To Kennedy's credit, these are issues he'd apparently like to tackle — if he could. His HHS report earlier this year pointed out that 'studies have raised concerns about possible links between some of these products and adverse health outcomes, especially in children.' Specific ingredients in pesticides have been associated with cancer, inflammation, metabolic problems and more. But the EPA, meanwhile, has reversed regulations and stymied research for those same substances. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins hold ice cream cones while announcing a major industry pledge to ditch artificial dyes by 2027. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images The EPA has proposed easing restrictions on the amount of the herbicide atrazine that can be permitted in the nation's lakes and streams. Human and animal studies have associated exposure to atrazine with birth defects, kidney and liver diseases, and problems with metabolism; the evidence, however, remains limited and the MAHA report called for further independent research. The EPA has also moved to block states from putting any new limits on or requiring any public disclosures for glyphosate, a herbicide that the MAHA report says has been linked to a wide range of health problems. Zeldin also postponed Biden-era plans to take action on chlorpyrifos, a common insecticide increasingly associated with development problems in kids. The EPA has also been slow to move on microplastics and PFAS, both substances of growing concern among scientists and the general public. These invisible but omnipresent chemicals are a priority for the MAHA movement, singled out in the White House report for further study and policymaking. The EPA, though, has delayed implementing a new standard to limit PFAS in drinking water and announced it would consider whether to raise the limits of acceptable PFAS levels in community water systems, while also slashing funding for more research on the substance's health effects. Bisphenols (also known as BPA) and phthalates are two other common materials used in plastic production and food packaging, which have also been identified by researchers as likely dangerous because of their ability to disrupt hormone and reproductive function. The MAHA singles them out for further study and possible restrictions, but the EPA has delayed safety studies for both. The US is even moving backward on pollutants like mercury and lead, for which the scientific evidence of their harms is undisputed. They are toxins that regulators have actually taken steps over the decades to reduce exposure, through banning the use of lead paint, strictly limiting mercury levels, etc. Yet over the past few months, the EPA has moved to grant exemptions to coal power plants and chemical manufacturers that would allow more mercury pollution, while cutting monitoring for lead exposures. This is a long list of apparent contradictions and we're barely six months into Trump's term. How long can the contradictions pile up without Kennedy challenging Zeldin directly? We reached out to the Health and Human Services Department to see if we could get Kennedy's perspective on any of this. In response, an agency spokesperson sent a written statement: 'Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to investigating any potential root causes of the chronic disease epidemic, including environmental factors and toxic chemicals,' an HHS spokesperson wrote. 'The Secretary continues to engage with federal partners, including the EPA, to ensure that federal actions align with the latest gold standard science and the public health priorities identified in the MAHA report.' But as the EPA continues to roll back environmental protections despite the reassurances that the administration is aligned on MAHA, Kennedy's constituents are growing impatient. 'Our children's lives and futures are non-negotiables, and claims from the industry of 'safe' levels of exposure ignore the impacts of cumulative exposure and the reality of serious, evidence-backed risks,' the MAHA movement's recent letter says. 'The industry's call for delay or inaction is completely unacceptable — immediate and decisive action is needed now and is long overdue.' Why isn't RFK Jr. standing up to the EPA? The conflict between the two agencies' agendas has been striking: The EPA, under Zeldin, is allied with the industries it regulates and plans to deregulate as much as possible. HHS, on the other hand, is focused on its vision of making the environment safer in order to improve people's health — a goal that will inevitably require more regulations that require companies to restrict their use of certain compounds that prove to be dangerous to human health. Trump himself has said the two sides are going to have to work together and figure things out, Honeycutt noted — words that she is taking to heart for now. And the movement's leaders recognize that they are now in the business not of outside agitation but of working within the system to try to change it. 