The Food Babe

Hey, Michael.

Aubrey.

Wait.

Are you ready to tag us in?

Oh, I thought we were doing the If Post could kill.

I thought you were about to ask me, what do I know about the food, babe?

Very little.

Oh, do you want me to?

I'll be Peter today.

Michael.

Aubrey.

What do you know about the food, babe?

Well, I already said very little.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where we know very little about what we're talking about.

Boom!

It doesn't cut in in the same way.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is made from the same material as yoga mats.

This was like all I know of this person, so I'm going to be just killing time till we get to that controversy.

It was also almost all I knew of this person as well.

Because you mentioned her real name the other day, and I was like, what?

Yes, her name is Vonnie Hari.

she has been running campaigns, usually petition drives, okay, that are focused on food corporations for more than a decade.

Interesting, that approach has garnered her quite a following.

She has currently 1.2 million followers on Facebook and 2.3 million followers on Instagram.

She has targeted Anheuser-Busch, Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg's, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Subway, Starbucks, In-N-Out.

Just it's a really long list.

That all sounds bitchin' to me, except for the goals that she sets and how she achieves them.

Except for what she's doing and who she is as a person.

So today, Michael.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

Oh my God.

I love recording.

Whoops.

She got too far into it.

It's not like we even say what our little qualifications are.

Just like, here's my name as a person.

We don't even have really a schedule anymore.

Yeah, it's not a real show.

It started with the fake tagline, and then it just gotten less real from there.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase.

You can also subscribe through Apple Podcast Premium Subscription.

It's the same audio content.

Same stuff.

Michael.

I'm Ray.

Today.

Today.

I'm taking you into the world of the food babe.

You're taking me back to the blogosphere.

And I think that...

Oh my God, shit is leaving my brain again, Michael.

This sucks.

Cognitive decline, the podcast.

Cognitive decline.

We are in our 40s.

A bunch of the sort of rhetorical devices that she uses are used by lots of folks in this space.

So it seemed useful to sort of break down and think about like what are the components of what she's doing here and what are the red flags that folks might be able to apply to other health and wellness media and go, ooh, wait a minute.

Yeah.

So, Michael, Aubrey, Vani Hari was born in 1979 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her parents immigrated to the U.S.

from India.

Her dad was an engineering professor at UNC Charlotte, and her mom was a high school math teacher.

Vonnie herself goes on to graduate from UNC Charlotte with a degree in computer science.

And when I read that, I was like, I don't know why, but this makes intuitive sense.

There's something going on with computer science majors

having like a bizarre sense of certainty that they excel at lots of fields.

We need to get kids like reading like liberal arts shit again.

We need more awokeness in the schools.

After college, she goes on to work as a consultant, a management consultant at Accenture.

That's also

foreshadowing.

No offense to the management consultants out there, but it's like, if you look at the trajectory of some of it, it's real bad.

Her origin story as the quote-unquote food babe is similar to many, many, many we have heard before.

She talks about getting sick, she talks about changing what she ate, and she talks about feeling better.

And then she says, I started looking into nutrition.

So here is a synopsis of that origin story from a New York Times

piece.

It says, she had eczema, asthma, stomach problems, and severe food allergies, the last of which critics and at least one person who said she knew her growing up dispute because Miss Hari has advocated lying to servers about allergies to butter, dairy, corn, and soy to avoid possible sources of genetically modified food.

At age 23, she had appendicitis, something she said was caused by her lifestyle of poor nutrition, though most experts say it is a random occurrence.

She read books like Spiritual Nutrition and Conscious Eating and applied the skills she learned as an award-winning debater in high school to food.

She read labels, cleaned up her diet, and saw results.

Her eczema, asthma, and allergies went away, and she said she was off all prescription drugs, up to eight or nine, depending on the season, within three to four years.

Yeah, this is like all of the greatest hits of maintenance phase.

It's like a Voltron.

Yeah, she's got a condition without sort of clear causes or clear treatments, which often sends people Googling and then Google gets you into the like, swim with dolphins to cure everything rabbit hole.

And then she gets into this like, my diet will save me kind of thing.

My lifestyle was killing me stuff.

And then...

into like spiritual world and then these weird claims of like I was on prescription drugs right but then I stopped eating seed oils and now I'm not on any what she does with that experience is go ah this made me feel better we need to change the law.

Yeah.

I feel better because I stopped eating this thing, so we should change how they make this thing that I don't eat anymore.

What was the actual diet that she switched to?

Was it anything specific or just certain foods?

She's a little bit Dave Asprey style in that it's like a real sampler platter.

Oh, yeah.

It's GMOs.

It's food colorings.

It's additives.

Okay.

I always feel like there's this moment in an episode where I go, like, do we just tip our hand and go, this person isn't good?

And I think this is the moment I go.

You're not pretending to be like, this is a simple thing.

This person isn't good.

This person isn't good.

She's not.

I mean, we're already getting like some of the woo-woo stuff and some of the exaggeration.

So like, I knew this was coming.

What I will say, what we'll see in her pattern is that she reaches for like the biggest, scariest, and least understood concepts amongst her audience.

Okay, nice.

She's written two books, and I read both of her books, Michael.

Did you really?

Yeah.

Aubrey.

I know.

Are you okay?

I'm fine.

They didn't end up being super relevant to the actual episode.

So I was like, You wasted your time.

I read these for nothing.

You stopped eating seed oils months ago, and you're like, why?

