Some cool folks

Posted by Yasmin Tayag

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/restaurant-snack-meal-menu/686220/?utm_source=feed

The eating habits of American adults have, in recent years, begun to resemble those of hobbits. Maybe you, too, have scarfed down scrambled eggs at home in the morning, only to arrive at the office and supplement them with a protein bar for second breakfast and a bag of chips for elevenses. The late-afternoon pastry and banana-bread mocha latte have proliferated—and for humans, at least, may become an existential threat to dinner.

Blame the coronavirus pandemic; blame Ozempic; blame inflation. Whatever the cause, intermediary bites and sips make up a growing portion of Americans’ daily consumption, especially among young people, as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote in 2024. The shift has now become so pronounced that restaurants are adapting to it. Chains that primarily offer meals are rolling out smaller and cheaper options—solid and liquid alike—in the hope of capturing customers who just want a snack. And in the past two years, the nation’s fastest-growing restaurant brands have been those specifically oriented toward that audience.

The restaurant industry subscribes to an extremely broad definition of snacking. Any item consumed outside the traditional breakfast, lunch, and dinner “dayparts”—industry lingo for eating occasions throughout the day—can be considered a snack, David Henkes, a food-and-beverage analyst at the food-industry research firm Technomic, told me. That includes beverages, as long as they’re purchased at a restaurant during off-meal hours; both a high-protein espresso smoothie and a black coffee count. In this view, the most important characteristic of a snack is not content or form but versatility, David Portalatin, a food-service-industry expert at the research firm Circana, told me. In fact, he said, one of the biggest drivers of the snacking trend is consumers’ demand for flexibility.

In the past few years, snacks—especially sweet ones—have powered immense growth among quick-service restaurants, a category that includes stalwarts such as McDonald’s as well as more recent arrivals such as the China-based Luckin Coffee. According to preliminary estimates from Technomic, the top-10 fastest-growing brands in the United States last year were cafés or dessert shops. Most are known for specialty drinks. The fastest-growing chain of 2025 was 7 Brew, which specializes in ultra-customizable sugary drinks such as the Cookie Butter (a creamy espresso concoction flavored with toasted marshmallow, hazelnut, and white chocolate) and the Pink Mermaid 7 Fizz Soda (a bubbly drink with notes of strawberry, watermelon, and coconut). Last year, the company opened 280 new stores, and Technomic projects that it made more than $900 million in sales. Second on the list was Swig, which sells soft drinks flavored with creams and syrups—popularly known as “dirty sodas”—followed by HTeaO, a Southern-style-iced-tea chain. The drinks sold at these chains are descendants of the Frappuccino, one of the earliest chain-restaurant products to blur the line between beverage and snack. Yet even as Starbucks attempts to refocus on coffee by moving away from desserts masquerading as drinks, newer chains are making no pretenses about selling beverages that can easily tide someone over through a mealtime or two.

[Read: How snacks took over American life]

Some brands have realized that snack time can call for a beverage and food. Last year, Dutch Bros Coffee, best known for its saccharine, candy-colored beverages, began rolling out small, hot breakfast items—egg sliders, a single waffle—across its stores to supplement its existing snack menu. The South Korea–based companies Paris Baguette and Tous les Jours, which were also among the top-10 fastest-growing brands of last year, serve baked goods and desserts in addition to coffee- and tea-based drinks. Tous les Jours’ snacks are geared toward younger customers “who are replacing traditional meals with smaller, more intentional indulgences,” Regina Schneider, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me.

Well-established restaurant chains best known for selling full meals are getting into the snack game too. A common strategy is offering smaller versions of typically sandwiched items in the form of a wrap. Last year, McDonald’s reintroduced the chicken Snack Wrap, a palm-size crispy chicken strip enveloped in a tortilla. (It was discontinued from menus in 2016 because it was a nightmare to assemble quickly, but McDonald’s says that it has streamlined the process.) Similarly diminutive and affordable chicken wraps rolled out at Sonic and Popeyes. Chipotle’s interim chief marketing officer, Stephanie Perdue, told me that the company is catering to demand for protein-laden options “across more occasions, especially snack-sized portions at accessible prices.” Accordingly, in December, Chipotle introduced a chicken taco and what the company described as its first-ever snack: the High Protein Cup, a four-ounce container of chopped chicken or steak. The items cost less than $4 each. Even sit-down restaurants are expanding their appetizer and side-dish offerings; earlier this year, TGI Fridays introduced new sampler platters, which were designed to give “guests a snackable option that fits any daypart,” Lauren Perez, the company’s senior vice president of global marketing, told me. Some TGI Fridays locations are even testing a kids’ menu for all ages, she said.