'We're not always going to be happy,' Honeycutt said. But Kennedy may be playing the weaker hand: Zeldin and his agency hold obvious advantages, and in a fight between HHS and EPA, EPA will likely win — unless, perhaps, Trump himself steps in. The biggest reason is a matter of authority: The EPA has the responsibility to regulate pollution, while Kennedy's HHS does not. The federal health agency can offer funding to state and local health departments to advance its policy goals, but it has effectively no regulatory authority when it comes to the dangerous substances identified in the MAHA report's section on chemical toxins. The EPA, on the other hand, has broad discretion to regulate the chemicals that industries pump into the American environment — or not. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin speaks, as he tours a steel plant in South Carolina in May. Kevin Lamarque/AFP via Getty Images The difference between the leadership at the two agencies is also stark: Kennedy is a former lifelong Democrat who has never held a government position; Zeldin is a seasoned GOP operator who served four terms in the US House. Kennedy has brought in an assortment of unconventional personnel at HHS, many with skepticism about mainstream science and who are viewed dubiously by the industries they oversee. At the EPA, representatives of long-entrenched polluting interests have commandeered powerful positions: Nancy Beck, a former scientist at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical manufacturing industry's trade association, for example, is now holding the position overseeing chemical safety and pollution prevention. The perception within the industry, according to insiders who spoke with Vox, is that Kennedy is, well, a lightweight. 'From the perspective of the polluter takeover of EPA, Kennedy is largely seen as inconsequential and ineffective. He's playing wiffle ball,' Symons said. 'Kennedy talks a good game, but watch carefully what's happening at EPA and all the favors being given to corporate polluters that are going to do far more damage than anything.' 'The food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe are going to get more toxic and more dangerous because of what's happening in EPA,' Symons told Vox. When it comes to jockeying for influence, Zeldin also enjoys more powerful friends in the Republican Party. He has relationships with conservative politicians and advocacy groups across the nation. Almost all of the Republican state attorneys general, for example, are motivated to roll back environmental regulations because it's compatible with their priorities in their respective states. 'A lot of this is being driven by polluter states, red states with Republican attorneys general,' Symons said. And, as evidenced by the pesticide liability relief legislation in Congress that prompted MAHA's letter to Kennedy and Zeldin, Republicans in the House and Senate remain much more allied with corporate interests — an alliance that has stood for decades — than with the public health movement that has only recently been brought inside the broader Make America Great Again coalition. It is a bitter irony for a movement that has often called out corporate influence and corruption for the government's failures to protect public health. The White House's own MAHA report cites the influence of big businesses to explain why the chronic disease crisis has grown so dire; in particular, the report says, 'as a result of this influence, the regulatory environment surrounding the chemical industry may reflect a consideration of its interests.' MAHA's leaders aren't running for the hills yet; Honeycutt said she urges her members not to vilify Kennedy or Trump for failing to make progress on certain issues. But they sense they're losing control of the agenda on the environment, forcing difficult questions onto the movement just a few months after it attained serious power in Washington. 'As for MAHA organizations, they must decide whether they are to become appendages of the Republican party, or coalesce into an effective, independent political force,' Charles Eisenstein, a wellness author who was a senior adviser to Kennedy's presidential campaign, wrote for Children's Health Defense, a once-fringe group with ties to Kennedy. 'To do that, the movement must hold Republicans accountable for undermining public health with policies like liability shields. It must not sacrifice its core priorities to curry short-term favor with the Republican establishment.' The MAHA movement is made up of concerned parents and others focused on childen's health. Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images The MAHA-MAGA political alliance is new and tenuous — many MAHA followers voted for President Barack Obama, Eisenstein points out — and it may not be permanent. And some fractures are already apparent: Honeycutt, the leader of Moms Across America and a signer of the MAHA movement's letter to Kennedy, told Vox that her own members have told her directly that they are considering voting for Democrats in the next election. Even as she urges MAHA to keep the faith, Honeycutt said that Republicans risk alienating this enthusiastic part of their coalition by going hog wild on environmental deregulation. Her group is in the process of pulling together a legislative scorecard to hold lawmakers to account. 'There could be dire consequences for the midterm elections, if they don't realize,' she said. 'We don't care if you're a Republican or Democrat. We will support whoever supports us.' Vox climate correspondent Umair Irfan contributed reporting to this story.
Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
The testosterone theory of politics
is an essayist and critic based out of New York. He's written about the intersection of technology & culture for Wired, Polygon, Mother Jones, and others. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the US Department of Health and Human Services, has supported the debunked ideas that vaccines cause autism and that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have helped cover up the link. He's skeptical of the chemicals in our foods and skies, and worries that we've veered too far from all that is good and natural. Yet for all this, he admits to taking testosterone regularly as part of his 'anti-aging protocol from my doctor.' In April, in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters, the septuagenarian began to lament the testosterone levels of our youth. 'A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man,' he claimed. When Watters expressed disbelief, he doubled down, saying that testosterone levels have dropped as much as 50 percent from 'historic levels.' It's not clear exactly what 'historic levels' he was referencing— or, for that matter, what, if any, research he was citing. It's possible that he was misinterpreting the results of a 2007 study that analyzed data gathered from adult men from the 1980s onward and observed a 1 percent decline in average testosterone levels per year (meaning that a 68-year-old man in 1997 would have had 10 percent more testosterone than a 68-year-old man in 2007). The study, however, said nothing about how teenage or young adult testosterone compared. Still, the Fox News clip made its rounds online. On platforms like X, users reshared the video and parroted Kennedy's unsubstantiated claim, voicing suspicions of an intentional campaign to weaken the nation and sounding well-worn dog whistles. 'Mass poisoning mass murder mass replacement,' read one post responding to the video. Questions of scientific literacy aside, it was clear that Kennedy had struck a chord. Testosterone is having a moment. Within the sweaty halls of the gym bro internet, the trend of testmaxxing has gathered steam, with countless videos dedicated to how someone might 'naturally' (and not so naturally) increase their testosterone levels by, say, eating nearly a dozen eggs a day or simply getting on testosterone replacement therapy. The supplements hawked by alt-right podcasters like Alex Jones are often studded with possibilities of '[supporting] normal testosterone levels in men.' Famously, in 2016, Trump paraded his testosterone levels in his presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. And lest we think obsession with testosterone is restricted to the echo chambers of the manosphere, we should bear in mind that the physique idealized in mainstream Hollywood wouldn't be possible without artificially elevated levels of it, as Alex Abad-Santos previously observed for Vox. The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was. We live in strange times, surrounded by positions that can seem like contradictions: Our HHS secretary doesn't believe in vaccines, but takes a hormone regularly; the Republican Party works tirelessly to limit access to the substance for people seeking gender-affirming care while simultaneously gutting the federal agency responsible for regulating testosterone in our farming industries (which employs it to increase the 'efficiency by which [the animals] convert the feed they eat into meat'). Meanwhile, evangelical leaders condemn trans people for existing, while also platforming doctors telling post-menopausal women to take testosterone so they might get back their curves. In many ways, testosterone sits at the crossroads of the tensions cutting through our culture today. By paying close attention to the history of the hormone and the often paradoxical roles it is made to play, we can better understand the forces shaping modern life. The road to testosterone Ask most people what testosterone is, and you'll probably hear that it's the 'male hormone.' In fact, type that very phrase into Google and all search roads will tend to lead back to T. The two are considered so interchangeably that they often function as synonyms: testosterone as the chemical essence of masculinity, masculinity as the product of testosterone. Online, this line of reasoning gets pushed to its limits. In one TikTok with more than half a million views as of this writing, a user boldly claims that 'Low testosterone is the cause of 99 percent of all male problems. When a transgender woman wants to feel like a man, she takes testosterone. Why? Because testosterone is what makes you feel like a man.' With testosterone comes all the characteristics and advantages ascribed to men: strength, mental acuity, competitiveness. Just last year, Elon Musk responded to a post on X featuring a 4Chan screenshot that argued that 'women and low T men' weren't fit for leadership because they would naturally defer to consensus beliefs, compared to 'high T alphamales' who were capable of objectively assessing a situation. 'Interesting observation,' replied the world's richest man. Despite the ubiquity and weight testosterone holds today, it's a relatively new entrant in our understanding of the body. In Testo Junkie, Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado explains that for most of Western history before the 17th century, sex was understood by a logic of similarity and inferiority. 