What was it all for?

I've cut out all the GMOs.

What am I supposed to do now?

But you feel amazing.

Your energy is off the charts.

She doesn't say this, but reading her work, I was left with the distinct impression that her, what she calls here, sort of like looking into health and nutrition stuff in that phase of her origin story was much more her Googling from a place of like, I feel better.

Why did this thing make me feel better?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Than a, I want to understand the full landscape of this issue and understand the nuances in the body of research, right?

Right, you're gathering ammunition for something you already believe rather than doing like an open-ended, like, oh, what does the science say about this?

Yeah.

It's the kind of Googling that most of us do most of the time,

right?

Just to be totally honest, right?

You're like, you're Googling like e-bike benefits

rather than like okay

what are the pros and cons she's not googling like eczema yeah what are the treatments that are available what's the body of research she's googling quit gmos treatment for eczema or like improved eczema you're right like yeah that's my i don't know that i don't have her search terms in front of me of course i don't but like that's the impression that i got from reading her work was being like i feel better why do i feel better yeah i i feel like anytime somebody says like i do my own research like 90 of the time that's what i assume they're doing 100

from there she starts blogging under the name the food babe in 2011.

is she like 25 at this point she's born in 79 so what are we talking yeah 32 so she has like a whole life as like a management consultant before she starts this like influencing stuff she's been a management consultant for like the better part of a decade at this point she's doing well enough with the blog within one year

that she is able to leave her full-time corporate consulting job.

Dude, AdSense, getting that AdSense dollars.

Truly.

So she's getting money from AdSense.

She's getting money from affiliate marketing of products that she says are safe and above board.

And uh-oh, Michael, she also now sells her own line of protein powder called Truvani, which you can get at Target and Whole Foods.

Truvani?

That's almost Truvada.

No, it's the word true and then her first name.

Oh, so mine would be True Michael.

True Michael Traubri.

So the early days on the Food Babe blog are frankly wild as fuck.

There was one post, I only found synopses of this one.

It didn't get archived on the Wayback Machine, so I couldn't find the original post.

But there was one post that has been much discussed and much reported on called Food Babe Travel Essentials.

No No reason to panic on the plane.

Okay.

We were just talking about this.

I'm an anxious flyer in a way that I didn't used to be.

So maybe I can benefit from these tips.

Okay, Michael, did you know, according to Vanni Hari, that the air on a plane, quote, isn't pure oxygen either?

It's mixed with nitrogen.

Oh, what?

This is very alarming.

It is alarming because air itself is about 78% nitrogen, and she just like didn't know.

This is a wild thing to publish without like a very cursory Google.

Just a Google.

Yeah.

So people started to critique it both in the comments and also like on Reddit.

It sort of made its way far and wide to be like, what is going on with this lady?

The New York Times interviewed her about this post.

This was in 2015, so several years later.

And here

is what happened.

She says, all you seed oil guzzlers in my mentions right now stay metabolically impaired and torpid.

That's interesting.

I'm that's never not going to be funny to me.

It says, in an interview, Miss Hari said she didn't remember the post,

okay, which Mr.

Cook brought up by name.

She then said it would have disappeared from the blog because it was old.

Weeks later, in an email, she admitted that it had been removed because of mistakes and said that she planned to start noting when she clarified or corrected posts.

Miss Hari said that these particular posts, which she wouldn't acknowledge as having been discredited, were a feeble exercise in nitpicking that detracted from her mission.

If you're going to pick apart every little sentence I've written, she said, her voice trailing off, she added of her critics, they have to dig so far and deep to find something that will make me look crazy because what I'm saying now is so sane and so real.

That's good.

I'm too real.

And my haters are going back to my posts.

She is doing seed guzzlers in my mentions.

This is what these people people always do.

She's doing all my

become my waiters at the table of success?

Another good quote from a terrible person.

That's all this show is now.

Oh my god, I don't know why that one gets me so hard every time.

You could have just said that and saved us both some time, and I wouldn't have had to read this fucking alarmingly weird quote.

That's a really, really strange response to just like a factual error.

Also, like factual errors get through.

Like people, we have said dumb things on this show, too.

Like, factual errors happen.

I feel like the bigger thing with, like, if you're following an influencer or something, if they can't just admit to a mistake, I'd be like, yeah, that was really dumb.

I don't know why I said that.

Thank you to everybody who pointed it out.

Like, the fact that she can't even admit, like, oh, they're nitpicking and finding all this garbage, but also it wasn't even, it wasn't wrong.

And also, I deleted it without saying anything.

All of this stuff is just like weird.

Just say that you made a mistake and move on.

It's not that big of a deal.

To me, these are the reactions and the comments of someone who is seeing this as like an attack on their character and not as like, this is a thing that happens.

Yeah, every reporter under the sun has published something that was like incorrect in retrospect, or you didn't catch it at the time, or I heard a podcast recently who called Colostrum.

Wound juice.

I heard about that one too.

Unclear who.

The next post we're going to talk about is from July 2012.

It focused on microwaves.

The previous one was not archived on the Wayback Machine.

This one is archived in the Wayback Machine.

And have I got a fucking screenshot for you?

Ooh, it's got an arrow.

Okay.

It's got images.

So I would like for you to describe?

Okay.

Okay.

The images.

Oh my God.

What?

Yeah.

I didn't know she was like this off the rails.

Michael.

Michael, we're doing it.

