I grew up in a family of nine in New Delhi, where scarcity was our daily companion. We had no processed food, no artificial dyes, no glyphosate-laced cereal aisles stretching into infinity. We ate whole foods, not by philosophy, but by necessity. We moved our bodies, not by gym membership, but because life demanded it. We slept when the sun went down and woke when it rose. Circadian rhythm was not a wellness trend. It was simply life.

Then I came to America. I became a physician. And I watched, in examination room after examination room, as a country drowning in abundance became paradoxically the sickest developed nation on earth.

So when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood up and said America’s chronic disease epidemic was a crisis, when he pointed at ultra-processed food, at broken food systems, at a health care model that treats symptoms instead of causes, I felt something I had not expected: recognition. He was describing, in political language, what functional medicine physicians have been saying in clinical language for decades.

But recognition is not endorsement. And the story of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is, ultimately, a story of a real diagnosis attached to the wrong prescription.

The diagnosis MAHA gets right

The numbers are real, and they are devastating. Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease. 40 percent of Americans are diabetic or prediabetic. Over 55 percent of total daily calories consumed by Americans now come from ultra-processed foods, and for children, that number climbs to nearly 62 percent. A landmark Lancet series confirmed what functional medicine practitioners have long observed: Ultra-processed foods are associated with higher risks of heart disease, diabetes, depression, kidney disease, and early death, and their addictive properties rival those of tobacco.

These are not fringe claims. This is peer-reviewed science, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, and the lived reality of every physician who sees metabolic disease every single day.

MAHA is also right to name the structural failures. The U.S. food system has, for generations, been shaped more by commodity subsidies, lobbying dollars, and profit incentives than by public health science. The generally recognized as safe (GRAS) loophole has allowed thousands of food additives into the market without independent safety review. School lunch programs have, for decades, normalized ultra-processed food for the most vulnerable children. The chronic disease epidemic did not happen in a vacuum, it was built, brick by brick, in policy rooms and boardrooms.

As a physician who trained in functional medicine precisely because conventional care was failing my patients, I believe in root-cause thinking. I believe in food as medicine. I believe in the circadian rhythms, the gut microbiome, the inflammatory pathways that ultra-processed foods disrupt at the cellular level. On those foundational truths, MAHA and functional medicine share common ground.

Where MAHA loses the plot

Here is where the story fractures.

A movement that began by promising to hold pesticide makers accountable has, in practice, backed a presidential executive order promoting the production of glyphosate-based herbicides, invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee their supply. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent decades fighting Monsanto in courtrooms, is now defending Roundup in policy rooms. Environmental advocates who believed in the MAHA promise are asking the right question: “If there is a significant plan to detoxify agriculture from these chemicals, where is it?”

The movement that promised to rebuild trust in public health has presided over the worst measles resurgence in a generation. The U.S. documented over 2,200 confirmed measles cases in 2025, more than any year since elimination was declared in 2000. In 2026, 1,136 cases were confirmed in just the first two months. South Carolina’s outbreak alone, where 93 percent of patients were unvaccinated and 90 percent were children, became the largest single measles outbreak in modern U.S. history. MAHA-aligned groups are simultaneously fighting against legislation that would tighten measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) requirements for school entry.

The movement that claimed to champion functional health has, in many expressions, devolved into supplement grifting, fear-based marketing, and conspiracy frameworks that erode the very institutional trust needed to reform public health systems. As Newsweek noted, functional health is increasingly at risk of becoming a luxury, costing up to $25,000 annually, accessible only to affluent biohackers while the Americans who need it most are left out.

And perhaps most critically: MAHA has nothing to say about the social determinants of health. No mention of food deserts. No mention of the Medicaid cuts that are stripping coverage from 11.8 million Americans, threatening to close more than 400 hospitals. No mention of economic inequality, racial health disparities, or the communities, like the one I grew up in, where structural poverty is the root cause that no seed oil ban can fix.

What functional medicine actually teaches

I practice functional medicine not because it is fashionable, but because it asks the question that medicine too often skips: Why is this patient sick?

The answer is almost never one thing. It is a constellation, gut dysbiosis fed by years of ultra-processed food, circadian misalignment from shift work and blue light, cortisol dysregulation from chronic financial stress, hormonal disruption from endocrine-disrupting chemicals, inflammatory cascades triggered by diets that never give the immune system a rest.

