The ‘Huberman husbands’ phenomenon sweeping the US: Protein, diet, exercise and the far right

Andrew Huberman started a podcast in 2021 and has built a small empire by talking one-on-one to millions of men about neuroscience and ‘body optimization’

Archival image of U.S. students doing abdominal exercises in the 1940s.Bettmann Archive/Getty

Like Goop, but for bros. That’s how some — comparing it to the multi-million dollar wellness and lifestyle company founded by Gwyneth Paltrow — refer to Huberman Lab, created by U.S. neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and which in a very short time was transformed from a popular podcast (Huberman Lab, born in 2021) to a small empire. Time dedicated a feature to him in 2023, painting him as the man who made America care about science, a kind of Joe Rogan in a white coat. Huberman has become the guru of an audience that seems unfazed by some of his episodes lasting up to three hours, that New York Magazine published a lengthy report on his disturbing private habits, or that Vox (the American website, not the Spanish far-right political party) published another one on the network of half-truths and diffuse statistics behind some of his information.

Its content, as stated on its website, is aimed at “improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing bodily health and performance, and rewiring the nervous system to learn new skills and behaviors that can transform your life.” All sprinkled with imposing, but accessible, scientific language. Precisely these particularities — together with the fact that Huberman is a muscular and attractive individual who does not resemble the nerdy image with which the imagination traditionally associates neuroscientists — have attracted countless middle-aged men who have discovered the formula to talk, both among themselves and with their partners, about food, exercise, and self-care. These are fields that, historically, have been linked to women or, in recent years, to young men who have grown up seeing the mirror image of their abs on the screens of their smartphones.

From Huberman to “Huberman husbands,” defined by the sharp-witted Daily Beast website as “followers of a wellness protocol that requires them to immerse themselves in cold water, tape their mouths shut and try to convince their long-suffering wives of the benefits of it all.” If in the 1970s literature dropped the term “Stepford wife” to define a caring, beautiful partner, perfect in her exuberant and helpful femininity, following Ira Levin’s classic horror novel The Stepford Wives, today it is the internet that brings us its male equivalent: the “Huberman husband” now exercises more, eats healthier, and has more eccentricities than his wife.

Of course, this is a group effort. It is common for Huberman husbands to share their routines and compete to see who is right on nutritional issues or in the execution of certain exercises. “Competition has been a practice repeated for millennia in masculinized environments and the attitude of being better than others, more than simply surpassing oneself, leads to this power game, now focused on physical health, becoming competition,” Benjo Podlech Sandoval, a psychologist and expert in masculine energy, tells EL PAÍS. “It is vanity, yes, but if we examine it closely, so is the need for approval from others, to give meaning to what you do.”

Andrew Huberman on 'The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon' in June 2024.NBC (Getty Images)

Huberman sells supplements that promise, among other things, to improve sleep quality and optimize mental activity — promises that are exactly the same as those of the supplements available at any health food store for a fraction of the price. “Perfect your sleep! Optimize your focus! Reduce your appetite! Andrew Huberman is the bearded prophet of the optimization dad who believes that if a thing can be measured, it can be improved. A heavily muscled neuroscientist at Stanford Medicine — note the conspicuous Ph.D. in his Twitter and Instagram handles,” writes journalist Joseph Bernstein in an article published in The New York Times called The Dad Canon.

Like everything that aims to become a monetized trend in the 2020s, the concept of the Huberman husband is boiling over and trading on TikTok. In the profiles that discuss this topic, several women list the new habits that their husbands implement every day following the teachings of the neuroscientist. The term was coined by TikTok user Sierra Campbell, who detailed in a video some of the habits that her husband has made her adopt “because of his obsession with health and longevity.” Campbell says in the article in The Daily Beast that she realized that her husband was taking his “sleep hygiene” too seriously when he installed red lights on the ceiling. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Where are you getting this stuff?’ And it was from the Huberman Lab podcast.”

The neuroscientist promotes the benefits of supplements and, of course, the protein shakes that now occupy such a prominent place among the profiles of gym bros. “We’re not going to deny that it’s important to consume the correct amount of protein per day, but it must be adapted to our needs,” warns Laura Jorge, founder and director of the Laura Jorge Nutrition Center. “They may give these tips focused on gaining muscle mass or losing fat, but an excess of protein can be a negative thing, especially if we do not choose good protein sources. As if that were not enough, focusing what we eat on self-optimization can lead to problems in our relationship with food, such as vigorexia or orthorexia. It can also generate stress, frustration, guilt, and some nutritional deficiencies,” she adds.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the ‘fittest’ members of Donald Trump's cabinet, photographed in New York.Gotham (GC Images)

From standing in the sun for 20 minutes without protection to taking ice-cold baths, and of course consuming a huge amount of supplements (preferably the ones he sells), the advice of the Hubersphere is taken seriously by millions. “What sets Huberman apart from others who want to create Goop for bros is that he is incredibly well-credentialed and endearingly serious. The 48-year-old describes himself as a neuroscience professor and lab director at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He relies on his affiliation with an elite university to bolster his credibility, and frequently brings fellow Stanford professors to his podcast. His podcast was the third most popular podcast in the world last year, according to Spotify,” explains activist Virginia Sole-Smith. “His episodes tend to be very long and full of detailed scientific studies that he does not try to simplify: he speaks to his listeners as equals and makes them feel intelligent.”

Sole-Smith also claims that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, is “the great American Huberman husband.” The politician, famous for his anti-vaccine stance, doesn’t drink soda or alcohol and boasts about his biceps and workouts on social media. Huberman himself has shown interest in Kennedy’s stance: “I want to know his point of view on many issues. Whenever I meet him at the gym, he’s very kind, he asks me about science… and I can attest that he also trains hard,” he commented last October on the networks of his friend, the poker player and king of the manosphere, Joe Rogan. The occasion? An Instagram post announcing Rogan’s interview with Kennedy on the former’s networks.

Derek Beres, a speaker, podcaster and co-creator of Conspirituality, a show that aims to “dismantle new age cults, wellness scammers, and conspiracy-crazed yogis,” claims that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who works out in jeans) “is playing a cultural war game” by cashing in on the trendy body-optimization boom over conventional science and medicine. “We’re on a cultural spectrum where on one side you have Donald Trump, who has in the past said that exercise exhausts the body. And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who kills himself in the gym and has been seen leaving the gym with Andrew Huberman,” he explains.

Erick Pescador Albiach, a sociologist, sexologist and specialist in the development of a culture of care, says that the gym culture is close to the far-right ideology because “the loss of power that so many men feel [with progressive and egalitarian policies] is mixed here with the need to return to ancestral power, which is the power of force and brutality.” Podlech Sandoval shares his personal experience with EL PAÍS. “For the last four months, I have been training three or four times a week to feel stronger. When the results started to show, I was surprised that the treatment and appreciation of other men towards me was different. Men have a relationship with their own and other people’s muscles that is not indifferent and represents values desired by many people, such as willpower, perseverance, concentration, and health,” he says.

In a world in which women have been asking for decades that politics not be conducted with their bodies, there is a certain ideology within which men are more than willing to conduct politics with theirs. Muscles are now part of that conversation. Trump doesn’t need them, of course, but he already has what the gym bros and Huberman husbands crave: power.

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