Wallace-Wells: Surprise, surprise.
Bedard: And it’s lower when I wake up in the morning and haven’t eaten in a while. And even still, it’s within a range of normal, and those higher values are not necessarily problematic. They just reflect that I’m taking calories in. And the lower values aren’t either. So whether that data is meaningful or will ever be meaningful, like, I don’t really know.
Wallace-Wells: But what do you make of the broader impulse here, of people like the Means siblings, asking us all, suggesting that we all start monitoring our glucose levels as though we are diabetics, recommending that the population as a whole treat our bodies as a source of constant anxiety, and really like a patient would as opposed to someone who is well?
I mean, so much of the promise of MAHA is to extract people from chronic illness and from obesity, and dozens of other things that they think we can do relatively painlessly. And yet, the process by which they’re asking us to do that really asks us all to treat ourselves as ill; and think a lot about how we’re staying on the right side of that dividing line and what might push us over it. I know you’ve thought a lot about MAHA in general — bodily autonomy, which is also tied up in here because we’re talking about a kind of health surveillance. What is going on here?
Bedard: Yeah. OK, so I would say that the Means siblings — Casey’s brother is named Calley. He works for the administration. What do I think it’s about for them? I mean, I think that they are emblematic in two ways: One, there’s a profit motive, right? She sells wearables directly to consumers, and tells them that this is the way that you’re going to revolutionize your health. The profit motive drives a ton about what products are released, how they’re marketed, all of those things. The second is that it’s very consistent with a MAHA ethos, that your lifestyle is the primary determinant of your ——
Wallace-Wells: Yeah.
Bedard: Health, right? And that ——
Wallace-Wells: And so it’s your responsibility.
Bedard: And it’s individual. So if you take responsibility and you live correctly, and you do not allow yourself to ever be exposed to the toxic substances in tap water that might make you sick, etc., etc., right? If you read Casey Means’s book, which I have, it has this really wild list of things that she claims she does around her own health, and that she encourages everyone to do, around optimizing their lifestyle and their environment and their home for wellness. And it’s very, very much like, you have to do this, and if you don’t do this, then you are putting yourself at risk. And so, I do think this is all of a piece with this very lifestyle-oriented way of thinking about — it’s wellness, not health, really. And the corollary, which is like, if you get sick, maybe you were eating the wrong things, not getting enough sleep, etc., etc.