Root-cause medicine means looking at all of these threads simultaneously. It means understanding that a child whose gut microbiome has been shaped by 62 percent ultra-processed calorie intake cannot be “fixed” by removing Red Dye No. 40 from Skittles, however symbolically satisfying that might be. It means understanding that vaccine-preventable diseases like measles are not wellness inconveniences, they are killers, disproportionately dangerous to immunocompromised patients, infants too young to be vaccinated, and communities with compromised access to care.

The circadian medicine principles I work with every day offer a compelling example. America’s chronic disease epidemic is not only about what people eat, it is about when they eat, when they sleep, when they move, and how profoundly the structure of modern life has severed human biology from the natural rhythms it was designed to follow. Temporal biomarkers, cortisol curves, insulin timing, sleep architecture, tell stories that no food label policy can fully address. Healing requires structure, not just substitution.

The contradiction that defines this moment

MAHA’s central contradiction is this: It correctly identifies that America is sick, then offers a treatment plan shaped more by political coalition-building than by clinical evidence.

Removing petroleum-based food dyes is good. Defining ultra-processed foods for regulatory purposes is long overdue. Scrutinizing the GRAS loophole is necessary. These are wins worth acknowledging, regardless of the political vehicle carrying them.

But a movement cannot simultaneously claim to protect children’s health while fighting vaccine mandates during a measles outbreak. It cannot claim to fight toxic chemicals while promoting glyphosate production. It cannot claim to reform food systems while cutting the Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that are the only buffer between millions of low-income Americans and the ultra-processed food their budgets can actually afford.

As a physician who has seen both the scarcity of New Delhi and the abundance of American illness, I recognize this pattern. It is the pattern of a movement that has captured the language of healing without fully committing to its practice.

What real health transformation looks like

Real transformation, the kind that happens in examination rooms, in communities, in individual bodies, looks different from a political movement. It is slower, quieter, and more demanding.

It looks like a patient understanding that their fatigue is not laziness but a broken cortisol rhythm, shaped by years of irregular sleep, chronic stress, and a diet that dysregulates their microbiome every single day. It looks like that same patient having access to care, not just a policy framework, but an actual clinician who can run the labs, interpret the biomarkers, and walk alongside them in the healing process.

It looks like a food system that makes whole food affordable, not just aspirational. It looks like school lunch programs that serve vegetables children will actually eat, not just ban the things scientists fear. It looks like Medicaid coverage that stays intact, because the patients who most need root-cause care are the ones least able to pay for it out of pocket.

It looks like vaccine coverage that stays above 95 percent, because herd immunity is itself a form of functional medicine, a community-level intervention that protects the most vulnerable members of the biological ecosystem we all share.

A physician’s verdict

MAHA deserves credit for moving chronic disease to the center of national conversation. That conversation is long overdue, and any physician who dismisses it wholesale is missing the moment.

But functional medicine has always known something that populist health movements tend to forget: The body does not heal through ideology. It heals through precision, through patience, through the honest accounting of all the variables, biological, environmental, social, and structural, that shape a human life.

America is sick. The movement that truly makes it healthy again will not be the one with the best slogan. It will be the one willing to do the hardest, least photogenic work: rebuilding trust in evidence, protecting the most vulnerable, and treating the root causes, all of them, with the rigor and compassion they deserve.

I have seen what health looks like without the infrastructure of modern medicine. I have also seen what it looks like when modern medicine ignores the wisdom that infrastructure cannot provide. The answer lies in neither extreme.

It lies, as it always has, in the patient in front of you, and the honest question: Why are you really sick?

Shiv K. Goel is a board-certified internal medicine and functional medicine physician based in San Antonio, Texas, focused on integrative and root-cause approaches to health and longevity. He is the founder of Prime Vitality, a holistic wellness clinic, and TimeVitality.ai, an AI-driven platform for advanced health analysis. His clinical and educational work is also shared at drshivgoel.com.

Dr. Goel completed his internal medicine residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and previously served as an assistant professor at Texas Tech University Health Science Center and as medical director at Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital and Metropolitan Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. He has served as a principal investigator at Mount Sinai Queens Hospital Medical Center and at V.M.M.C. and Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, with publications in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology and presentations at the American Thoracic Society International Conference.

He regularly publishes thought leadership on LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack, and hosts the Vitality Matrix with Dr. Goel channel on YouTube. He is currently writing Healing the Split Reconnecting Body Mind and Spirit in Modern Medicine.