Wearables Won’t ‘Make America Healthy Again’
Wearable health and fitness devices can do a lot, but they can’t make people healthier — no matter what U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells Congress .
I research, wear, and test wearable health and fitness technology here at Lifehacker. I’ve also had a long-standing interest in public health. I wrote a book about disease epidemics throughout history, and the piece that first brought me to the attention of Lifehacker editors, a decade ago, was published on a blog called Public Health Perspectives . So understand that I’m not new to either field when I say this: Wearables won’t “Make America Healthy Again,” Mr. Secretary. What the hell are you thinking?
What kind of wearable devices are we talking about?
In a post on the social media site X, RFK Jr. said that “wearables are putting health back in the hands of the American people,” and posted a short video in which he talked about the devices while answering questions from members of Congress. In it, he announced that his vision for the Make Americans Healthy Again program is for all Americans to use wearables within the next four years.
The brief exchange Kennedy released was extremely vague about what wearables are and how they are supposed to improve human health. (In his questioning, Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson referred to “wearables” that allow people to track their health and share that data with providers, and classified the devices as “innovative health tools.”)
In general, “wearables” can be any technology you wear, including but not limited to smartwatches and fitness trackers. Kennedy’s answer was a little more specific: He mentioned that people can use them to “see how food affects their glucose levels, heart rate, and a number of other metrics when they eat it.”
But that’s not what smartwatches do. That’s not what regular wearables do, really. If you want to see what’s happening to your glucose levels after you eat, a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) can do that. (More on those in a second.)
Tracking changes in heart rate as you eat isn’t something I’ve seen in a wearable — it’s not a typical Apple Watch feature or anything like that. Most diet trackers don’t use a wearable at all, but instead require you to manually enter data into whatever app you like ( Cronometer is my favorite free one ) without collecting any biometric data.
But OK, maybe he’s got something wrong. Smartwatches, rings, and bands can track your heart rate throughout the day, as well as your physical activity (steps and exercise), which Kennedy also mentioned. He’s certainly highlighting things that wearables makers would like to see in favorable congressional debate.
This is not about health at all.
If wearables were going to have any real impact on health care, you’d think the person who controls an entire branch of government would propose some action to make the devices more accessible or more useful to Americans. But all Kennedy mentioned in the action plan was that the branch would soon “launch one of the largest advertising campaigns in HHS history to encourage Americans to use wearables.”
Advertising campaigns are what you do when you want people to buy your product — with their own money. If you thought wearables were truly the future of public health, an appropriate action might be to provide free wearables to those who need them, or subsidize the cost of buying them. An even more important action would be to create a system for studying these wearables, providing rigorous data on accuracy and real-world usefulness while the models you tested are still on the market. (Currently, we have no way to get reliable data until the devices are nearly obsolete .)
Devices that may or may not be accurate and that don’t provide any specific benefit are hardly the focus of a national health plan. Meanwhile, the same guy pushing wearables is destroying our nation’s health care infrastructure and ripping funding out of medical research labs and public health agencies. This is the guy who founded an anti-vaccine organization before he took office, then, once in office, destroyed the expert panel that recommended vaccines for the United States . The guy helping bring back measles thinks wearables are the key to health?
No, it’s not about health at all. Kennedy seems to be working with tech companies to push their products — expensive products that project an aura of health. He’s recently met with health industry executives including Whoop (a $239-a-year subscription product) and Function Health (lab tests that go well beyond what your doctor would order, so you have to go to a separate company to get them, with packages starting at $499), to name a few.
“Health,” as MAHA defines it, doesn’t seem to be about preventing disease or making health care more accessible; it’s more about vibrations. Casey Means, the surgeon general who got her job on Kennedy’s recommendation, said it’s better to “look [a local farmer] in the eye, pet his cow, and then decide if it’s safe for me to drink milk from his farm” than to regulate the sale of raw milk. That’s not health policy; it’s an Instagram photo op.