The snackification of restaurants, as one might call it, is partly a response to Americans’ desire for lower-calorie options. GLP-1 use, weight-loss attempts, and the popularity of lean protein are driving that demand, Portalatin said. Circana data show that 35 percent of restaurant-goers say that they’re ordering smaller portions than they have in the past, and roughly 75 percent of that group say that they’re doing so for health reasons. Some restaurants offer not only smaller items but also foods that evoke wellness. Marketing for Chipotle’s High Protein Cup, for example, touts the 32 grams of protein it contains. In January, Dunkin’ added Protein Milk drinks to its menu; they can include caffeine, B vitamins, and more than 15 grams of protein.

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

As American work habits become decoupled from traditional mealtimes, people want to eat in a way that’s convenient for that new paradigm, Portalatin said. Busy workdays and, especially among younger generations, guilt about taking breaks lead half of American employees to skip lunch at least once a week, according to a recent survey. “People all across the country are looking up from their desks at 2 in the afternoon and going, Oh, I didn’t have lunch, but I need something,” Portalatin said. Plus, thanks to the pandemic, a significant chunk of American employees are working from home, which means they have fewer organic opportunities to eat meals outside the house. These workers are part of the reason that the share of lunches purchased at a restaurant—the most lucrative daypart in the business—is 5 percent lower than it was in 2019, Portalatin said. Yet remote workers haven’t given up on restaurants altogether; they’re just visiting off-hours. “If you work at home, you’re like, Well, I’ve got to get out once in a while,” Sam Oches, the editor in chief of Nation’s Restaurant News, a trade publication, told me. A jaunt outside for a change of scenery between meetings may not offer enough time for a sit-down meal, but it presents a natural opportunity to pick up a snack—a little reward, perhaps, after a productive stretch. The popularity of drive-through chains such as 7 Brew and Swig reflect that shift in behavior, Oches said.

That little reward is crucial to understanding why snackification endures. As the cost of living has increased because of inflation, people are spending less at restaurants. Yet they’re loath to give them up altogether. When people decide to eat out, they consider not just the cost but also “the quality, the convenience, and the craveable indulgence that I can’t get for myself at home,” Portalatin said. These factors strongly shape appetite, even when finances are an issue. “At the end of the day, Americans love restaurants,” Oches said. And a $3 Snack Wrap gets you just as much of the McDonald’s experience as a combo meal that can cost $10 or more.

[Read: The worst sandwich is back]

Restaurants going all in on snacking is more than just a trend. It’s a major step in codifying America’s upended eating patterns. Restaurants will never entirely abandon breakfast, lunch, and dinner, experts told me, but for the foreseeable future, they’ll likely continue introducing items that people can eat whenever and wherever they need to. In that regard, the rise of snacking is anything but hobbit-like: The abundant mealtimes of Bilbo and his kin were occasions to take a break from the daily grind and savor the pleasure of eating. Ours allow us to keep eating as the wheel turns.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/restaurant-snack-meal-menu/686220/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Harsha Thirumurthy

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/cash-transfer-success/686104/?utm_source=feed

Of all the ways that governments can try to help people, cash transfers can seem like one of the most straightforward. Their popularity has been growing: Over the past decade, dozens of American cities have launched cash-transfer pilots. During the coronavirus pandemic, governments worldwide dramatically expanded their own programs’ reach. And as AI reshapes work, the idea of guaranteed income—a specific kind of recurring, no-strings-attached cash payment—is moving into the mainstream.  

Yet while the provision of cash has saved many lives in dozens of low- and middle-income countries, it has seemingly produced only modest health gains in the United States. Guaranteed-income pilots also haven’t delivered the dramatic health improvements associated with cash-transfer programs elsewhere. Why does cash save lives in Tanzania but barely move the needle in Texas?