'Female sexual anatomy was set up as a weak, internalized, degenerate variation of the only sex that possessed an ontological existence, the male,' he writes, citing the scholar Thomas Laqueur. You might call this the Eve-as-Adam's-rib model of sex. Women weren't seen as a distinct category, separate from men in their own right, as much as they were considered a 'worse' version of men. Then, at the dawn of the modern era, a new approach began to emerge. We started to create discrete categories that we might fit the world into, purifying it of ambiguity and hybridity: nature versus culture, animal versus human. Sex was no exception, and an oppositional, binary understanding of man versus woman emerged. Women and men were placed in entirely separate categories, overturning the previous understanding of women as imperfect men. Sex assignment became hyper-focused not so much on the complex web of social roles, anatomy, temperament, and reproductive capacities that organized identity previously, but on easily observable, 'mechanical' features like the shape and size of one's genitals. As Laqueur points out, organs like the ovary, which didn't even have a 'name of its own' for millennia (since it was often referred to by the same word used for male testes), became no less than a 'synecdoche for woman' during this time. These categories were 'not only natural but even transcendental,' in Preciado's words. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to phrase it, 'facts don't care about your feelings.' Today, you can still see this system hard at work whenever a troll uses a hashtag like #WeCanAlwaysTell to discredit someone's gender identity. Of course, the supposed facts didn't always line up quite so neatly with reality itself — as was the case with intersex people who challenge this paradigm — but doctors conveniently solved for this by creating sub-classifications like 'female pseudo-hermaphrodites' that still preserved the 'truly male,' 'truly female' binary. Testosterone didn't properly enter the scene until 1935. That was the year that three independent teams of researchers, each backed by a different pharmaceutical company, identified and synthesized it. There was only one catch: The long-awaited 'male hormone' didn't fit quite so neatly into the binaries that organized our understanding of the body. Research uncovered that hormones weren't exclusive to one sex. Everyone had testosterone, even if average rates tended to differ between traditional sex lines. It turns out that before menopause, women produce three times as much testosterone as estrogen. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, testosterone isn't the 'opposite' of estrogen, it's the precursor — men and women convert testosterone into estrogen using the enzyme aromatase, and higher levels of testosterone in men can actually result in higher levels of estrogen. The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was. It was born as a paradox, the double-edged essence of manhood that never was. Maximizing masculinity These tensions haunt testosterone today. On the one hand, we still largely think about sex in terms of binaries, and of testosterone as the chemical distillate of a natural and inviolable maleness. At the very extremes, testosterone has been used to violently enforce old hierarchies. In the '40s, Nazis transplanted testosterone glands into gay men's penises in a brutal attempt at conversion therapy. On the other hand, it doesn't take much to sense the unease that the fluidity of testosterone has opened us up to. If maleness or femaleness were once something you unassailably possessed at birth based on unchanging physical markers and roles, then the presence of testosterone across sexes — alongside the development of other chemical interventions that disrupted traditionally sexed functions like the Pill — contributed to the growing awareness that these categories aren't given as much as they are produced. Critically, these scientific developments happened against the backdrop of broader social movements that sought to challenge the core ideas underpinning patriarchy. As second-wave feminists critiqued the idea of a 'natural' order where men ruled, and women were integrated into more spheres of economic and social life, traditional notions of masculinity began to lose their grip. Testosterone lives between these two slowly colliding cultural tectonic plates. The desire to compare T-levels — whether it's between 'low T men' and 'high T alphamales' or teenagers and 68-year-olds — ultimately boils down to the desire to lament the state of masculinity today while simultaneously legitimizing the reality of 'maleness' by pinning it on some objective and measurable metric. In short, testosterone has become a way that men can not only ground their masculinity in a moment when our ideas of gender are more fluid than ever, but even quantify it — all while borrowing the veneer of scientific legitimacy to feel assured in their manliness. It's this tension that lets conservative mouthpieces insist on the 'immutable biological reality of sex,' as one Trumpian executive order phrased it, while simultaneously making a