A smartwatch or continuous glucose monitor, like a farm tour, is a largely useless luxury. You’re not protecting yourself from milk-borne pathogens by petting a cow, and you’re not making yourself healthier by obsessing over data from health apps.
Wearables are becoming more like toys
As much as I love running with a Garmin or checking my heart rate variability on my Oura ring , I know these gadgets aren’t making me healthy . If a wearable encourages you to take more steps or spend less time sitting, that’s a nudge in a healthy direction, but it’s only going to have a small impact on your overall health, and only if you’re the kind of person who enjoys chasing numbers on an app.
Anything you can do with an expensive wearable, you can do for free and on your own. You can simply decide to go for a walk after dinner every day , without knowing exactly how many steps it will take or how many active zone minutes it will get you. You can go for a run without tracking your heart rate , and your fitness will still improve. You can go to bed earlier because you feel tired, instead of needing a watch to tell you that you are five minutes lower in deep sleep this week than last week. You may forget these obvious truths if you are deep in the wearable rabbit hole, but we all know they are true, right?
Some people enjoy the gamification we get from wearables — reaching step goals and the like. But people can also obsess over these goals to a level that’s not healthy.
Which brings me to the ongoing problem with glucose monitors, or CGMs, that Kennedy mentioned and that Surgeon General Casey Means sells through the company she founded . CGMs were originally a medical device intended for people with diabetes, but they are now available to those simply interested in glucose.
Glucometers can’t make you healthy either
Knowing your glucose levels in near real time can be life-changing and life-saving if you have diabetes. But if you don’t? Not so much. Glucose, or blood sugar, levels rise and fall throughout the day, and that’s normal. Eating causes them to rise, and other activities like exercise and stress can also affect them. All of this is perfectly normal, and most doctors will tell you that there’s no need to monitor your glucose levels unless you have diabetes.
But companies like Levels (Mins’ company) encourage people to track their glucose levels for vague health reasons. The Levels app costs $199 a year, but you’ll also pay $184 for each glucose sensor. The sensor attaches to the back of your hand and transmits data to your phone. The model Levels sells lasts about 10 days , so using the sensor continuously for a year would cost thousands of dollars. CGMs are usually covered by insurance for people who need them to manage diabetes, but if you just buy one yourself, you’ll pay full price.
So Kennedy’s simple vision—you eat dinner, check your glucose levels, make healthier choices—is a staggeringly expensive and high-maintenance hobby. According to GoodRx , CGMs can cost between $1,200 and $7,000 a year, and you’ll need to log every meal into an app and change the sensor periodically. Who would do that without a compelling medical reason? More than zero people, sure (Levels has its share of satisfied customers), but it’s hardly a realistic vision for all Americans.
It’s not even clear whether there’s any benefit to tracking glucose levels for people without diabetes. A study published earlier this year found that CGMs tended to overestimate glucose levels in people without diabetes, especially when people in the study ate fruit or drank smoothies. One of the authors said of the results that “for healthy people, relying on CGMs may lead to unnecessary food restrictions or poor dietary choices.”
Americans Need Real Health Care, Not Wearables
If we were to take the MAHA folks at their word, the obvious question would be: what is this “again”? If we were healthy in the past, and wearable technology is the new thing, why don’t we ditch the technology and go back to the era when we did things right?
Of course, they’ll never give a specific time frame, because there’s not much to choose from. The 1980s, when HIV was untreated and killing countless people? The 1950s, when polio outbreaks were common? The 1920s, when diphtheria was called the “childhood plague”? Perhaps sometime in the 1800s, before antibiotics, when surgery and infected wounds could easily lead to death? Or the early 1900s, when 10% of babies didn’t survive their first birthday ?
Meanwhile, we know about a lot of things that affect health at the environmental and lifestyle levels. The scientific term for this category of knowledge is “social determinants of health,” and research in this area has been heavily criticized for being too mundane . The agencies that are supposed to provide clean air and water are also denigrated .
I’d rather Americans were healthy now , with access to vaccines and reproductive care and good research and all the other things we know help people stay healthy. Wearables don’t cover that.