#867 - Vani Hari - Exposing The Food Industry’s Dangerous Lies

0:00What's happening with you in Kellogg's? Kellogg's. So, two weeks ago on October 15th, I went to Kellogg's headquarters with 400 ,000 signatures, took them to Kellogg's front door to ask them to remove artificial food dyes and BHT from their cereals that they produce here in the United States, but don't do this for countries like Canada, all of the countries in Europe, Australia, India. So basically using one set of ingredients here in the United States that are more toxic and harmful towards little children because artificial food dyes are linked to hyperactivity. They require a warning label, a cigarette type warning label in Europe when a product has artificial food dyes that says, may cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children.

1:00They've seen that when they study these different artificial food diets, they contain carcinogens, so they're linked to cancer. They cause autoimmune disorders, eczema, asthma, and also the chemical BHT, which is an endocrine disrupting chemical that you find in the lining of cereal bags as a preservative. They use that here in the United States, but they don't use that in other countries. So, I have been demanding that Kellogg's sell us the same safer versions of their cereals that they serve in other countries. And I've been doing this for a really long time. I've been doing it since, for over a decade.

1:44In 2015 Kellogg said that they were going to make these changes. They got worldwide press about making these changes. They got a lot of praise publicly and through the media when they made this announcement, but then they never did it. They said they would do it by 2018 and instead they created new cereals to hook modern children up today like baby shark and peeps and little mermaid and and Elf on the shelf and in all of these different trick or treat type cereals to get people to buy their cereals. And it's really sad because not only did they lie to us, they continue to sell American children an inferior, less safe version of their cereals.

2:32Is it true that they make those cereals in the same factories as the cereals that don't have those same dies in? Is there any truth to that? At one point, I believe that Canadian cereal was being produced here in the United States and they were shipping it over the border. I think Malini had a lot of Canadian manufacturer now, a factory, but yeah, yeah, that was... They had the capacity to do it. So we're going to talk a lot today about some of the more nefarious activities, maybe of people's favorite high street food brands and stuff like that. Why do brands do this? Is it cheaper? Is it laziness?

3:14Is it something new world order trying to sterilize the population? What's your reasoning behind this? What's your justification that you think they're doing it for? There's a few different reasons. The first reason is that a petroleum coltar -based dye is cheaper to put into a product, then carrot juice, water melon juice, blueberry juice that they're using in other countries to color these cereals. Okay? And other products, for that matter. It's cheaper. The second thing is, it doesn't break down as fast, right? Petroleum lasts forever. Carrot juice, you know, goes rancid. So from a preservation standpoint of how long you can keep a cereal on the shelf, it matters.

4:04So it's all about money and it's all about greed. In the same way they're using BHT to line the insides of the cereal bags, it's a preservation thing. And the fact that the FDA has allowed our food companies here in the United States to create these chemicals, to approve these chemicals for use under their own safety data, not any third party regulatory fashion. This is happening in the food companies themselves. They've decided it's okay to use these chemicals. And the FDA hasn't even reviewed, for example, red number 40 since 1971. And they don't even know the amount that the American public is consuming at this point, which we've done some studies and data and there's been a study done in Purdue University about how the, it's been a dramatic increase in terms of over 500 % increase since food dyes were introduced to our food supply in terms of how much we're actually consuming as the American public.

5:17And this is something that food companies continue to do because no one's holding them accountable. And this is why I had to march two Kellogg's headquarters to do this because no one's doing it. How much do you lay at the feet of the food companies? How much do you lay at the feet of the FDA? And why is America so unique in it's like this weird island food desert type thing, but it's not. It's like a food additive desert, but whatever the food additive oasis. Right. Yeah, we have the worst food system in the world. And we have all of the big food companies that are American food companies making better, safer products overseas for all these other countries.

6:12And this is something that has to be addressed. First of all, I believe that it is a moral obligation, an ethical obligation. If you can make your product safer, then you should do that. And not doing it is anti -American, especially when it's an American company doing this. And the worst part about it is that these food companies know their product is causing harm because 20 years ago, when the South Hampton study came out, European regulatory agencies decided that they would put the cigarette -type warning label on any product that contains dies. And when they did that, these food manufacturers in America didn't want that warning label.