From our work studying cash-transfer programs across 37 countries, we’ve come to see a consistent logic behind why cash succeeds in some places and falls short in others. Cash transforms health when four particular conditions are met. Most U.S. cash-transfer pilots have lacked them. But one major American policy does come close: the federal food-assistance program SNAP. Its success offers a road map for what effective cash assistance can look like in this country, if we choose to build on it.

First among the necessary conditions, cash infusions must be large enough to change one’s daily reality. In many low-income countries, a modest amount, on the order of $20 a month or less, can represent a major share of household income. For families living in extreme scarcity, a small influx of funds can expand their food budget, allow children to get vaccinated, or help a mother reach a hospital to deliver safely. These changes are big enough to save lives.

In the U.S., by contrast, a few hundred dollars a month for a relatively short period of time, typical of guaranteed-income pilots, rarely matches the steep costs of housing, child care, and health care. The support modestly eases financial instability but doesn’t fundamentally alter the constraints that low-income families face.

Second, cash must be able to remove specific barriers that block good health. In the countries we studied, many of the leading causes of death—HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition—are tightly linked to poverty. Families face life-threatening obstacles that a small amount of money can help them overcome, by creating access to transportation, better nutrition, a skilled birth attendant. When families have a little more income, the health effects can be immediate and profound.

In the U.S., the dominant health problems are chronic diseases shaped by neighborhood environments, structural inequities in housing and health care, and years of accumulated risk from unhealthy diets and other long-term exposures. These problems are far less responsive to short-term financial boosts. Cash can reduce stress and improve stability, but it cannot, on its own, undo the deep roots of these conditions. Yet in certain periods of life—such as during and after pregnancy—cash can have an immediate impact because health outcomes hinge on whether people can meet their basic needs and show up for health care when it matters most.

Third, scale matters. Successful cash-transfer programs reach large portions of the population. When millions of people receive support, the benefits spread beyond individual households, which helps explain why such programs have reduced mortality across entire countries. U.S. pilots have been small, reaching only hundreds or thousands of families—too limited to change the broader conditions that shape health outcomes.

Finally, cash works best when it is woven into social infrastructure that families already rely on. In many low- and middle-income countries, payments are linked with health visits and other essential services. Brazil’s Bolsa Família program, for instance, operates alongside an extensive primary-care system and has been credited with preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths. In the U.S., cash-transfer studies and guaranteed-income pilots are typically disconnected from other programs that translate cash into health gains.

These conditions help put common criticisms of such programs in perspective. Fears that cash discourages work or fuels spending on alcohol or drugs have not held up in the research. Across rich and poor countries, cash transfers have minimal or positive effects on work and do not increase drinking, smoking, and other substance use.

Although many U.S. pilots have fallen short, SNAP is the one American program that comes closest to the global success stories. Its payments are large enough to meaningfully reduce poverty. The program targets a barrier, food security, directly tied to health and survival. It reaches more than 40 million people. And it is administered through state systems that connect it, albeit imperfectly, with other public systems, including Medicaid and school meals. It is no coincidence that SNAP is the only U.S. income-support program convincingly linked to improved survival. In many ways, it resembles the global cash-transfer programs that have delivered the largest health gains.

Although SNAP benefits currently remain too small to eliminate food insecurity for many households, expansions during the Great Recession and the pandemic demonstrated that larger benefits and smoother access can make the program far more effective. SNAP’s impact is greater when benefits are adequate and when eligible households can easily stay enrolled. Instead of incorporating these lessons, changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act move in the opposite direction—tightening eligibility and cutting funding in ways that could mean millions lose their benefits. (The Trump administration has justified these cuts in part by arguing SNAP is rife with fraud and abuse. Fraud does occur, as it does in any large federal program. But by the government’s own estimations, this represents a small fraction of SNAP spending, and the large majority of the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. spends on the program benefit Americans.)