There's a before and after image, and the before looks like some sort of like snowflake type of thing.

And then there's an after, and there's a giant red arrow pointing at the after, and I don't know why.

And then alongside the arrow, it says harmful effects of electromagnetic waves as illustrated by Dr.

Mazaru Emoto in book, The Hidden Messages in Water.

And then under the after image, which also has a microwave oven.

So this is like a snowflake being microwaved, I guess.

It just looks like a water droplet.

It says the distilled water heated in the microwave resulted in a crystal similar to that created by the word Satan.

I'm not seeing Satan in this image though.

Do we have to look upside down?

No, read the paragraph.

Okay, and then we get this big brick of text.

The paragraph that we're about to read is from Vani Hari's post.

She says, last by not least,

Dr.

Mazaru Emoto, who's famous for taking photos of various types of waters and the crystals that they formed in the book called Hidden Messages in Water, found water that was microwaved did not form beautiful crystals, crystals, but instead formed crystals similar to those formed when exposed to negative thoughts or beliefs.

Yep.

If this is happening to just water, and then an M dash, which doesn't make sense, I can only imagine what a microwave is doing to the nutrients, energy of our food, and to our bodies when we consume microwaved food.

I didn't know what a bad writer she is.

It's not great.

For the experiment pictured above, microwaved water produced a similar physical structure to when the words Satan and Hitler were repeatedly exposed to the water.

Yep, yep.

This fact is probably too hokey for most people.

Again, a weird M-dash, but I wanted to include it because sometimes the things we can't see with the naked eye or even fully comprehend could be the most powerful way to unlock spontaneous healing.

What does it mean the words Hitler and Satan were exposed to the water?

Like the water was nearby?

He just said Hitler, Satan, Satan, Hitler.

is that real he just chants it at the water and then he looks at it under a microscope this is the first thing we've talked about on the show aubrey where i'm like don't bother like debunking

just like so off the rails and it's like this isn't even like a real like what possibly could he be fucking talking about so the author of this book is masaru emoto he is a pseudoscience entrepreneur you're kidding pseudoscience one of his inventions is called the vibrationometer

Got his degree in alternative medicine from a disgraced and discredited institution that no longer exists.

Hell yeah.

His fucking Wikipedia page is listed under pseudoscience.

And I gotta say, if Wikipedia as a whole is like, this is garbage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then like that is the fucking dregs.

I love the ones that are like early life and it's like a paragraph and it's like controversies after like six pages.

So his belief was that water's structure responded to human consciousness.

Okay.

And that its structure changed when exposed to curse words and words like Satan and Hitler.

Is it only like curse words in English or is the water multilingual?

Mike, I'm gonna blow your mind.

I didn't read this book.

She's slipping.

When asked about these, she said, quote, these were before I decided to make this my career.

It's like saying that the New York Times or whoever aren't allowed to make mistakes.

Back then, I was blogging as a hobby.

It's so funny to be like, how was I to know that the guy who exposed water to Satan and found crystals in it was lying?

This was only a part-time thing.

It's my hobby.

Of course I'm allowed to lie.

Right.

There's a part of me that read that.

It's like,

you don't get mad at the New York Times for having its little hobby wordle.

Yeah.

Come on.

Her profile continues to grow.

In 2015, she was named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time magazine.

Michael, do you want to know who else is on the 30 most influential people?

I'm going to ask you this.

I'd be like, give me the list.

Are they all like discredited, like crypto weirdos now?

I'm going to go rapid fire.

PewDiePie, Tanahasi Coates, Matt Drudge, Anita Sarkeesian, Shakira, JK Rowling, Narendra Modi, Taylor Swift, and Caitlin McNeil, the woman who took the picture of the blue and black/slash gold and yellow, gold and white dress.

Let's do it again, but do Mary Boff kill for each one of them.

It's very important to me.

We have to rank these people.

Oh, it's going to be so many kills.

What I know is mostly kills on that.

So all the while, while her profile is rising, there is more and more and more overt criticism from scientists.

A Yale neurologist named Stephen Novella has called her the Jenny McCarthy of food.

That's a good dig.

Kevin Fulta, who leads horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, said, quote, she found that a popular social media site was more powerful than science itself, more powerful than reason, more powerful than actually knowing what you're talking about.

That is accurate and very sad.

Marion Nessel told one reporter, quote, I think she means well, but I wish she would pick more important issues and pay closer attention to the science.

Classic Marion Nessel.

She's saying the same thing, but like way nicer.

Yeah.

Trying to put it in a nice way and is like, pick better goals and also look at science.

I love your energy, but if you were a different person, it would be better.

When asked to respond to her critics, she generally responds in one of a few different ways.

Her most common one is by asserting that the scientist in question is a paid industry shill.

Classic?

Classic.

Another one comes from a quote that she provided to the New York Times.

She said, Quote, this whole idea that I'm not scientifically accurate, okay, fine if you want to say that, but I'm translating stuff so that the layman can understand it, and that's why I'm so effective.

Yeah, well, how else would we know that the water exposed to Satan and Hitler is poisoning us?

She's like, I'm trying to make this available to the people

as a retort to your information for the people is incorrect.

And also, we are the scientists that you are allegedly interpreting, and we are saying that this is wrong.

In addition to those sort of more public responses to criticism, a lot of the media around Vanihari includes references to her penchant for blocking people who express discomfort with her marketing or who are like,

hey, wait, what are your credentials for talking about this?

