The Food Babe

0:28Hey Michael. Very little. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where we know very little about what we're talking about. Boom. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. 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 until 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 Vani Hari. She has been running campaigns, usually petition drives, that are focused on food corporations for more than a decade.

1:09That 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 craft general mills kellogg's chipotle chick-fil-a subway starbucks in and out just it's a really long list that all sounds bitching 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 uh i'm michael humps oh my god whoops she got too far into it it's not like we even say like what our like little qualifications are just like here's my name as a person we don't even have really a schedule anymore yeah we don't 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 aubry 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 uh oh my god shit is leaving my brain again michael this sucks cognitive decline the podcast 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?

2:43And what are the red flags that folks might be able to apply to other health and wellness media and go, Oh, 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. Vani 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.

3:26We need to get kids like reading like liberal arts shit again. We need more wokeness 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 something 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 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.

4:10It 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 Ms. 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.

4:43She 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.

5:17And 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 food? 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.

5:48It'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 where I go. You're not pretending to be like, this is a sympathetic protagonist. This person isn't good. She's not good. 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.

6:23Did you really? Yeah. Aubrey. I know. Are you okay? I'm fine. They didn't end up being super relevant to the actual episode. 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.

7:02Why 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. It's 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 gmo's 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 uh 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.

9:01Oh, so mine would be True Michael. True Michael Traubry. 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 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 Vani Hari, that the air on a plane, quote, isn't pure oxygen either.

9:45It'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 you're afraid of sunflowers i'm that's never not going to be funny to me it says in an interview miss harry 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.

10:50Weeks 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. Ms. 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 always do she's doing all my haters 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.

11:47You 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've said dumb things on the 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.

12:17And 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. Every reporter under the sun has published something that was like incorrect in retrospect, or you didn't catch it at the time or whatever. I heard of a podcaster 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.

12:50It 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 the images. Oh my God, what? I didn't know she was like this off the rails this early. 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. There's a giant red arrow pointing at the after. I don't know why. And then alongside the arrow, it says, harmful effects of electromagnetic waves as illustrated by Dr.

13:40Mazzaru 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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 but not least. Okay. Dr. Mazzaro 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, but instead formed crystals similar to those formed when exposed to negative thoughts or beliefs.

14:37Yep. 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, yep. This fact is probably too hokey for most people. Again, a weird em 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.

15:18What 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 talked about on the show aubrey where i'm like don't bother like debunking this it's 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 vibration-o-meter.

16:01Got 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 drag i love the ones that are like early life and it's like a paragraph and it's like controversies like six pages so his belief was that uh 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?

16:50Mike, I'm going to 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 as like, you don't get mad at the New York Times for having its little hobby wordle.

17:25Yeah. 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 i'm just gonna ask you this i'm like give me the list are they all like discredited like crypto weirdos now i'm gonna go rapid fire pewdiepie ta-nehisi coats matt drudge Anita Sarkeesian, Shakira, J.K. Rowling, Narendra Modi, Taylor Swift, and Caitlin McNeil, the woman who took the picture of the blue and black slash golden yellow, golden white dress. Let's do it again, but do Mary Boff kill for each one of them.

18:11It's very important to me. We have to rank these people. Oh, it's going to be so many kills. I know, it's 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.

18:52That is accurate and very sad. Marion Nestle 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 Nestle. She's saying the same thing, but like way nicer. Yeah. Trying to put it in a nice way. It 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.

19:31Classic, 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. OK, 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. Right. 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.

20:04In addition to those sort of more public responses to criticism, a lot of the media around Vani Hari includes references to her penchant for blocking people who express discomfort her 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 banned by food babe with over 10 000 members oh my god is that true yeah 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 harry 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.

21:05I block people for being annoying mostly. 10 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 no I'm not a responsive blocker I'm like a preemptive blocker. You're like this is only getting more annoying. 100 % like if I see someone doing some real fucking bad behavior in someone else's comment section I'm just like cool block. So we stan a queen a blocking queen. A blocking queen. Join that Facebook group, everybody. The thing is, there is a Block by Michael Hobbs Facebook group, but it's just Mumsnet. Where she really starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations.

21:48Okay. 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. Yes, all 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 is targeting things like Chick-fil-A sandwiches, Kraft 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?

22:28Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, do you not want to advocate for higher levels of money in food stamps programs? There's like a bunch of stuff that you can do that isn't focused on like, Kraft mac and cheese is poisoning you or what? 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 just 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 yeah yeah so her complaint with craft mac and cheese was uh the use of artificial food dyes okay she wanted them to remove artificial dyes from Kraft mac and cheese, particularly Yellow 5 and Yellow 6.

23:32Because they shrink your balls. Oh, good! That was what I learned in middle school. Yellow 5, which was in Mountain Dew, shrinks your balls, and also the last sip of Mountain Dew is 80 % backwash. Richard Gere gerbils. Yeah, these are true facts. They're 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! spreading misinformation this is all i want so in this craft 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 she's 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 craft hq and had a meeting with executives there craft 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 work since 2012.

24:47Okay. 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 the subseed 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 Kraft 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 and the fine gold diet was that additives and food dyes caused ADHD.

25:46Was 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. 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.

26:25The U.S. does not require that warning label. But that body of research did not exist when the Feingold diet came out. This was somebody who was just like, on fucking vibes. Yeah. Here's what I think. Yeah. 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 5 and Red 40 and these things do sound kind of like sci-fi dystopian. Yes. Because what happened to the first 39 Reds?

27:03Yeah. 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 three. The FDA has banned red three. You can't use red three 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, right? This is the diet Coke aspartame conundrum where it's like, yeah, you're drinking aspartame. You're worried about like brain cancer from rats.

27:49Are you having aspartame directly injected into your brain? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 okay and it adds a maximum allowable amount so it's not just you can use unlimited red 40, right?

28:21Right. It is you can use up to X amount of red 40. Yeah. According to one scientist interviewed by New 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? There is a regulatory mechanism there. Make Skittles beef tallow again. So a big part of vani harry'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 US is used in the EU.

29:15Okay. 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 like an e-dash 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 e 129 that's red 40 right yellow five is e 102 blue two is e 132 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.

30:14So we're more likely to use and to require language that's more accessible to more people, right? And 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 US. 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, uh, 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.

30:59Right. 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 of things better than them. And they do some things better than us. So, Michael, 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 gonna dig in on and one of them we're not the one we're gonna dig in on is that the caramel coloring used in pumpkin spice lattes is quote unquote linked to cancer.

31:49Okay. The other big bombshell that she drops in this blog post is that pumpkin spice lattes contain no pumpkin. 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.