SNAP is not the only instructive example. The U.S.’s earned-income tax credit can also deliver a sizable cash benefit, typically as a lump sum, that low- and moderate-income workers can use to catch up on bills, pay down debt, or cover necessities. Because it is built into the tax-filing process, it avoids eligibility churn and can be readily expanded by states. It’s not a health program, but past expansions have been linked to improved child health. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, is much smaller than SNAP in scope and generosity, but it’s integrated with local clinics and pairs food support with nutrition counseling and care referrals for pregnant and postpartum women, as well as infants and young children. By increasing access to healthy foods during a crucial period, and freeing up money that would otherwise go to groceries, WIC has been linked to improved birth outcomes and infant health.

Smaller programs can also have a clear impact if they are designed to meet the four conditions. Rx Kids, launched in Flint, Michigan, in 2024, offers cash transfers to parents and infants and closely follows the global playbook: It has a meaningful transfer size, near-universal reach within the city, benefits that target pregnancy and infancy, and links to the health system. Early evaluations of the program suggest substantial improvements in birth outcomes. The political will for such an approach at the federal level may not exist, but Flint shows what local efforts can achieve when the conditions are right. Michigan’s recent decision to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to expand Rx Kids statewide, enough to reach roughly one-third of all births, suggests a plausible U.S. path to scale.

Although these programs require public investment, the returns can be high. For young children, SNAP delivers roughly $60 in benefits for every dollar spent. The question is not whether cash is misused, but whether we choose to structure programs at the size and under the conditions where cash does the most good. Cash is not a cure-all. But when designed with the right basic ingredients, cash transfers are one of the most powerful levers that governments have to alleviate poverty and improve health.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/cash-transfer-success/686104/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Tom Bartlett

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/casey-means-confirmation-maha-subdued/686147/?utm_source=feed

Updated at 9:53 a.m. ET on February 26, 2026.

Casey Means has, to say the least, modified her tone. When she testified today in front of the Senate’s health committee, the nominee for surgeon general didn’t, as she is normally wont to do, delve into her experiences with psychedelics or endorse raw milk. She also did not rail at length against birth control. Instead, the longtime health entrepreneur and influencer emphasized her medical degree from Stanford—even though she does not have an active medical license—and sought out common ground with the senators cross-examining her.

Before her nomination last spring, Means—who dropped out of her surgical residency in 2018—embraced some unconventional theories about wellness. As Rina Raphael wrote for The Atlantic last month, Means has talked to trees, implied that natural disasters are a “communication from God,” and dubbed the nation’s health “a spiritual crisis.” When she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in 2024, she denounced seed oils and suggested that the widespread use of hormonal birth control was indicative of a cultural “disrespect of life.” She has also questioned the universal birth dose of the hepatitis-B vaccine.

[Read: America’s would-be surgeon general says to trust your ‘heart intelligence’]

In her 2024 book, Good Energy—which Means co-wrote with her brother, Calley, who is now a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a key figure in the MAHA movement—she advises readers to avoid tap water and conventionally grown food, and to trust themselves rather than their doctors. She recommends getting “one cumulative hour of very hot heat exposure” each week and says that people should optimize their health by using a glucose-monitoring device, which is, helpfully, available through Levels Health, a company she co-founded.

Means, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, wrote in her September ethics filing that she would resign from Levels and forfeit or divest all stock options in the company. But she is still listed on Levels’ blog as the company’s chief medical officer. She said today during her hearing that she has spent “the last several months working with the Office of Government Ethics to be fully compliant” with rules regarding conflicts of interest. Senator Chris Murphy also pressed Means on her financial relationships with companies whose products she has promoted in her newsletter, citing an analysis that found that she’d frequently failed to make proper disclosures to her readers. “I have a strong feeling that the way in which they gathered this data is done intentionally to create these claims that you’re making,” Means testified.

Today, Means was far less outwardly anti-establishment than she has been in her book, her newsletter, and podcast appearances. For example, when Senator Patty Murray asked Means to explain her previous anti-birth-control comments, Means said that she was referring not to birth control generally but to particular women whose medical history might increase risk from taking birth control. She also avoided explicitly besmirching immunizations. “I believe that vaccines are a key part of any infectious-disease public-health strategy,” she told Senator Bill Cassidy.

Means had reason to tone it down. Health leaders, including former surgeons general, have questioned her qualifications for the position. Dozens of health and advocacy organizations have opposed her nomination. Peter Lurie, the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, called Means “a virtual PEZ dispenser for RFK, Jr.’s misinformation” in a statement yesterday.

