Tucker Carlson Got a Cease-and-Desist from Big Tobacco for Shilling Their Product TOO Hard. Now MAHA Is All In on Nicotine.
The big picture: Tucker Carlson and a growing roster of MAHA-aligned health influencers, including Dave Asprey and Jillian Michaels, are pushing nicotine pouches as a cognitive enhancer, longevity hack, and miracle cure. The science does not back up those claims. The financial conflicts are everywhere. And Philip Morris itself had to formally ask Tucker to stop overselling their own product.
Why it matters: Nicotine pouch use among young people has nearly quadrupled since 2022. The “natural wellness” framing gives Big Tobacco a brand-new customer pipeline while MAHA influencers with direct financial stakes reach audiences of millions.
Tucker vs. Philip Morris is the single strangest part
Tucker has pitched Zyn as a “life-saving medical product,” a male “vitality” enhancer, and “the hand of God reaching down and massaging your central nervous system.” You may have seen the viral Theo Von clip where he joked about Zyn fixing erectile dysfunction. What you may not have seen is what happened next. Philip Morris International, the company that owns Zyn, sent Carlson a formal letter saying his claims “lack a scientific foundation” and risked “a misunderstanding and misuse of our products.” In other words, the tobacco company asked the tobacco influencer to tone it down.
Tucker’s response was to launch his own brand, ALP Nicotine Pouches, in partnership with Turning Point Brands, marketed as the “non-woke” alternative to Zyn. His new line reportedly helped boost his partner company’s nicotine sales by 63% in summer 2025. So he now profits every time someone buys in.
The broader influencer grift
Dave Asprey, the biohacker behind Bulletproof Coffee, has been pushing nicotine for years as a cognitive enhancer. According to STAT News, Asprey is an investor in Lucy, a nicotine pouch company, and has done consulting work for Philip Morris. On his own site he offers readers a 20% discount code on Lucy products.
Jillian Michaels, the MAHA-aligned celebrity fitness trainer, has claimed on her podcast that low-dose nicotine helps protect against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, treats her ADHD, and is “not toxic.” The actual medical consensus says the opposite on all three.
And Alex Clark, host of Turning Point USA’s “Culture Apothecary” podcast, ran an entire episode called “Nicotine is NOT the Villain: What Big Pharma Hides from Parents,” telling listeners that “everything” they’ve been told about nicotine “has been a lie.”
What the science actually says
Nicotine raises blood pressure, adrenaline, and heart rate. It increases heart disease risk. It harms brain development up to age 25. It is highly addictive, with many young users reporting daily use within weeks of starting. And research shows tobacco-free pouches can prime nicotine-naive users for later tobacco addiction. The influencer talking points about cognitive enhancement, longevity, and disease prevention are either preliminary research being vastly oversold or have no evidence behind them at all.
The pattern is the tell
“The mainstream medical establishment is hiding a natural cure” is the exact playbook MAHA has used to sell raw milk, beef tallow, unregulated peptides, and now nicotine. Every time, the influencer delivering the message has a financial stake in the product being promoted. Every time, the research is “preliminary.” And every time, the product being sold turns out to be the same thing the “mainstream” was warning about in the first place.
By the numbers:
4x — rise in nicotine pouch use among young people, 2022–2025 (CDC Foundation / TEEN+)
2x — rise in teen pouch use in just one year, 2023–2024 (Stanford Medicine)
35% — share of pouch users in the U.S. who previously smoked (American Lung Association)
25 — age at which the human brain finishes developing, per CDC
68.7% — share of teen pouch users who use Zyn specifically, per 2024 CDC data
63% — growth in Turning Point Brands’ nicotine sales after ALP launched, summer 2025
0 — scientific studies backing nicotine as a cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or Covid
The bottom line: The MAHA movement loves to frame itself as the underdog against corporate medicine. But on nicotine, the same movement is the corporate medicine. The product is made by Big Tobacco, the health claims are not backed by research, the promoters are on the payroll, and the people most likely to get hooked are young people who have never used nicotine before. If you hear a wellness influencer tell you the mainstream is hiding a miracle cure, the first question is always “who pays them.”
STAT News | CDC Foundation | Stanford Medicine | USA Today | Yahoo Finance
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