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The first time I was hospitalized at 18 for my then-undiagnosed chronic illness—with an extremely puffy face, hives, nausea, and trouble breathing—I was told the cause was anxiety. I know firsthand how frustrating it is to be undiagnosed with serious symptoms, and how tempting it can be to reach for any explanation that promises answers. What I actually had was an autoimmune disorder called vasculitis that causes my blood vessels to become inflamed. I’ve dealt with chronic inflammation where my immune system attacks itself ever since.
My dad heard from someone whose kid also had vasculitis. He claimed that the kid was able to move out of a wheelchair because of a diet promoted by former cardiothoracic surgeon and Goop contributor Dr. Steven Gundry. I told him this was likely an example of the placebo effect; my dad pushed Gundry’s book onto me for a year and asked me to speak to my doctors about it. My dad believed it would curb my inflammatory autoimmune disorder
There is no rigorous evidence that Gundry’s lectin-free diet works and may actually be harmful, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Gundry has also pushed questionable theories about other health topics too. In an episode on the popular Doctor Mike’s YouTube channel in defense of his diet, Gundry argued that smoking can actually make some people live longer. It finally took my pro-vaccine dad reading Gundry’s Wikipedia page—which includes Gundry’s claim in an abstract that mRNA Covid vaccines “dramatically increase” inflammation—for him to leave me alone on this topic. A Reuters report says that Gundry’s abstract, which alsoreceived an extensive correction, doesn’t contain “reliable evidence.” Conversely, research does show that Covid vaccines decrease inflammatory markers when people get a Covid infection.
In a statement, Gundry acknowledged that “large, long-term randomized controlled trials of this [lectin-free] dietary approach do not yet exist,” and he welcomes researchers to look further into his diet. Gundry also said he does not endorse smoking and “nothing in my work suggests anyone should smoke.” Gundry also said he is not anti-vaccine and that he asks “only that my work be represented as what it is: an observational finding, reported transparently, that invites further research.”
My dad is not an outlier when it comes to being sucked into promises of health improvement. He’s one node in a much larger web of inflammation misinformation—one that now stretches from wellness podcasts all the way to the highest levels of the federal government
At a press conferencein August 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that when he watches children walking through airports, he can tell that they are “overburdened” with “inflammation” as evidence that children have more health problems today
Inflammation also makes an appearance in the executive order establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission, with President Donald Trump ordering that the committee “assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children with respect to chronic inflammation.”
While some health advocates believe raising awareness about inflammation is important, the MAHA movement has twisted it,devaluing the struggles chronically ill people with inflammatory disorders actually face.The children may not be alright, but the root cause of their problems, for the most part, is not inflammation
This inflammation craze did not start with the MAHA movement. It has been present in wellness circles for years. Current Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services head Dr. Mehmet Oz has promoted a wide variety of unproven supplements and diets that supposedly reduce inflammation. If you scroll on TikTok, you’ll findabsurd claims that people to need to be brought into ketosis to bring down inflammation, as well as promotion of many supplements.
“They just keep taking medical and research-related terms and concepts to sort of gaslight us and increase their wellness grift,” Dr. Jean Liew, a rheumatologist based in Boston, told me
Inflammation is not inherently bad. We would die if we did not have any inflammation, immunologist and biomedical scientist Andrea Love told me. People have inflammation around cuts, for instance, as it is our body’s way of healing itself
“A lot of the times that stuff that’s probably been circulating in the wellness community, the first time I hear about it is when the patient asks me about it, and all I can say is, ‘I have never heard of that before. ‘”
“It’s constantly occurring in your body at all times, and it’s actually critical for processes,” said Love, who runs the informational websiteImmunologic. “Normally, your immune system does a really good job of regulating it with all the anti-inflammatory processes.”