Means’s confirmation hearing also comes at a pivotal moment for the MAHA movement. In the run-up to the midterm elections later this year, Kennedy appears to be shifting his focus from undermining the childhood-vaccine schedule—his least popular priority, according to one recent poll—to battling the food industry, which enjoys broad support. (The New York Times has reported that the White House wants Kennedy to downplay vaccines ahead of the midterms. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After this story was published, Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me in an email that Kennedy “is doubling down on the MAHA strategy to improve the health and well-being of our nation’s children, restore real food at the center of the American diet, and make medicine more affordable and accessible.”)

Means’s stance on vaccines today was measured, by MAHA standards. She said that “vaccines save lives” but hesitated when asked whether she agreed with Kennedy’s assertion that there’s no evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious illness or death in children. “At the population level, I certainly think that it does,” she said finally. (CDC data indicate that the flu vaccine prevents death across all age groups, including children.) Notably, Means said that “I absolutely am supportive” of the measles vaccine, but—against prevailing medical advice—declined to recommend it to parents, possibly hoping to avoid alienating the anti-vaccine wing of MAHA. “There’s a nuanced conversation that American families are looking to have about shared clinical decision making with their doctors about specific vaccines,” she told Senator Angela Alsobrooks—less of an endorsement than is customary for a surgeon general or any other public-health expert, but more mainstream than her earlier suggestions to follow one’s own intuition over expert medical advice.

[Read: RFK Jr.’s next move is what anti-vaxxers have been waiting for]

She also sought to be a unifying voice on pesticides, which have recently caused a fissure between MAHA and MAGA. Last week, President Trump issued an executive order to boost the domestic production of the weed killer glyphosate, which Kennedy has long insisted causes cancer, on the grounds that the compound is essential to the United States’ food security. Key leaders in the MAHA movement regarded the move as a betrayal. Not that long ago, Means might have also been quick to criticize the decision: Last March, she posted on X that “pesticides are a slow-motion extinction event.” In her testimony, though, Means was far more conciliatory, telling senators that the issue is complicated and that “changes need to be made thoughtfully, with full respect for American farmers and the constraints that they’re under.”

Over the past several weeks, leaders in the MAHA movement and the GOP have been fighting over how to win the midterms without angering the factions that make up MAHA. Anti-vaccine activists won’t be satisfied until Kennedy follows through on long-favored plans to do away with the childhood-vaccine schedule. But at least for now, the secretary seems to be leaning into more broadly popular priorities, such as condemning ultra-processed food (he’ll be the keynote speaker at an “Eat Real Food” rally tomorrow in Austin). If she is confirmed, Means will find herself at the center of a movement that is in the midst of an identity crisis.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/casey-means-confirmation-maha-subdued/686147/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Nancy Walecki

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/toddler-skincare/686132/?utm_source=feed

Kids love to imitate their parents, and in Shay Mitchell’s home, that meant her daughters wanted to copy her face-mask routine. Mitchell, an actor best known for her role in Pretty Little Liars, would wear one while she read her 3- and 6-year-old girls a story, and inevitably, they’d look at her sheet mask and ask, “Can I have it?” Cutting eyeholes into cleansing wipes didn’t cut it, she told the Today show late last year. They wanted a “real” one.

So Mitchell co-founded the child-skin-care company Rini and launched an Everyday Facial Sheet Mask for toddlers. That (vegan, 100 percent pure cotton, mushroom-serum-based) mask quickly became an object of scorn online. In news coverage and on social media, people asked some version of Why would we ever want kids to get into skin care so young? Mitchell made her Today show appearance in an attempt to defend the company; Rini quietly raised the minimum age on its masks from 3 to 4.