Although, as someone who blocks extremely liberally, I'm inclined to like

slightly defend her on this.

Do you have a Facebook group called Band by Food Babe with over 10,000 members?

Oh my God, is that true?

No way.

I definitely think there's like a point at which it just became like a little hater factory and all the people who disliked her joined in.

But like it seems like initially it really was like a shit ton of people who had been blocked by her.

Yeah.

This was also summarized in one of the Times profiles.

Quote, Ms.

Hari said that people are only blocked for obscenities, but Dr.

Schwartz, who is among the band, though not a Facebook group member, said he merely questioned her credentials.

I block people for being annoying mostly.

Ten years ago, I was like a zero block purist, like no blocks, not doing it.

You can't do that.

You can't do that on the internet.

Today,

I'm not a responsive blocker.

I'm like a preemptive blocker.

You're like, this is only going to get more annoying.

100%.

Like, if I see someone doing some real fucking bad behavior in someone else's comment section,

cool, block.

So we stand a queen, a blocking queen.

A blocking queen.

Join that Facebook group, everybody.

The thing is, there is a block by Michael Hobbes Facebook group, but it's just Mumsnet.

Where she really starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations.

Okay.

So in 2013, Michael, Vani Hari set her sights on Kraft Foods crown jewel.

It's boxed mac and cheese.

Which, to be honest, is like the most ultra-processed food imaginable.

That's all you think of these are.

All of these are, and I think this is one of the things that like absolutely blew my mind about her work is that she's targeting things like Chick-fil-A sandwiches, craft mac and cheese.

She had a whole Fruit Loops campaign.

Okay.

All of them are like, can you believe they're putting this in there?

Right.

We deserve healthy, safe food.

And I'm like, why are you campaigning around boxed mac and cheese?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, do you not want to advocate for higher levels of money in food stamps programs?

Right.

There's like a bunch of stuff that you can do that isn't focused on like, crap, mac and cheese is poisoning you or whatever.

Like, it's an odd path to take.

Although, to be fair, it is powdered cheese.

Dude, I'm on record.

Cheese dust is delicious.

How dare you?

It is delicious, but it's like.

There are some like mega ultra-processed foods that I'm like, yeah, this stuff is killing us.

Sure.

That if there was real evidence for it I would buy in wholeheartedly again I think this is sort of her model right is pick things where you're like that sounds about right yeah and then say the scariest version of the thing about that and get a bunch of people on board right with that and then on her list and then buying into her framework and so on

so her complaint with craft mac and cheese was the use of artificial food dyes.

Okay.

She wanted them to remove artificial dyes from Kraft Mac and Cheese, particularly yellow five and yellow six.

Because they shrink your balls.

Oh, good.

That was what I learned in middle school.

Yellow five, which was in Mountain Dew, shrinks your balls.

And also the last sip of Mountain Dew is 80% backwash.

Richard Gere gerbils.

Yeah, you know, these are true things.

That's just community knowledge.

My sincere goal in high school was to start a nationwide rumor.

You fucking gremlin.

Of course you started a fucking podcast.

I know.

This is what

she's doing.

Spreading misinformation.

This is all I want.

So in this Kraft Mac and Cheese campaign, she did what would become a real sort of classic tactic of hers, which is she launched a petition on her website.

And according to her, she got 350,000 signatures.

Oh, wow.

So she has a huge audience.

And each one of these campaigns grows her audience considerably, right?

She gathered all of these signatures.

She did a big theatrical petition delivery, like physical petition delivery at Kraft HQ

and had a meeting with executives there.

Kraft initially said that they weren't going to change the recipe, but two years later they announced that they would remove artificial coloring from all of its mac and cheese products.

Okay.

But they said the change had been in the works since 2012.

Okay.

It's not because of this lady.

Although that could also be PR stuff on their part.

Yes, absolutely.

Both of these actors involved have an incentive to lie.

Yeah.

Also, this is a common response from businesses.

Yeah.

They're just like, we're doing the thing.

I don't want to talk about it.

We didn't really get into some seed oils, but like, fundamentally, like, I don't care.

If they've removed food dyes, it's not like I'm like married to food dyes.

It's like, I think evidence should guide these discussions, but ultimately, like, if crafts removed yellow five, like, okay, fine.

Do you know what the concern is with food dyes when people are like, get artificial food coloring out of our food?

Shrinking your balls.

No.

That's all I've ever heard about.

I've never heard anything specific.

This one dates back to the 1970s with something called the fine gold diet.

Okay.

The core idea behind the fine gold diet, it was the like, strip all of the additives out of your kids' diet.

Okay.

The assertion behind this in the fine gold diet was that additives and food dyes caused ADHD.

Was it like a line go up thing that like rates of ADHD have increased at the same time as yellow five consumption has increased kind of thing?

No, the fine gold diet came out in the 70s.

So even our language around ADHD was very different than what it was.

Yeah.

There is some evidence today that in kids who already have ADHD,

some of those kids, when consuming foods that have food coloring in them, will sometimes experience a temporary increase in their hyperactivity symptoms.

Really?

Yes.

It's very strange.

So as a result, some countries require a warning label on foods with food coloring.

Wow.

Okay.

The U.S.

does not require that warning label.

But that that body of research did not exist when the Feingold diet came out.

This was somebody who was just like, on fucking vibes.

Here's what I think, right?