7:04They said, oh no, we don't want to warn parents that this could cause hyperactivity. So we're going to voluntarily remove these chemicals from our products and we're going to create a safer version for all of these other countries. That right there is completely sinister to find out that your product could cause this issue in children and decide not to change it across the board. And that policy, that unethical business practice has to stop with American companies. And that's why we have targeted Kellogg's first with our campaign. And me and other amazing health leaders, doctors, activists are gonna go after the entire food industry at this point because this is something that's happening not only with Kellogg's, it's happening at McDonald's, it's happening with PepsiCo, it's happening with General Mills, it's happening at Kraft Times, it's happening everywhere across the board and I want to send a huge message to the food industry that they can't get away with this anymore.

8:17If they're already making a product that has less chemicals and is safer, they have to do it for their own American citizens. What's the story of the food industry over the last few decades? How would you describe it? We've created a toxic soup, Chris. Over the last 50 or so years, the majority of food chemicals that have been produced and put into our food supply have been invented for one sole purpose, and that's to improve the bottom line of the food industry. Everything from a preservative chemical to an addictive chemical that makes you eat more of that product than you should. The mouth feel, the emulsifiers, the flavorings that trick your old factory system in your head.

9:11Every time you open up a package or you rip open a bag, every single ingredient, I would It's a 99 % of them are there to make the food companies money and not improve our health. And so the majority of foods in the grocery store right now, I would say anything in a package or box or bag that doesn't have five or less ingredients is something that is literally harming your health because the ingredient itself, first of all, likely does not have doesn't have safety data around it. There's this underlying implication that when a food chemical or anything that's been introduced to the food supply goes through a rigorous testing at the FDA.

10:02There is nobody at the FDA testing anything. They actually look at the data that the food companies themselves produce and they just let it be called generally regarded as safe. There's no one actually holding the food companies accountable and saying, hey, we need to look at these chemicals and see the safety data and prove that these chemicals are safe before we allow them in our food system. Is it a hangover from previously food was just food, it was something that you ate and maybe you wrapped it in plastic? There are only so many degrees of perversion and molestation that you could do with food.

10:44Whereas for something like a drug, if we're going to release a drug go into the market, then we need to go through different trials and we need to do so on and so forth. But that now it seems the level of manipulation that happened to food and the different additives and the different preservatives and the different carrying methods that can be included in them. And even the design of them too, the technology is getting to the stage where it can become very, very far removed previously, but we're still working with an old framework, which is when food was largely just food and there was maybe a couple of different amendments that could be made.

11:18This sort of, I'm going to guess, sort of 1900s to 60s model, and then we start to pivot a little bit more as food technology becomes more advanced. Is that kind of what's going on that it's just not held to the same rigor that other industries that people consume are because we assume, well, it's food. Food's just, you know, it's food. Well, I mean, there's a couple things at play here. The food companies basically started to get bought up several years ago by the tobacco companies. And the tobacco companies started to use the same technology that they learned on how to hook Americans to cigarettes in the world to cigarettes and basically use that same science and technology in our brains when we would start to eat processed food.

12:07And so they started to use this complicated kind of laboratory experiments where they would measure our bliss point in our brain, measure our taste response when we would eat a certain product. Everything down from the type of texture the product is. A lot of people don't know that processed foods are manufactured in a way for you to consume them very fast. Think about cheese balls. For example, they melt in your mouth, right? You just digest them so quick. And so your biting doesn't even have the time to catch up with its own society for you to stop and you end up eating half the bag, right? The same thing is with bread.

12:50If you get grocery store bread, a loaf of it, it's so soft and so processed that you can eat five, six, seven slices of that. And the same time it would take you to eat sourdough bread that you would make in your oven at home where you have to really chew through the crust. You really have to take your time to chew it and eat it. And your body in your society, hormones and everything start to work. And you're like, okay, I've had enough bread. But that's not the case with processed food. It's literally manufactured so that you eat more than you should and everything from the texture to the taste to the flavorings that they add and the different additives that they add.

13:36I mean, I want to talk about natural flavoring. This is something that seems so innocuous that it's on the label and you're like, oh, it's from nature. It's natural flavoring, but no, it can be thousands of different chemicals under that label, that create a flavor in your brain that you remember and that you crave and you taste that and you're like, I have to eat one more. And without that flavoring component, the food manufacturers would really be in a lot of hurt because we would stop eating it just a little bit. It's kind of an, I'm thinking about this from the standpoint of the food manufacturers is that what we're asking them to do is almost make foods less palatable.

14:27They need to be less enjoyable. And you think, well, who wants that? Who wants food to be less enjoyable? Surely the job of a food design company is to make foods that are tasty and people enjoy them and they want to have them. And sure, maybe they get them to eat more and that's, you know, capitalism or whatever. So is it your stance that there is a step change in how they've been able to hack physiology, olfactory system, our texture detection, orification as it's known? They've been able to get in and play now sort of outside the bounds of what is reasonable for food companies to do because assuming I'm gonna guess that you know can say all foods need to taste like gravel and it should make the Experiences unenjoyable as possible for everybody involved Listen, real food does not taste like gravel, right?

