Removing one food ingredient from your home is first step to 'doing MAHA,' influencer says

Fox News

27-02-2025

A supporter of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) has some strong beliefs about the rise of the movement, the biggest misconceptions about it and how people can easily incorporate some of its most basic principles into their daily routines.
Alex Clark, the Arizona-based founder of the health and wellness podcast "Culture Apothecary," which launched in Sept. 2024, said she was involved in MAHA early on, even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s confirmation on Feb. 13, 2025, as President Donald Trump's Health and Human Services secretary.
"What's funny is, I guess I was doing MAHA — before it was MAHA — in 2021," she told Fox News Digital. (See the video at the top of this article.)
"I was completely radicalized on pharma and food during the pandemic," said Clark, who is also a contributor to Turning Point USA.
She said she started to ask questions about pharmaceutical companies — which then led to questions about "big food" and organic food.
Clark is also involving her followers in discussions about MAHA.
"I started talking about it with my audience of really young conservative women, 25 to 35 [years old], [those who are also] graduating [from] college or just starting their families," she said.
"And none of us really had known any of this."
Clark said she looks at the original creators of what is now MAHA and said its basic principles are not as new as people may think.
She also said it's not as politically leaning in one direction or another as some have suggested it is.
"The original MAHA people were actually crunchy, liberal feminist hippies in the '60s and '70s," she said. "That was MAHA. It was never conservatives."
Clark added, "So this idea that it's only radical right-wing extremists who care about exercise and organic food and raw milk, that they're all conservative crazies — that's absolutely not historically true … It was not your suburban Republican housewife. That's very new. And a lot of them are my audience on 'Culture Apothecary.'"
Clark said her audience has shifted over the years – and noted how active so many mothers have been in the MAHA movement.
"They want help. They want change."
"There's nobody that's going to fight harder than a mom who's dealing with a sick child," said Clark.
"They will do anything. They are desperate. They want help. They want change."
Having a MAHA mentality isn't intimidating, said Clark — and can be as easy as focusing on one ingredient at a time.
"Pick one ingredient that you want to learn about," she said.
"So, let's say in the news you've heard people talking about artificial food dyes or seed oils — and you don't know anything about any of this stuff," she said.
"Say [to yourself], 'OK, I'm going to get to know what this is. I'm going to get to know what it looks like on an ingredient label. I'm going to eliminate everything from my freezer, my fridge, my pantry, that [has] these ingredients.'"
It may take some time — weeks, months or even a year, she said.
But the goal is to feel confident when spotting the singular ingredient a person has chosen to focus on.
Once there's a full understanding of that item, people can then transition to other items — such as natural flavors or food dyes — and start to eliminate those things from their diets and their family's diets as well, according to Clark.
"You can always make sure, 100% of the time, that you're avoiding things like seed oils and artificial dyes," she said. "Eat real food, whole food, all lowercase letters – whole foods."
She added, "Whole foods, apples, grass-fed ground beef, chicken breast, eggs, asparagus, green beans and oranges … If you can afford to go the organic route, great. But if you can't, eating even conventionally farmed ground beef that's not organic is going to be better than [eating] ultra-processed hot pockets with mystery ingredients that you can't pronounce."
"If the American mom can first pick an ingredient to focus on, to learn about — or just focus on eating real foods — that's the best place to start in cooking meals at home," she said.
"The biggest price you're going to have to pay is actually just convenience and time. It is going to take a little bit more time to make that meal at home, but actually it's going to cost less."
It is her belief that big food corporations will start to eliminate the very ingredients parents are trying to remove from their homes and from their kids' public school lunches.
"[California] announced that they're banning all artificial dyes from their schools, [and] Texas is right on their heels," she said.
"Texas is working diligently on this."
"If both California and Texas ban artificial dyes from schools or even statewide and say, 'These have to be heavily regulated,' or 'We're not having them in our states,' the different food companies who are making products with these ingredients are going to have to change," she said.
"You cannot be making [your product] for all [the rest] of the 48 states," Clark said.