And again, this is like 70s natural food freak out sort of suspicion about newer foods kind of stuff.

So this fit right into a worldview and a discomfort with sort of like the modern world as a whole.

Yeah.

And also a fundamental discomfort with neurodivergence.

Also like yellow five and red 40 and these things do sound kind of like sci-fi dystopians.

Yes.

Because what happened to the first 39 reds?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

We've had to iterate on this.

We're finally at the decent one after 39 tries.

The idea that food dyes cause ADHD has long, long, long since been discredited.

The other concern with food dyes that pops up is about cancer in rats.

Okay.

That is a result of a dye called Red 3.

The FDA has banned Red 3.

You can't use Red 3 in the U.S.

Okay.

However, the amount of dye that exists in food for people is way lower than the dose given to rats in studies.

This is the Diet Coke aspartame conundrum where it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're drinking aspartame.

You're worried about like brain cancer from rats.

Are you having aspartame directly injected into your brain?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

At like double your body weight.

No, okay, cool.

It's always like an indicative mechanism, not necessarily like a direct danger.

On the other hand, like, fine, we don't have the cancer-causing dye in our food anymore.

It seems fine to me.

Um, I think the other thing to know about food dye regulation in the U.S.

is that the FDA quote requires evidence that a color additive is safe at its intended level of use before it may be added to foods, and it adds a maximum allowable amount.

So, it's not just you can use unlimited red 40, right?

Right, it is you can use up to X amount of Red 40.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

According to one scientist

interviewed by New York York Magazine, a 60-pound child would have to eat eight bags of Skittles a day to get to harmful levels of red 40.

Okay, yeah.

It really is being regulated, right?

Like there is a regulatory mechanism there.

Make Skittles beef tallow again.

So a big part of Vanihari's pitch around craft is the idea that these food colorings are banned in the EU, so why are they allowed in the U.S.?

This comes up all the time in these conversations.

Yeah, that came up with the seed oils thing, too.

It sort of sounds right that the EU would have a stronger regulatory food system than the U.S.,

but that is not the case.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Every food coloring that is allowed in the U.S.

is used in the EU.

Okay.

Yellow five, used in the EU.

Red 40, used in the EU.

Blue two, used in the EU.

They are just named differently.

Oh, is it like red 41?

Red 40 is called Allura Red.

Okay.

And when it shows up in ingredient lists, it is listed under its E code name.

So all of these have

labeled number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So people are looking for red 40 on a label of food from like the UK, and they're like, where is it?

And it's E129.

That's Red 40.

Right.

Yellow 5 is E102.

Blue 2 is E132.

These are labeling differences between the US and the EU.

The EU is more likely to use technical names or these sort of coded names for ingredients and labeling.

But regulation in the U.S.

prioritizes consumers' ability to understand what's in their food.

So we're more likely to use and to require language that's more accessible to more people, right?

Or more direct, like this is a food dye rather than just like a random number.

I think it's also worth noting that there are like a number of food dyes that are allowed in the EU that are banned by the FDA and are not allowed in the U.S.

Ponso 4R is a red food coloring that is allowed in the EU but not approved by the FDA.

That doesn't mean it's necessarily unsafe.

It just means that these two sort of regulatory systems deal with them differently.

I think there's a temptation to go, this food system is doing a better job on every measure and not like,

hey, these are different countries with different needs and different priorities about how this stuff ought to get disseminated.

Reasonable minds can differ.

Different systems can make sense for different places, right?

This is actually one of the most enriching things about living abroad for many years.

I feel like when I moved to Denmark, I was like, they're better at everything.

Socialism is cool.

And then you get there and you're like, oh, we actually do a couple things better than them.

And they do some things better than us.

So, Michael.

Aubrey.

The craft campaign was in 2013.

In 2014,

she sets her sights on Starbucks.

Okay.

She writes a blog post called, You'll Never Guess What's in a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte?

Is it union busting?

Is it union busting?

No, there are two main claims that she makes.

One of them we're going to dig in on, and one of them we're not.

The one we're going to dig in on is that the caramel coloring used in pumpkin spice lattes is quote unquote linked to cancer.

Okay.

The other big bombshell that she drops in this blog post is that pumpkin spice lattes contain no pumpkins.

Is she the one that originated this?

This has been driving me insane for like a decade.

It's nutso.

I don't know if she's the one who originated it, but she is definitely a big force in popularizing it.

This made me laugh because I just always assumed that a pumpkin spice latte did not contain pumpkin, that it was pumpkin spice.

Yeah, we're both bakers.

We both understand that the pumpkin spice is the spice you put on the pumpkin.

It doesn't contain pumpkin.

So here's the thing that I find fascinating.

How worked up I am about this?

According to Vannihari, it took Starbucks one year to announce that they had removed caramel coloring from their pumpkin spice lattes.

Again, each of these campaigns, she gets what she wants.

Yeah, that's weird.

But often what she wants is not the full picture or not correct or whatever.

Yeah, like physically incorrect.

Like they, I remember that they added pumpkin to pumpkin spice latte.

They absolutely fucked it.

So I looked this up because I was like, is there fucking, I've never, I don't think I've ever had a pumpkin spice latte.

They're so good.

Are they really?

I bet it's delicious.

Of course.

All of those Starbucks, like we just poured a pound of sugar in here.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It's basically a pie and liquid for him.

Of course, it tastes amazing.

It's a milkshake.

We made you a milkshake.

Yeah.