15:13I mean, I eat a real food diet. I love everything that I have for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think it tastes amazing. But I stay the same way. My health is awesome because I'm eating real food with real nutrition. My body isn't being subjected to these food industry tricks that have happened at a level that I can't even comprehend. I mean, our entire food system has been weaponized against the human body to the point now our rates of chronic disease are astronomical. I mean, like literally we were going to have a situation where we are going to break down as a human society unless we take a look at this and see what's been done and people know the truth.

15:59How much do you lay at the feet of ultra -processed calorie -dense, hyper -politable foods that are easy for people to find consumer deep too much of and how much do you lay at the feet of the specific ingredients and endocrine disrupting effects and so on and so forth. It seems to me that most of the arguments come from either a overconsumption side leading to higher BMI's downstream from that lot of health problems, but then there's this sort of other area which is maybe to do with what's the constituent parts of these foods and so on and so forth. How do you come to think about these two areas?

16:38I mean both of them are synergistic, you know, both of them are problematic and you know you've got on one hand the overconsumption of food that is not nutritious. It's actually not doing anything for your mitochondria in your body. It's leading to metabolic syndrome and that leads to so many different chronic diseases. What's metabolic syndrome? Metabolic syndrome is a condition that happens in your body that basically turns on factors for diabetes and cancer and heart disease. It basically is when the organs in your body stop functioning, your liver, your pancreas, other parts of your digestive system actually stop functioning so that you become more insulin sensitive.

17:25you become more prone to cancer, you become more reluctant to have heart disease. And so this is something that Dr. Casey means, and Callie means talk about in their book, Good Energy, that this is something that is literally attacking the entire body when we're eating this food. And it's up to us to really know the truth about what this food is. And if it is even food, I mean, can you even call it that at that point when it's 50, 60 different chemicals in a subway sandwich or, you know, in a Chick -fil -A sandwich for that matter. It's something that we have to take a good look at in terms of how these chemicals interchange with each other.

18:14But here's why I think I've been effective at getting people's attention because I've It's broken down these chemicals for people to understand. And I've told them why they're there and why the food industry is using them. And they decide on their own that, hey, I'm not going to be part of this experiment anymore. I don't want that chemical in my body. If it is taken out in a study whether it causes hyperactivity or if it's linked to cancer or if it has some endocrine disrupting property, those are all reasons not to consume those chemicals. And I think those are strong reasons. but what that does also is it puts a note in the person's brain of like, wait a minute, I shouldn't eat that much of this food either.

18:56And so they don't bring it in their house as much. And so for me, my methodology has always been ingredients. You read the ingredients. If you don't recognize the ingredient, you don't understand it. You need to go find out why. And this is part of my book feeding you lies at the end. I take people through a three -part question that they need to sit down and every time they sit down to eat, they need to ask themselves. Number one, worthy ingredients. Number two, are these ingredients nutritious? Number three, worthy ingredients come from. If you can't answer those three questions about what you're eating, you need to go find out.

19:33And when you go find out, you will learn so much about your diet and your food that you will automatically start to make better choices. And you don't need to be a nutritionist or a food scientist or anything to know if whether those ingredients are nutritious or not. Because if you know what the ingredient is, and I'll give you a really good example, in breads and a lot of processed foods, you'll see this ingredient and nobody knows why it's there unless they were actually go look it up and teach themselves. It's monodiglycerides. Okay. This is a food industry manufactured products that they use to replace trans fats when the FDA banned trans fats because it was linked to 10 ,000 heart attacks a year in several deaths.

20:18When they banned this chemical partially hydrogenated oils from our food system, the food manufacturers had to find a way to still preserve oils in products and they came up with this monodiglister And so it still even has trace amounts of trans fats in it. And it's a chemical they're using from a preservation standpoint. If you see that on a product that you're eating when you're when you sit down to eat, you should automatically know that's not for my health. That's not for my nutrition. That's not going to serve my body. That's there for the food industry. And so if you start to make decisions, hey, I'm not going to buy products with those chemicals anymore.

20:59You're automatically going to eliminate several thousand different products on the grocery store shelves, and it's absolutely a critical thing people have to learn. What are your hit list of what are the biggest concerns you've got in terms of ingredients? You've just mentioned one there. BHT was something else. So we're talking about, I guess, packaging. What are the main culprits? I'm aware that there's probably an awful lot. What are the ones that are carrying most of the weight and doing most of the damage in your opinion? Yeah, any kind of processed seed oil. So cotton seed oil, canola oil, corn oil, soy oil.

