Today, the term [‘crunchy mom’] has taken on a new meaning. Yes, the crunchy moms are still organic, still love wooden toys. But now, many are right-wingers, too, and RFK Jr. — with his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign — is their hero. Medical freedom is their rallying cry. Food dye, pasteurized milk, big pharma, big food, and often vaccines and the entire health care system, are their villains.

Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said the new breed of crunchy mom is more distrustful of established science and expertise. Before, she said, “there was not the same sentiment of, ‘We’re trying to escape from these experts,’ or ‘The government is misleading us.’

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Taillie, a Ph.D. whose work focuses on evaluating food policy efforts in the United States and globally, finds the crunchy moms’ emphasis on “doing my own research” infuriating. “I spent a decade in school training to have expertise to do research,” she said, “and you have crunchy influencers pointing to blog posts or anecdotal evidence.”

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