Well, here's the other thing.

When you get a can of pumpkin puree, that's mostly not pumpkin.

Oh, because butternut squash, a lot of it.

It's butternut squash.

So I'm also like, well, now who's hiding?

Is it real pumpkin?

I don't know.

I would know Aubrey because I always bake my own pumpkins when I make pumpkin pie.

He's farm to table.

I did live in Europe.

You know what?

I did live in Europe.

I just like eat like this.

That's why I'm like so healthy.

He's got the superiority complex to prove it.

That's why I'm like so masculine.

Like the internet is saying like he's so masculine.

And like it's mostly like the vegetables that I eat from Europe, the way that I make my vegetables.

She gets hooked on this caramel coloring thing as being like a source of carcinogens

in pumpkin spice latte.

I'm going to send you a quote here that is from an analytical chemist named Yvette Dentremont, who who wrote a piece for Gawker called The Food Babe Blogger is Full of Shit.

Nice.

Okay.

So here is that chemist's breakdown of the PSL of it all.

It says, and what about that carcinogenic caramel color?

Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your pumpkin spice latte that's in carcinogen class 2B.

There's also coffee.

Coffee is class 2B because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process.

Coffee, before Starbucks turns it into a a milkshake, is pretty healthy for you.

Class 2B means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out, but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer.

Okay, so it's like a maybe.

We can't say it doesn't cause cancer, but there's no affirmative evidence that it causes cancer.

Right, the evidence doesn't allow us to prove a negative that it absolutely never causes cancer.

This is a sort of classic thing where health and wellness influencers will pull from these rankings of carcinogens and will assume that they are ranked by their their likelihood to give you cancer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those rankings are instead rankings of the strength and state of the evidence.

Yeah, I know.

Science could be way better at communicating this, to be honest, but like, yes,

so easy to misinterpret.

And also, this is like directly the result of people who are untrained sort of googling around, tromping around, and not attempting to understand the science on the science's terms.

Because I wish scientists were better at communicating this stuff, but also ultimately the responsibility is of the influencers or whoever the pundits who are saying like this causes cancer without like reading the documents in question, which are always very clear about like what these terms mean.

Right.

And meanwhile, Vani Hari is out here in the press repeatedly saying, you don't need to be an expert to understand this stuff.

Yeah, but you don't understand it.

Really fundamentally misunderstanding like big, big, big parts.

And not even caring to like check in with experts.

Be like, hey, do I have this right?

Yeah.

This is what like we do with our episodes very frequently.

It's like we'll send a rough cut to somebody and be like, are we saying anything boneheaded here?

Does this sound roughly true?

And like it's really really useful to check in with experts on that stuff.

And we will absolutely get very useful feedback being like, ah, this part's not quite it.

I think the only way you can do this and not bother to reach out to people is if you think scientists are like fundamentally part of the problem.

Paid industry shills, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael.

Library.

Are you ready for our next campaign?

Yes.

This is the way that both you and I first heard about the food babe.

Yoga mat bread.

Yoga mats.

We're talking 2015.

We're talking the campaign against Subway bread.

I will say every Subway in the whole world has the same weird smell when you walk in there, which does have like a sort of formaldehyde kind of quality to it.

So I get why this sounded true to people.

There's something weird about the way that it smells because it doesn't smell like baking bread, even though they are baking bread in there.

Subway is not a top-tier

fast food place in the U.S.

You're coming, you're going for it.

You're coming for Subway.

You're like, we don't care about what you eat, how you live your life.

However, if you go to Subway, you're trash.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

I just mean like she's reaching for a restaurant that not very many people are going to defend, right?

Right.

Last week, tonight did an excellent piece on their like extremely predatory business practices, which is why we have like three times as many Subways in the U.S.

as any other fast food restaurant.

Oh, really?

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Did he talk about how six inches isn't enough food and 12 inches is too much?

That's my beef with Subway.

So, this was the first campaign of hers that sort of made its way onto my radar.

The allegation sort of at its core was that Subway's bread used ingredients that were used to make yoga mats.

Love it.

A friend of mine told me this at the time, and I remember being like, that doesn't sound right.

Yeah, I remember that too.

Like,

like it really felt like scientific information that had been delivered by like one of the minions memes on Facebook or something where you're just like,

the packaging of this alone is is suspect, right?

It's a little bit like the American bread is cake thing, which is also just about Subway bread and about its tax status in Ireland or something.

Also, just such a like on-it's face facile comparison.

You can say like, I wash all my towels in vinegar and then I made a salad dressing.

Right.

You use baking soda to clean things, but you also use it to put in your like quick breads or whatever or your cookies.

Yeah.

So Vanni Hari went about looking at Subway's ingredient lists, and she found one ingredient in particular that troubled her.

It's called azodicarbonamide.

We'll call it ADA.

That's what it's shortened to.

Sounds bad.

Sounds scary.

Vonnie Hari launched a petition in February of 2014 demanding that Subway remove ADA from their bread, and she made a video to go along with that petition.

And Michael, we are going to watch that video.

Okay, we're going to see this woman.

Okay.

We are going to see this woman.

Oh, hi there.

I'm the food babe.

I love yoga.

It is so amazing for your body and stress and well-being, but it really does make me really hungry.

Oh my god, she's taking a bite out of the yoga mat.

Wake up, people.

Take a look at the ingredients in Subway's nine-grain bread.

Wake up.