profit by selling supplements that claim to enhance testosterone levels (and by extension your manhood). This doublethink is on full display whenever a product like Force Factor's Test X180 Legend advertises itself with lines like, 'Let's be honest: being a man is relatively straightforward. … Biologically, to achieve this goal you want more testosterone and less estrogen – maximizing your masculinity.' Major pharmaceutical companies are competing over the growing testosterone replacement therapy market, which is set to break $2 billion in the next few years. In the same ways that marketers for Listerine generated demand for mouthwash in the 1920s by popularizing 'halitosis' (or bad breath) as a medical and treatable condition, testosterone has become positioned as a salve for the supposed crisis of masculinity today. Masculinity is now both something straightforwardly given at birth, but also always needing to be maximized through consumable supplements, a commodified 'biotech industrial artifact' as Preciado provocatively calls it. Of course, this commodity isn't available to everyone. The desire to preserve traditional boundaries also helps us understand the restrictions that have been historically applied to the hormone. One of the reasons that testosterone therapy failed to gain larger traction in the 1940s after its synthesis was that physicians were worried about its effects on women, including vocal change and hair growth. Even today, although the Food and Drug Administration has approved 31 different testosterone products for men (not to mention the many products it has approved for livestock), it hasn't greenlit a single product for women out of this fear, despite studies that indicate that testosterone could offer women a range of benefits from breast protection to osteoporosis prevention. The hormone's male bias has impeded the kind of expansive testing needed for regulatory approval and created a host of misconceptions around its effects on women, even as interest in testosterone for women appears to have grown organically in recent years. It's not hard to imagine the commercial motivation to keep it this way either. Though women might represent an untapped market, offering testosterone to women could also result in what advertisers call 'brand dilution,' or overextending a product to the point of undermining its value. Natural and unnatural In his conversation with Jesse Watters, Kennedy attributed the decline in teenage testosterone levels to the quality of food being consumed today. 'The food our kids are eating today is not really food, it's food-like substances,' he claims. He's not wrong. A recent study found that over half the calories consumed at home in the US come from ultra-processed foods, or 'industrial formulations containing no or minimal whole foods and made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods.' Like any medicine, it is both a poison and a cure depending on how it's used. Our renewed interest in testosterone isn't just about the erosion of borders between gender classifications, but about the slowly crumbling walls separating us from the world we inhabit. Around a century ago, hormones like testosterone upended our ideas about how the body communicates with itself — allowing us to see how organs could speak to each other using our bloodstreams. Now, as we discover that the world has worked its way into our bloodstreams in the form of microplastics and the 'food-like substances' we ingest daily, it makes sense that this hormone would be caught up in these broader anxieties. As one user commented in the r/Testosterone subreddit, 'hormones given to animals we eat, pollutants in the air and water, blue light from devices etc all contribute to lowering of hormone production.' High testosterone is seen as a sign of a healthy and self-regulating body, and concerns about declining hormone levels stand in for a broader concern that the natural balance in us has been disrupted by our environment. At the heart of our fascinations and fears lies the growing awareness that our bodies are far more malleable and open to the world than we once thought, that our identities are far more unstable and fluid than assumed. What remains to be seen is where we'll go from here. There are those that want to lean into this radically chemicalized body. Sports leagues like the Enhanced Games, endorsed by transhumanist types like Bryan Johnson, are experimenting with steroids and testosterone regimens in an attempt to 'redefine superhumanity.' Meanwhile, Kennedy's use of testosterone despite his vaccine skepticism comes from the desire to preserve some delineation between what is natural and synthetic — to let in what is real (testosterone) and do away with what is artificial (vaccines). Many like Kennedy are unsettled by the idea that the borders of our bodies and identities are highly permeable, and taking testosterone is a way to try to get the body back to a 'natural' state, before it was disrupted by the unnatural forces outside of us. This desire to use testosterone to protect the 'natural' also runs through evangelicals who see it as a way for women to retain their femininity as they get older, as well as industrial farmers who use it to reinforce a natural order in which animals are treated chiefly as meat for human consumption.
