A Familiar Spike in Magical Thinking on Health and Wellness
It’s here again – a familiar spike in magical thinking about health and wellness. Our new president has installed an evangelist for raw milk, vaccine cynicism, and psychedelics to lead his department of health and human services. Because MAHA rhymes with MAGA so nicely, it is completely unsurprising.
But it’s unsurprising for a more fundamental reason. Magical health thinking is an impulse in American popular culture, ever present, that peaks from time to time around a cult of personality.
The Bernarr Macfadden Phenomenon
Jessica Grose writes that we seem to produce such a spike in magical thinking on health and wellness about once every century. As the example from last century, she tells us about Bernarr Macfadden:
“The wrestling champion Bernarr Macfadden loved raw milk and cold plunges. He hated vaccines and despised white flour, which he called ‘dead food.’ His greatest enemy after white flour was the American Medical Association. He thought that the sedentary weakness of the American people was a crime and that overeating was wicked, writing, ‘Hardly a home exists that is not made unhappy, to a greater or less extent, by this habit,’ in a book called ‘Strength From Eating.’
“Mr. Macfadden was a genius of self-promotion – he understood that flooding the zone with his ideas and his scantily clad body via tabloids, magazines and radio was the key to spreading his gospel.”
Today, we have better science and better tools (e.g., social media) for flooding the zone with pseudoscience and cynically profitable misinformation. But the pattern is the same.
As the largest measles outbreak in three decades rages in West Texas and New Mexico, we also have a stark reminder. The entertaining distraction of magical thinking has a very real downside.
For gift access to Grose’s essay, click here. For the story of Bernard Macfadden reinventing himself as Bernarr, click here.
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February 23, 2025