Do you know that one of them is the same ingredients found in yoga mat?

This stuff called Azocarbon,

you know, it's this stuff here.

The name's on the screen, is banned across the globe.

If you get caught using it in Singapore, you get fined and put in jail.

Yes.

This is a very hazardous substance that is linked to lung issues and workers who are exposed to it.

If it isn't even safe to be around and breathe in, how could it be deemed safe to eat?

Well, the U.S.

is one of the only countries in the world that still allows this ingredient to be used here in the United States.

In the U.S., big food companies use this as a flour bleaching agent.

In other countries, they wait a week to turn their flour white.

Not only is Azak,

it's on the screen, and Subway's nine-grain bread, but you'll find it in the food at McDonald's, Wendy's, and even Starbucks Christopher.

Keep the yoga mat out of your mouth and on the floor.

Do you know friends and family that eat yoga mat?

Then share this video with them and go to foodbabe.com for updates.

Until then, I'm the food babe.

You have no real enemies.

You're afraid of yoga mats.

I shouldn't be, but I'm so annoyed at how she's pretending not to know how to pronounce it.

Totally.

Like, you've written numerous posts.

It's like a whole campaign, and you're like, oh, whatever.

You can see it on the screen.

Like, come on.

One of her sort of core rules about food is: if a third grader can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it.

Third graders can't pronounce very much.

I couldn't say refrigerator when I was in third grade.

She relies really heavily on this sort of proposed binary of like chemical versus natural,

which is like that doesn't exist.

Almost everything in the natural world is also chemical, has a chemical name.

This is once again, I would say neophobia in sheep's clothing, right?

The assumption is that new techniques and new ingredients and new foods are inherently sinister.

I thought that this quote from a professor of food science at UMass

was a really good sort of encapsulation of what she's doing here.

This is from a New York Times piece.

It says, Science splutters with frustration that to Miss Hari, the word chemical is always a pejorative, and that she yells fire about toxins but ignores that fruits and vegetables are full of naturally occurring toxins.

Beach pits, for example, are very natural, but they contain cyanine, said Fergus M.

Clydesdale, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts.

Oranges have methanol, which is very toxic, and we've been eating those for thousands of years.

Professor Clydesdale also pointed out that the body is made of chemicals and that we eat partly to replenish those chemicals with chemicals from food.

Hey!

Yay!

Everything is chemicals!

Yeah, I'm against chemicals and I'm for natural foods.

Like neither one of those things mean anything.

So, ADA, what it does is that it's essentially like a foaming agent.

It helps foams retain their structure, and bread is a fucking foam.

Okay.

So, this is an additive that helps you sort of maintain that like bread-foamy kind of structure.

structure.

She does point this out in her video that, like, the core reason that this is banned in other places is because of worker safety.

Right.

It doesn't have anything to do with consumer consumption.

Right.

It's just like completely apples to oranges.

And again, she's reaching for sort of the scariest thing.

It's also wild to look at that and not to frame this as,

hey, the people who make your food deserve safe working conditions.

I want food that's made by people who are able to be safe at work.

You could run this whole campaign as is, but swap out sort of like, aren't you afraid of what's in your food, what's lurking in your food?

Right.

For,

hey, workers are underprotected in this country.

That's fucking true.

Hey, like, food processing is like a notoriously exploitative sector.

The leap from if it's not safe to inhale, why would it be safe to ingest without looking into what we know know right about whether or not it's safe to ingest, right?

Like, that's sort of an unhinged thing.

Again, like, part of the way that she talks about this stuff is completely devoid of context.

She doesn't talk about like, why is this used?

Right, right.

Here is a little write-up from Forbes.

So, how dangerous is this latest red flag food additive?

Honestly, not so bad, at least when compared to some of the other chemicals like BPA that have raised a hue and cry in the past few years.

Interestingly, ADA was actually brought in as a substitute for a much worse chemical, potassium bromate, which was phased out after California's Proposition 65 called it into question as possibly dangerous to human health.

Right, so this was an attempt to actually improve the safety of the food system.

Yes, and there's no real acknowledgement of that.

There's just the like, look how sinister this shit is.

Right.

She genuinely just makes it seem like they are straight up out to get you and not like they're solving a problem in an inelegant way or they could solve that problem in a better way.

Right.

According to her website, the petition garnered more than 50,000 signatures just in the first 24 hours.

Wow.

Which is also how long it took Subway to respond and agree to remove ADA from its bread within the next two months.

That's actually fascinating that it came so quickly.

They said that the removal was already underway, which tracks to me, right?

If it's coming out in the next two months,

I don't know enough about industrial food creation, food manufacturing.

So I couldn't say for sure, but I'm like, two months is a really quick turnaround for something that is part of the structural integrity of the bread that you serve in every dish at your place.

Because you'd have to reformulate it and then do a bunch of testing to make sure that the product is not going to be meaningfully different, which like takes a lot of time.

There may be...

Different equipment that's required.

There may be different staff training.

It just seems like a big undertaking to me to get done in like 60 days or less just because there was a petition.

But I'm sure sure she declared victory anyway.

Absolutely.

For all of these, she claims credit pretty unilaterally.

But again, it's sort of goop style, where, like, as Gwyneth Paltrow said, like, each of those little cultural firestorms

increased traffic, increased her business, all of that kind of stuff.

And that is also, whether or not that's her intention, that is also an effect that appears to be happening here, right?