If Rini represents some kind of “late-stage capitalist hell,” as one commentator put it, it’s far from the only company in this particular circle of the inferno, in which 7-year-olds make “get ready with me” videos on TikTok. A handful of companies are now pitching regimens for children who are elementary-school age and even younger; some spas have begun to feature child-oriented menus. Tubby Todd Bath Co., which sells a basic lineup including bath wash, lotion, and diaper paste, asks customers if they’re shopping for “baby’s first skincare routine.” A TikTok from the company Evereden depicts a bathroom cabinet filling up with the brand’s products—a child-size skin-care headband, lip oil, fragrance, face mist—with the superimposed text “pov: your 3-year-old is interested in skincare.” (The company also launched a pink-packaged multivitamin face wash and moisturizer called the Barbie Kids Happy Face Duo, which comes with rhinestone stickers to bedazzle the bottles.) The tween-skin-care brand Pipa tells customers to “start young”—in this case, at 8, the average age that children in Generation Alpha who are using these kinds of products begin experimenting.  

Dermatologically speaking, most kids don’t need a skin-care routine; soap, lotion, and sunscreen suffice. If the actual benefits of many skin-care products for adults are questionable, for kids, anything that goes beyond the basics is unnecessary. But Megan Moore, an elementary-school teacher in the wealthy suburb of Oakwood, Ohio, told me that by fifth or sixth grade, most of her female students have a mini-fridge at home specifically for skin care. Her 9-year-old daughter, Charlotte, later told me she’s hoping for her own skin-care fridge, too—once her mom lets her get products other than the ones she picks up as party favors. She walked me through a typical slumber-party routine, much of which I recognized from my own, early-aughts childhood: paint your nails, spritz perfume, braid one another’s hair, take your braid out in the morning to reveal “whatever funny-looking curl” it gave you. But some of the routine was new to me: get out your goodie bag, put on your skin-care headband, and don a sheet mask made for kids. (A brand called Yes Day, run by a 13-year-old CEO, offers a Sleepover Set for exactly this type of ritual.)

By the time they’re old enough to be Sephora Kids, at least some tweens are raiding skin-care aisles and buying adult brands such as Drunk Elephant—known for its bright packaging and premium price point. Those products can contain strong anti-aging ingredients, such as retinol, that can irritate a young person’s face. The parents I spoke with said they were willing to buy their kids skin care to help them adopt a good routine early or at least have a chance to try it out—as long as the products were safe. “Millennials created the wellness economy,” Kimberley Ho, a co-founder of Evereden, told me: Is it any wonder their kids are interested too? Companies like hers, she said, saw an opening for products formulated for children’s skin.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, adult-beauty retailers are welcoming these Gen Alpha–focused brands. Sephora began its expansion into the Gen Alpha skin-care category recently; Ho told me that Evereden will launch in Sephora stores nationwide next month. Sephora’s first Gen Alpha partner, Sincerely Yours, was co-founded by the then-15-year-old YouTuber Salish Matter to provide “skincare created with teens, for teens.” But when Matter held a rollout event at the American Dream mall, in New Jersey, she drew a roughly 80,000-person crowd that included many kids who were almost certainly middle-school age or younger. Presumably some of them persuaded their parents to buy Sincerely Yours’s four-step bundle: cleanser, sunscreen, moisturizer, and a serum mist. (Julia Straus, the company’s CEO and one of its co-founders, told me in an email that its customers’ average age is solidly in the teens, but that “we know younger audiences may show interest, especially at community events, and some of our products like sunscreen are a must for all ages.”)

The lines between hygiene, wellness, and beauty are blurry, and some of the companies sell products that fall under all three categories. The brands like to portray skin care as a normal part of childhood play. “For Gen Alpha, I feel like skin care is closer to slime-making or nail art or exploring different hairstyles” than an actual beauty routine, Ho told me. Rini’s next batch of products, released today, does feature more explicitly play-oriented “face and body crayons.” Charlotte told me that she and her friends like to use skin care because it’s fun, it feels good, and it “makes us feel more mature because we’re doing skin care and we’re 9-year-olds.” I’m sure that I would have begged my mother for Evereden’s five-piece set with the pink travel case, too.

But selling skin-care products that very young kids are meant to use daily is distinct from, say, letting a curious child re-create a parent’s nighttime routine with a dollop of yogurt. Mimicking adults is an important part of childhood play, but if actual skin care becomes the norm at a young age, it could deprive kids of the imagination that emulation normally affords, Katie Hurley, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, told me. A toddler using a prepackaged sheet mask is not doing as much learning or thinking as one who’s making their own version. Beauty products for kids also chip away at what psychologists call “middle childhood”—the years when kids are more independent but are not yet distracted by the self-consciousness of puberty, Susan Linn, a psychologist and the author of Consuming Kids, told me. Children want to feel older than they are, and skin care gives them that. But Linn and other researchers worry it gives them the insecurities of adolescence too.