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
FIRST ON CNN: Dramatic lifestyle changes can fight early-stage Alzheimer's, study says. Here's how
Chronic diseases Dementia Getting older Food & healthFacebookTweetLink Follow As her memory faded from Alzheimer's disease in her late 50s, Tammy Maida began to lose track of her life. Car keys, eyeglasses and her purse disappeared multiple times a day. Key characters in novels she was reading were forgotten. Groceries were left in the garage. Keeping the books for the family's businesses became impossible. 'I honestly thought I was losing my mind, and the fear of losing my mind was frightening,' Maida told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the 2024 CNN documentary 'The Last Alzheimer's Patient.' After 20 weeks in a randomized clinical trial designed to drastically change her diet, exercise, stress levels and social interactions, Maida's cognition improved. She was able to read and recall novels and correctly balance spreadsheets again. A blood test even found levels of amyloid, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, were retreating in her brain, according to the study published in June 2024. 'I'm coming back. It was really good — like I was prior to the disease being diagnosed,' Maida, now 68, told a researcher on the study. 'An older but better version of me.' Maida's cognition showed additional improvement, however, after she completed a total of 40 weeks of intensive lifestyle changes, said principal investigator Dr. Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and creator of the Ornish diet and lifestyle medicine program. Ornish gave a study update on Tuesday at the 2025 Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Toronto. While not everyone in the 26-person interventional group benefited, 46% showed improvement in three of four standardized tests, he said, including one that measures changes in memory, judgment and problem-solving as well as the ability to function at home, practice hobbies and practice personal hygiene. 'An additional 37.5% of people showed no decline in cognition during those 40 weeks,' Ornish said. 'Thus, over 83% of patients improved or maintained their cognition during the five-month program.' The new findings mirrored those of other studies on lifestyle interventions, he said, including the recent US POINTER study, the largest clinical trial in the United States to test moderate lifestyle interventions over two years in people who are at risk but do not yet have Alzheimer's disease. 'Our study complements these findings by showing, for the first time, that more intensive lifestyle changes may often stop or even begin to reverse the decline in cognition in many of those who already have Alzheimer's disease, and these improvements often continue over a longer period of time,' Ornish told CNN. And unlike available medications for Alzheimer's, he added, lifestyle changes have no side effects, such as bleeding and swelling in the brain that may occur with the newest class of drugs. EmblemHealth, a New York-based insurance company, announced Tuesday that it will be the first health insurer to cover the Ornish lifestyle medicine program for patients who have early-stage Alzheimer's disease. The lifestyle intervention Ornish created — which he calls 'eat well, move more, stress less and love more' — has been tested before. In 1990, Ornish showed for the first time in a randomized clinical trial that coronary artery disease could often be reversed with nothing more than diet, exercise, stress reduction and social support. The US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, declared in 2010 that Ornish's program for reversing heart disease was an 'intensive cardiac rehabilitation' and that it would be eligible for reimbursement under Medicare. Additional research has shown the same four-part program can lower blood sugars and heart disease risk in patients with diabetes, reduce prostate cancer cell growth, improve depression and even lengthen telomeres, the protective caps of chromosomes that are worn away by aging. During the Ornish intervention, one group of people consumed a strict vegan diet, did daily aerobic exercise, practiced stress reduction and engaged in online support groups. The rest of the participants were in a control group and were asked to not make any changes in their daily habits. Therapists led hour-long group sessions three times a week in which participants were encouraged to share their feelings and ask for support. Meditation, deep breathing, yoga and other ways to reduce stress took up another hour every day. The program also