Well, the thing is, I mean, it's also the thing that she didn't mention the actual danger with subway sandwiches, that if you arrange them in the shape of the word Satan, oh, it changes their molecular structure.

They actually get so much worse.

The sandwiches respond to human consciousness.

But only in English.

And I guess the real issue with this isn't necessarily that Subway removed this thing from their bread because honestly, who gives a shit?

It's more like it's the opportunity cost of, first of all, giving people this bizarre, like anti-system, anti-government, everything message.

And also, like, the energy of people doing petitions and lobbying the corporation could have been directed at something like bad that they're doing, like the way that they treat workers or union busting or something that's like actually real.

I think that's the vibe with kind of all of her stuff.

Yeah.

Most of the things that she lands on, I'm like, I don't care.

Yeah, yeah.

But I think the issue is that she is doing a bunch of world building that is like, they're poisoning you.

The food supply is out to get you.

That she's sort of painting this much broader picture about like most of the sources of your food are inherently suspect and are trying to hurt you.

And that leads directly into like pretty profound anti-government sentiment and erosion of trust in entities like the FDA, right?

Right.

You know, the FDA has a great deal of sort of power, but in terms of like a social media following, she's definitely winning that war.

Right.

And instead of educating her followers on like the actual problems in the food supply, she's essentially like un-educating them and making them afraid of all these like phantoms rather than like things that we could actually be doing something about.

Like things like improving the uh ability of like the FDA to like inspect workplaces and shit like that 100%

like a real issue yeah the little coda to this particular campaign is that this year the FDA has announced that it's going to revisit ADA's place on the grass list but isn't that just like RFK Jr.

being like whatever that's what I was gonna say is like whatever the FDA does is not a measure at this point of like whether or not it's true or false but also I hate this so much because we're now going into a world where basically anything the FDA does, you're like, oh, fuck it, it's RFK Jr.'s weird bullshit.

Right.

That's exactly the kind of distrust in institutions that she is fomenting.

However, these institutions are not trustworthy anymore because they are run by degenerate psychos.

Right.

It's now true what she's been saying about these government agencies for decades.

It's true as a direct result of what she has been campaigning for.

Yeah, and then we result in this like low trust society.

They were trustworthy or considerably more trustworthy on a bunch of different things.

And as a result of her like straightforward misinformation campaigns on a bunch of this stuff, that is now eroding public trust, at least amongst her audience and sort of adjacent audiences for institutions that were, by all accounts, not doing a perfect job, but on the stuff that she was talking about, were taking those decisions pretty carefully, right?

And we're like really genuinely weighing consumer safety and that sort of thing, right?

And also then now it puts us in a position where we're like, oh, those numbers are from the FDA.

You can't trust trust them which makes us sound like loons but like that might end up being the case it also puts us in the position of being like hey lay off craft what if they ever do to you

right like these are all sort of like institutions with very few defenders right this all sort of culminates with her attending the confirmation hearing for rfk junior oh it makes a lot of sense to me her approach is sort of right in the pocket of rfk juniors right so that that like their alignment makes a ton of sense to me yeah the thing i wanted to close with

is talking a little bit about sort of the rhetorical devices that vani hari uses that i think are pretty

common amongst maha influencers and wellness influencers sort of regardless of their political affiliation, right?

A few of these sort of rhetorical devices we've talked about before.

One is anecdotal evidence, stories in place of evidence, right?

Another, which we've talked about a fair amount, is designating some foods as real foods and other foods as quote-unquote fake foods, right?

Yeah, there's also another one that we've sort of touched on in the past is this idea of like nutritional nostalgia, right?

That's not an argument that relies on evidence, it relies on the sort of feeling that we weren't quote unquote meant to eat something.

Right.

We're a fallen society.

Yeah.

There are also a few devices that we haven't talked about quite as much.

One is that in her work, Vanihari does not spend much time explaining why things are the way they are.

Okay.

Again, there's only this sort of fallen society narrative.

The last one that she uses very liberally is this deployment of questions with sort of heavily implied answers.

The one that she uses the most is, what are they trying to hide?

Oh, yeah, I love that.

That's super conspiracy brain because it's like, we can't find evidence of this, but that's evidence of the conspiracy.

right this is the thing that will show up sometimes where people will be like I called General Mills and asked them who grew the oats that are used in Cheerios and they couldn't even tell me yeah that doesn't necessarily mean that someone is concealing sinister information from you right it may just mean hang on I don't have that answer handy it might take me some time to find it or I don't even know how to get that question answered I'm so sorry I can't do it right or maybe it does mean the company's evil but you need actual evidence the company is evil it's not

answer a question 100 right?

All of that felt important to sort of lay out because I think all of these are like increasingly commonplace

as there's more and more sort of health and wellness, quote-unquote, information being shared on social media with the rise of Maha influencers, with like more and more sort of like algorithms tuned toward rage bait and controversial shit.

It means we're just going to keep seeing more and more and more of this stuff.

So it felt like worth lifting up.

Like, here's how this shit shows up.

And if someone opens with,

I didn't see this information.

What are they trying to hide?

It might be worth considering that that is a person who hasn't done their due diligence or doesn't understand what's in front of them, rather than just the person they're pointing the finger at or the company they're pointing the finger at is necessarily doing sinister things.

Thanks, you know?

And the only, I mean, the only way around this stuff is to arrange your food so that it spells out Gandhi and then it becomes more healthy for you.