\n <\/p>\n
US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and JD Vance shared a stage at the MAHA Summit in Washington DC.<\/span>Credit: Alex Wroblewski\/AFP\/Getty<\/span><\/p>\n Washington DC<\/p>\n Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House last week. The meeting\u2019s purpose was to discuss the future of health in the United States.<\/p>\n Organizers called it the MAHA Summit, referring to US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr\u2019s signature \u2018Make America Healthy Again\u2019 movement. Attendees included Kennedy, US vice-president JD Vance, NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya, US Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary and the food activist Vani Hari, who blogs under the name \u2018Food Babe\u2019. Sessions at the summit, which Nature attended, covered a wide range of health-related topics, including psychedelics, brain implants and anti-ageing therapies. Academic researchers or clinicians were not among the speakers at the sessions, which were peppered by comments critical of the medical establishment.<\/p>\n Trump team backs an unproven drug for autism \u2014 but does it work?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The conference showcased the influence of the MAHA movement, whose supporters say there is a chronic-disease epidemic in the United States that they blame in part on corruption in the food and pharmaceutical industries. To combat this epidemic, supporters advocate lifestyle choices, such as improving sleep and taking dietary supplements.<\/p>\n The movement has ascended rapidly from a loose network of Kennedy supporters into a political force that Vance, speaking at the summit, called \u201ca critical part of our success in Washington\u201d. The event also drew officials from corporate heavyweights, such as Walmart and Google, and biotechnology firms, such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t have anything like this,\u201d Robert Redfield, who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, during US President Donald Trump\u2019s first term, told Nature at the summit. \u201cBobby [Kennedy] has gotten industry to sit down with him.\u201d<\/p>\n The nearly eight-hour summit featured remarks by several officials in Kennedy\u2019s Department of Health and Human Services. Among them were Bhattacharya, who said that the \u201cMAHA movement is an absolutely incredible thing to me\u201d. He added: \u201cI have waited my entire life to see this movement come.\u201d<\/p>\n Other speakers included mixed-martial-arts promoter Dana White and actor and comedian Russell Brand. Attendees also heard health advice from Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire known for his anti-ageing \u2018biohacks\u2019, such as receiving plasma transfusions from his teenage son, and his view that his generation might be first to never die.<\/p>\n RFK Jr slings accusations and defends public-health upheaval at fiery hearing<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Throughout the event, speakers criticized established scientific and medical institutions. Both are frequent targets of Kennedy, who founded Children\u2019s Health Defense, a non-profit organization in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, that is known for its anti-vaccine advocacy. Among these speakers was Bhattacharya, who said that the NIH, the world\u2019s largest biomedical-research funder, has focused too heavily on small scientific steps instead of \u201cdisruptive\u201d or \u201cinnovative\u201d research.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat puts lives at risk is doing research that\u2019s incremental,\u201d Bhattacharya said. \u201cAll it does is advance the careers of the researchers that do it. It results in publications that don\u2019t get used and aren\u2019t replicable.\u201d<\/p>\n Makary decried \u201cgroupthink that again and again led us astray\u201d, citing as an example public-health recommendations against eating saturated fat. (Kennedy has suggested that saturated fats are part of a healthy diet; the US government has, for decades, recommended limiting saturated-fat consumption.) \u201cWe got \u2018saturated fat causes heart disease\u2019 wrong for 50 years,\u201d Makary said. \u201cThat\u2019s a war we\u2019re going to end.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and JD Vance shared a stage at the MAHA Summit in Washington DC.Credit: Alex Wroblewski\/AFP\/Getty Washington DC Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[37,4565,789,1164,2591,8315],"class_list":{"0":"post-34799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nature","10":"tag-rfk","11":"tag-starring","12":"tag-summit","13":"tag-vance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Warm praise<\/h2>\n
Follow the science<\/h2>\n