january3–16, 2022 | newyork 75said Carly Cooperman, a Democratic poll-
ster who has been looking closely at the
dynamics in Pennsylvania. “He has a lot
of money to blanket the airwaves. He’s a
celebrity. He was in our houses growing up.
Assuming that sentiments continue to be
negative next year toward the Democrats,”
she trailed off. “I’m worried.”T
hough the candidate has lived
in New Jersey for most of this cen-
tury, primarily and most recently at a
Cliffside Park compound on several
acres along the Hudson River, and though it
was from there that Dr. and Mrs. Oz voted
absentee in the 2020 election, and though
the second home the Oz family maintains
is a historic $18 million oceanfront estate in
Palm Beach, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago,
he’s running where there’s room to run and
where, as luck would have it, his in-laws
maintain the lush estate the campaign
claims he is now renting.
Earlier on Sunday, December 5, I was
exploring the surrounding town of Bryn
Athyn, Pennsylvania, and feeling pretty
good. For three days, I had consumed at
regular intervals exclusively blueberries;
raw massaged kale; raw unsalted almonds,
Brazil nuts, or walnuts; steamed tofu;
steamed brown rice; poached salmon;
baked sweet potatoes; and unfiltered flax-
seed oil. I had exercised consistently. I had
fallen asleep easily, then risen alongside the
sun without struggle or even, on that morn-
ing, so much as an alarm.
My new habits were not in pursuit of
self-improvement but of public service, in
accordance with the general dietary and
lifestyle advice dispensed by Dr. Oz. The
idea was to live as he said I ought to live
while I reported on his political ambitions
as a means of better understanding his con-
tributions to American popular culture. But
consistency is the thief of content, and new
information about Dr. Oz’s diet and lifestyle
is what the Oz brand requires in infinite
quantities in order to make and market and
sell the dozens of books and magazines and
hours and hours on his podcast and radio
program and The Dr. Oz Show. In practice,
this means that sorting out how Dr. Oz lives
is surprisingly difficult.
For instance, Dr. Oz assembled a list of
his 25 greatest health tips for Men’s Health
in 2013. Among them: “Don’t Skip Break-
fast.” His breakfast, he wrote, consists of
steel-cut oatmeal, walnuts, raisins, and flax-
seed oil. In 2020, however, he announced
that we should “cancel” breakfast” and,
amid a strange feud with breakfast evange-
list Mark Wahlberg, disclosed that he does
not eat breakfast and instead waits until
midmorning to break his 16-hour intermit-
tent fast by eating a handful of nuts beforelunch, his largest meal of the day.
The plan I hatched, then, was to devote
the duration of my reporting—a three-
week period—to experimenting with all the
variations of the Dr. Oz Way of Life. That
Sunday, in the interest of time, I would be
taking on dual assignments: eating small
amounts of raw nuts and berries every
hour on the hour, the diet Dr. Oz claimed
to maintain circa 2010, while consuming a
beverage made from raw green coffee beans
and taking supplements made, allegedly,
of saffron extract, two substances Dr. Oz
has promoted as “miracle” fat burners and
appetite suppressants.
By the time I made my way to the Lower
Moreland area to meet with Congress-
man Brendan Boyle, a Democrat who
until redistricting would have represented
Dr.Oz’s in-laws, my hands were shaking.
Boyle ordered a toasted bagel with cream
cheese and a coffee roughly the size of Sena-
tor Rand Paul (also a doctor). I mentioned
that Dr. Oz would not approve of his choice.
In fact, the other daytime-TV personality
even told me that whenever they talk to Dr.
Oz, he tells them to stop eating bagels.
Although Boyle has lived in the area for
about 15 years and has been an elected
official here for 13 of them, he had never
heard even a rumor about Dr. Oz visiting
the area, never mind living in it. “Literally,
I learned this for the first time two days ago
reading the local paper.” Not only that, but
the farm Dr. Oz now claims as his home is
less than ten minutes from Boyle’s house.
“I laughed out loud and then I texted my
wife and said, ‘You will not believe where
Dr. Oz says he lives!’”
Boyle is quick to admit that, for members
of his party, there’s a lot to worry about in
this race. “Eleven months from now, if we’re
looking at the race and it’s much more than
51 to 49 one way or the other, I would be
shocked,” he said. “A 50-50 state, open seat,
in a midterm that, historically, should favor
Republicans over Democrats.” Boyle said
he hoped voters would see through Dr. Oz’s
act. “Being rich and bored is not a good rea-
son to run for office,” he said. “It is a great
annoyance to me, these celebrity candidates,
or people who are now in politics, like the
Lauren Boeberts and the Marjorie Taylor
Greenes, who are just there for clicks and
attention. Unfortunately, we are increas-
ingly getting and electing these people who
aren’t in it for public-policy reasons.”
Where the mogul responsible for creating
this candidate’s celebrity stands on the con-
test is unclear. At a meeting in Pittsburgh
with Republican officials and activists, one
source said, Dr. Oz told the room that he
has spoken to Oprah about his campaign
and “she’s supportive,” both because of their
friendship and because it would be in her“strategic” interests to offer a public endorse-
ment. Meanwhile, Dr. Oz has promoted a
story about protecting Oprah by begging
her not to involve herself in the messy busi-
ness of the Pennsylvania Senate race. As her
friend, the story goes, he prioritized their
relationship over her potentially valuable
endorsement. The former producer thought
this sounded unlikely: “There is no way that
Oprah is going to help turn Pennsylvania
red. Oprah is not gonna do that.”
I reached out to Oprah to request an
interview. “Ms. Winfrey is not doing inter-
views at this time,” Nicole Nichols, her
spokeswoman, replied 14 days later. A few
days later, Nichols wrote again: “I have one
statement for you from Ms. Winfrey. No
other comments: ‘One of the great things
about our democracy is that every citizen
can decide to run for public office. Mehmet
Oz has made that decision. And now it’s up
to the residents of Pennsylvania to decide
who will represent them.’ —Oprah Winfrey.”
After my strange phone call with Dr. and
Mrs. Oz, I made my way through New Jer-
sey to New York, wired from the green cof-
fee beans and saffron extract. The appetite
suppressants worked too well, and I hadn’t
been able to eat a walnut in hours. Bored
but unable to sleep, I read Lisa Oz’s self-
help book, Us, which explained, somewhat,
why her husband was seeking elected office.
There had been a moment in his medical
career, she wrote, when “I got the sense
that he was stagnating, and for Mehmet
that was tantamount to death.” They talked
about the problem. “It became evident that
he wanted a steeper learning curve, more
variety in his routine, and the chance to
have a bigger impact in the world.” The
solution then was a television show. Now, it
seems, the solution may be politics.
Those who know him say Dr. Oz was
always likely to run for office and always
likely to do so as a conservative. He was
a networker and backslapper by nature,
exactly the kind of person cut out for this
work. “He told me once he had plans to go
with Dick Armey and a couple people hunt-
ing, and I said to him, ‘Since when do you
fucking hunt?’ ” one friend said. It’s the way
he’s running, the appeals he’s making, that
have come as a shock. “I’m sick over what
he’s doing,” the friend said. It seemed that
their relationship would not survive his
candidacy because there are some things
you just can’t abide no matter how much
you love a person, and Dr. Oz had made
his priorities clear. “Look, Mehmet always
wanted to be president,” this person added.
“I don’t know if he thinks this is the way to
do that.” Reached for comment, the Oz
campaign denied this was true: “Dr. Oz has
never said that.” Which is exactly what a
senator would say. ■