Child-skin-care companies do, for the most part, market their products as tools for self-care, rather than correction. When I reached out to the companies mentioned in this article, Pipa, Evereden, Sincerely Yours, and Tubby Todd Bath Co. all said that they offered age-appropriate products, meant to promote skin health, and focused on cleansers, moisturizers, and sunscreens formulated for younger skin. “The goal isn’t to introduce adult beauty concepts early, but to normalize simplicity: sun protection, gentle cleansing, and barrier support,” Ho said. (Rini declined to comment.)

Charlotte seemed to think of skin care mostly as a game or as a way to express herself. But she was vaguely aware—as my friends and I were when we’d do “makeovers” using Lip Smackers gloss—that the products were part of a self-improvement project. “When you put on face masks, the ending result is a lot brighter than what you had before you put it on,” she told me. “I like my first look, but I like the second look a little better.”

If skin-care companies do make a meaningful push into the toddler market, they’re bound to hit adult opposition, Rebecca Watters, the wellness-insights director at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Even parents who go for other child-self-care offerings—which these days include meditation apps for children, yoga for children, and superfood powders for children—might not buy into the idea that a 3-year-old needs aesthetically branded skin care. But the strongest skepticism I heard about toddler sheet masks came from Charlotte, with all the wisdom of her 9 years. “That’s really weird. I mean, who’s gonna put a face mask on a 3-year-old?” she told me. She couldn’t imagine her own toddler sister sitting still for the five to 15 minutes that the Rini mask recommends, or that such a young child would need a skin regimen in the first place: “If they get chocolate or mud on their face, you could just get a paper towel and wipe it off and they would be fine.” Rini has a new product for that, too—Bamboo Face Wipes that “soothe and hydrate with every swipe” at whatever mess a kid has made.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/toddler-skincare/686132/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Katherine J. Wu

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/measles-death/686122/?utm_source=feed

Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is also unforgiving. The virus is estimated to infect roughly 90 percent of the unimmunized people it encounters; each infected person may pass the infection on to as many as 12 to 18 others. In large part owing to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, the United States is watching those risks unfold in real time. As of last Thursday, the CDC is reporting 982 cases of measles. That count is expected to break 1,000 this week; a tracker run by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that many experts consider more reliable has ticked past 1,000 already. By the numbers alone, another death seems inevitable, and inevitable soon.

Probabilities aren’t guarantees, of course. So far, 2026 may be seeing some improvements over 2025, when the U.S. documented more than 2,200 measles cases—more than in any year since 1991. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases have led to hospitalization, compared with 11 percent last year. Several factors could be contributing to that discrepancy, including how hospitals in South Carolina are reporting measles admissions or of more mild cases being diagnosed to begin with; experts aren’t yet sure.

That 4 percent, however, still represents 40 or so people who have ended up in the hospital with at least one of the conditions that can make measles so devastating—among them, pneumonia, respiratory failure, and brain disease. In South Carolina, multiple people, including children, have been hospitalized with a form of brain swelling called encephalitis, which can lead to permanent intellectual disability or deafness, and in some cases turn fatal.

Outbreaks are brewing elsewhere in the country too—Florida, Utah, Arizona. The nation is on the verge of losing the measles-elimination status it has held for 26 years, which would officially mean that the virus was once again routinely circulating in the United States. The majority of measles cases will remain somewhat mild. But as outbreaks continue, Americans will see where percentages mislead. Even if the rates of death and disabling disease remain roughly the same, as case numbers grow, so too will the absolute amount of suffering.

The calculus of the measles vaccine, meanwhile, should be comforting: A single dose of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine can protect people against measles for decades at rates of 93 percent; two doses can protect at 97 percent. Some vaccines work mostly to keep people from getting very sick, but the measles one is powerful enough to prevent many infections from taking hold at all. Only 150 or so of 2025’s measles cases—7 percent—occurred in people known to have received at least one MMR dose. (The CDC and Johns Hopkins haven’t been reporting on hospitalizations by vaccination status.)

