Jessica Knurick is part of our 2025 Wellness Creator Awards, a.k.a. The Healthies. See the full list here.

In April, just months after assuming the position of US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began waging a war against fluoride. First by directing the Center for Disease Control to stop recommending that communities fluoridate their water, then with praise of Utah legislative leaders for “making America healthy again” after the state stopped fluoridating water the following month. That’s when Jessica Knurick, PhD, RDN, entered the chat. She took to her platform of more than 1.4 million Instagram followers, posting an infographic that explained how tooth decay was one of the most chronic diseases among children, defending water fluoridation as “one of the most effective public health strategies we have…And yet here we are.”

Her sharp and immediate rebuttal was catnip to an audience enraged by the public health decisions made this year under RFK Jr. Comments and DMs flooded in, ranging from rage toward, or in defense of, the MAHA movement to analysis of our current policies to gratitude that someone, anyone, had stepped up to be the voice of reason. You could argue Dr. Knurick’s feed looks a lot like the scientific method in real time: a jumble of contradictory data, testing, and attempts at proving and disproving claims—but an evolving dialogue nonetheless.

In a moment where Americans have become disillusioned with our health care system, and rogue health conspiracies have gained real traction, Dr. Knurick has found fame debunking the peculiar pastiche of arguments on which the MAHA movement has been constructed. The dietitian and chronic disease expert, who got her start offering diet and lifestyle tips to new moms, has become known for her detailed, unsparing MAHA fact-checks and easy-to-follow health tips. Her videos decode the complicated world of nutrition, breaking down how our food systems work and the way health misinformation is spawned and spread. She creates a sense of urgency around dry general-health information by positioning her messaging around America’s public health crisis, often directly engaging with the most egregious of MAHA’s antics. Her most viral video to date, for instance, is of her responding to RFK Jr. struggling to read a list of ingredients that he finds difficult to pronounce.

“It used humor and clarity to expose how pseudoscience often relies on fear, not facts,” says Dr. Knurick. “And showed that just because something is hard to pronounce doesn’t mean it is harmful. I think it resonated with people who are tired of fear-based wellness messaging and want science explained in a grounded, relatable way.”