encouraged participants to prioritize good-quality sleep. Supplements were provided to everyone in the intervention group, including a daily multivitamin, omega-3 fatty acids with curcumin, coenzyme Q10, vitamin C and B12, magnesium, a probiotic, and Lion's mane mushroom. In addition to online strength training led by a physical trainer, people in the intervention attended hour-long video classes on vegan nutrition hosted by a dietitian. Then, to ensure a vegan diet was followed, all meals and snacks for both participants and their partners were delivered to their homes. Complex carbs found in whole grains, vegetables, fruits, tofu, nuts and seeds made up most of the diet. Sugar, alcohol and refined carbs found in processed and ultraprocessed foods were taboo. While calories were unrestricted, protein and total fat made up only some 18% of the daily caloric intake — far less than the typical protein intake by the average American, Ornish said. Working harder pays off People in the intervention group who put the most effort into changing their lifestyle have the most improvement in their cognition, said Ornish, founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and coauthor of 'Undo It! How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.' 'There was a statistically significant dose-response relationship between the degree of adherence to our lifestyle changes and the degree of improvement we saw on measures of cognition,' Ornish said. The 25 people in the study's original 20-week control group — who did not receive the intervention — had shown further cognitive decline during the program. They were later allowed to join the intervention for 40 weeks and significantly improved their cognitive scores during that time, Ornish said. It all makes sense, said co-senior study author Rudy Tanzi, an Alzheimer's researcher and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston. 'If you picture a brain full of damage as a sink full of water, when you just turn off the tap, it takes a long time for that sink to slowly drain, right?' Tanzi told CNN in 2024. 'If you want the amyloid to go down in 20 weeks, as we found on one blood test, you're going to need a Roto-Rooter.' In the 2024 study, a blood test called plasma Aβ42/40 showed a significant improvement in the original intervention group. Aβ42/40 measures the level of amyloid in the blood, a key symptom of Alzheimer's. Tests that measure amyloid in different ways, however, did not show improvement, Dr. Suzanne Schindler, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who specializes in blood biomarkers told CNN at the time. There was no significant change in a test for amyloid called p-tau 181, considered to be a superior measure of Alzheimer's risk, said Schindler, who was not involved in the study. Nor was there any change in glial fibrillary acidic protein, or GFAP, another blood biomarker that seems to correlate reasonably well with Alzheimer's disease. 'If one of these markers improves, you typically see all of them improve, so the fact they did not makes me wonder whether this effect is real,' Schindler said. 'If they were to repeat the study with a much larger population for a longer period of time, perhaps more change could be seen.' Over the complete 40-week program, however, a number of people in the intervention group did continue to improve their Aβ42/40 scores, according to the study update. 'Changes in amyloid — as measured as the plasma Aβ42/40 ratio — occur before changes in tau markers such as p-tau 218, so this is not surprising after only 40 weeks,' Ornish said. For Ornish, who has watched members of his family die from Alzheimer's disease, the study's results are important for one key reason — hope. 'So often when people get a diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer's, they are told by their doctors that there is no future, 'It's only going to get worse, get your affairs in order.' That's horrible news and is almost self-fulfilling,' Ornish said. 'Our new findings empower patients who have early-stage Alzheimer's disease with the knowledge that if they make and maintain these intensive lifestyle changes, there is a reasonably good chance that they may slow the progression of the disease and often even improve it,' he said. 'Our study needs to be replicated with larger, more diverse groups of patients to make it more generalizable,' Ornish said. 'But the findings we reported today are giving many people new hope and new choices — and the only side effects are good ones.' Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN's Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.