However, “there’s often this nugget of truth,” Love said, when it comes to popular discourse around inflammation. There are people like me who legitimately do have negative inflammatory problems, but we’re not the majority of the population. That’s what helps make pseudoscience around inflammation so effective
Scrolling through TikTok, one may come across an influencer talking about leaky gut, which is not a real diagnosis. They will probably be talking about how important it is to manage inflammation. Love says they are probably going to sell you a product or encourage you to detox, which your body does on its own. The reason these wellness influencers may be so effective is that they borrow from phenomena that actually happen to people
“In things like celiac disease or ulcerative colitis, pathology is legitimate inflammation in the GI tracts because there’s tissue damage occurring,” Love said. But that’s not what happens in a pseudoscience diagnosis. Of course, people who cling to this diagnosis may actually be chronically ill, but the pseudoscience-for-profit will not actually help them manage their chronic illness for the long term
Love said that experiences like the one I had with my dad show that “most of these people have good intentions” when spreading pseudoscience directly to people they care about. “They’re trying to empathize in the way that they know how,” Love said, “and it’s because they heard from a friend.”
And for chronically ill people themselves who fall down pseudoscience rabbit holes, their doctors can play an important role in addressing disinformation in a kind way. But there is a problem: there is so much out there that doctors cannot simply know all of it
“A lot of the times that stuff that’s probably been circulating in the wellness community, the first time I hear about it is when the patient asks me about it, and all I can say is, ‘I have never heard of that before,’” Liew told me. “I can say, ‘I’ve never heard of that before. I’m not aware of any data on that, so I can’t advise you on that,’ and then I can say, ‘I’ll look into it and see what I find and get back to you.’”
MAHA and wellness circles’ idea of inflammation also hurts people, whether or not they deal with legitimate chronic inflammatory problems, medical anthropologist Laura Gilchrest told me
“It creates hierarchies of deserving and undeserving people,” said Gilchrest, who lives with chronic illnesses herself. “It creates this non-medically valid division of healthy and unhealthy.”
We live in a country that has long had a relationship with eugenics, which Trump and Kennedy have very much made visible. If someone isn’t considered healthy—including if they exist in a bigger body—they bring less value to society, or so the MAHA narrative goes. Even the risk of being seen as a potential burden to the government by being sick should be avoided by bringing down inflammation. Except the tips and tricks promoted by MAHA and wellness influencers to bring down inflammation are often just placebo effects at best. Because I reject this twisted version of what inflammation means, I’ll eat what makes me happy. If I’m enjoying a meal, that doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong.
Some people with chronic conditions are stuck in a hellhole of unmanaged inflammation because their conditions have been historically brushed aside by doctors and have lacked comprehensive biomedical funding. Gilchrest raises polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, which is a common hormonal disorder, as an example
“People who suffer with this complex disease, which is characterized by inflammation, are in the states that they’re in because it was ignored for so long, because it was disregarded,” Gilchrest said
Inflammation has also become a buzzword among a lot of anti-vaxxers. On the Joe Rogan Experience in June 2023, Kennedy claimed that an animal study showed mercury from vaccines caused “severe inflammation” in monkeys’ brains. Kennedy also claimed that he spoke about this with vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, who refutes this narrative in a Substack: “But RFK Jr. lied when he said that the mercury had caused ‘severe inflammation.’ Burbacher didn’t report any evidence of inflammation, writing, ‘no serious medical complications were observed in any of the monkeys.’”
I’ve also seen inflammation panic spread by people who are at least somewhat critical of Kennedy and MAHA. On social media, I’ve seen the repeated claim that all Covid is airborne vasculitis. It’s just not, though it can mimic vasculitis in some instances. Not all serious vascular problems are vasculitis, although they can have overlapping properties. However, Covid infections can trigger vasculitis on rare occasions
While data scientists or self-proclaimed health communication experts may not be selling anything, spreading misinformation about inflammation doesn’t do anything to make the general public understand how my debilitating condition works. We can talk about Covid in serious ways that are accurate, which does include the devastating impacts of Long Covid
Living with inflammatory diseases can absolutely suck, but inflammation is not the downfall of American public health. Turning it into a buzzword just makes it a gimmick, instead of truly understanding what it does well and also makes people feel guilty that they must not be doing enough to be healthy