If those numbers still sound uncomfortably high, consider that 90 percent of American kids have gotten at least one MMR dose. The higher the vaccine coverage, the more cases will occur among the vaccinated—but also, the far fewer cases will occur overall. And studies have consistently found that when vaccinated people do contract measles, their cases are much milder and potentially less contagious than unvaccinated cases.

Still, certain factors, including genetics and immunocompromising conditions, can alter the level of protection a person gets from an immunization. Age, too, naturally erodes defenses, especially for people decades out from their most recent measles-vaccine dose. And not all vaccinated people are vaccinated in an optimal way. Some Americans, for instance, are too old to have been vaccinated with both modern MMR doses; children generally don’t receive their second injection until they’re about to begin kindergarten. The more a virus transmits broadly, the more easily it can exploit any vulnerability it finds. During a measles outbreak that began in the Netherlands in 1999, more cases were detected in vaccinated people living in mostly unvaccinated communities than in unvaccinated people in highly vaccinated communities—simply because low-vaccine communities were giving the virus far more chances to spread.

Unvaccinated people living among other unvaccinated people remain at the highest risk, Maia Majumder, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. The current statistics reflect that: The large majority of measles infections—93 to 94 percent—are still happening in unvaccinated people. Last year’s largest outbreak, centered on West Texas, killed two school-age children, both of whom were unvaccinated.

Other consequences of measles can take years to become obvious. Because of a quirk in its biology, the virus can erase a person’s preexisting immunity against other pathogens, leaving them more vulnerable to all sorts of illnesses. The more severe the measles infection, the more thorough the damage. Another of measles’ worst and most insidious outcomes is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), an untreatable neurodegenerative condition that can take nearly a decade to manifest. Alex Cvijanovich, a pediatrician in New Mexico, told me that about two decades ago, she treated a middle schooler who had caught the virus as a seven-month-old, still too young to be vaccinated. The initial illness was tame, seemingly inconsequential. But around the age of 12, the boy—an honor student—“started getting lost between his classes,” Cvijanovich said. A spinal tap eventually showed that the virus had lingered in his neural tissue for more than a decade, causing irreversible brain damage. In the following months, the boy’s nervous system deteriorated until he could no longer control the flow of fluid into his lungs. He asphyxiated on his own body’s secretions just a few years after measles had been declared eliminated in the United States.

“It was the most horrible, devastating death of all my years of training and doing pediatrics,” Cvijanovich said. “I comforted myself by telling myself, I’ll probably never see this again.”

Now she is no longer so sure. SSPE, like many other measles complications, is rare, occurring in perhaps one out of every few thousand infections among the unimmunized. (Cases among the vaccinated are virtually nonexistent.) But children who catch the virus in infancy seem especially vulnerable.

To protect their patients from infection, Cvijanovich and her colleagues keep a “rash phone” outside of their office, for families bringing in children who look especially blotchy and red, so that a nurse can inspect them far away from other vulnerable kids. James Lewis, the health officer for Snohomish County, Washington, which has been battling a smaller measles outbreak for several weeks, told me that his department has been advising any patients with suspicious symptoms and a potential measles exposure to call ahead, so they can wait outside the doctor’s office until they can be seen inside. Some may even be evaluated in their car.

Not every place has the resources for such investments, or for the testing, contact tracing, isolation rooms, vaccine clinics, and other measures necessary to help stop measles outbreaks. And some experts worry that as measles continues to appear in confined environments—such as, recently, an ICE facility in Texas—adequate infection-prevention measures will too frequently fall short.

Measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever documented and requires near-comprehensive levels of vaccination—roughly 95 percent or more—in a community to prevent it from spreading. But uptake of the MMR vaccine has ticked steadily down in recent years. Experts anticipate further drops under the Trump administration, especially as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department and Health and Human Services and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, continues to restrict access to vaccines, dismiss vaccine experts, challenge vaccine manufacturers, and question vaccine safety. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.) One recent modeling study found that a drop in nationwide MMR uptake of just a few more percentage points could lead to millions more measles cases over the next 25 years. And the more measles moves around, the more the risk to everyone will increase.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/02/measles-death/686122/?utm_source=feed