21:39The majority of those come from genetically engineered seeds that are designed to withstand heavy doses of glyphosate, which has now been linked to cancer in many different court cases across the United States. and awarded juries, I'm sorry, plaintiffs, billions of dollars. Okay? So this is a closed shut case on our oils are being produced with this very toxic chemical. Then the way the oils are actually extracted, they're extracting with hexane and different chemicals, deodorizers, and bleach agents before they get to the supermarket. it. And the FDA, unfortunately, does not monitor the residues of things like hexane that are left in a lot of these oils.

22:26Not to mention cottonseed oil is something that is actually produced from the textile industry. This is not even regulated like a food. It's a textile so it has way worse pesticides and chemicals allowed for use on cotton. But they found out that they can use this byproduct in our food system. And it's actually one of the, what was the main ingredient in Crisco and in trans fats for so long until I think a lot of manufacturers have started to remove cottons, you know, although you see it all the time, it's everywhere. And this is something that is pervasive in our food supply. And so when I'm looking for a product to buy on the shelf, I look for things made with olive oil.

23:13I look things remade with coconut oil. I look for things made with avocado oil. And that's about it. And I use grass -fed butter and bee at home to cook with. And I eliminate all seed oil. So that's like the first thing that you'd want to do. The second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. Not only is that also made from genetically engineered corn and have all those chemicals associated with the crops, but the way it's produced also disrupts your, it primes you for metabolic syndrome. It primes your body for insulin resistance. And so this is something you want to take out of your diet. And this is, you'll find everywhere.

23:55It's in Coca -Cola, it's in soda. It's in the majority of things that you find on grocery store shelves, unfortunately. Then you want to look at, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, I'm enthralled. Keep going. And then you want to look at all of the different artificial ingredients that are allowed in food. I'll give you a great example. Red number three was banned in cosmetics because it caused cancer. But when they were ready to ban it in food, the alcohol industry lobbied the FDA and said, know you need to allow it still in food because it makes our maraschino cherries that we have in all of our popular alcoholic drinks, red.

24:42And so we need to keep those maraschino cherries with that red number three dye. So you need to still allow it in food. So you can't use it in lipstick, but it's still allowed in food. And that shows you what a wild, wild west kind of situation we have with our government agencies and how they're completely co -opted by industry. And one of the things that I think needs to happen immediately at the FDA is remove all industry funding from the FDA and it should be a government funded organization. It should not have any type of industry funding coming into it. Talk to me about the conflict of interest in studies and food scientists and stuff like that.

25:29Well, one of the things that has happened recently and I wrote about it in my book, Feeding You Lies, is the food industry will use groups that look very reputable to defend their chemicals and their food -green policies, right? They will hire, you know, different organizations, like I'll give you one great example, the American Council of Science and Health. Sounds so reputable. Sounds so like you, yes, we need to listen to the American Council of Science and Health. But this is an organization that has taken funding. It was, it's like the who's who of corporations, everyone from Big Pharma, Big Chem, and Big Food.

26:24They've taken money from Kellogg's, they've taken money from Coca -Cola, they've taken money from Bear, they've taken money from Sanjenta, McDonald's. I mean, it is insane. And their main objective is to do character assassination on anyone who is speaking out about their products and then and to also confuse the public and to consuming these chemicals and these foods are completely safe. And they just released a hit piece on myself in Iba Mendes, who has been a huge supporter of our campaign on Kellogg's and Dr. Will Cole. And this is what they do. And back in the day when I was going up against a lot of these food giants, I was very naive.

27:18I didn't know that I would literally have paid organizations trying to take me down. And it was pretty much right after I think I got subway to remove azone di carbonamide, a chemical that you find in yoga mats and shoe rubber. You know, if you turn a yoga mat sideways and you look at the air bubbles, it's like evenly different. It looks like a subway sandwich. Oh no. Well, it's evenly disversed. The air bubbles in rubber does the same thing in bread. And so they wanted the bread to look and feel the same in every single subway. That's what fast food is. You want it to be the same in uniform. And so this was a chemical.

28:01They were not using in other countries. If you got caught using it in Singapore, you got fine $450 ,000. And I petitioned subway to remove this chemical because I didn't think eating that chemical was eating fresh. And Michelle Obama at the time had partnered with Subway in her Let's Move campaign. And I was like, wait a minute, does she not know the truth about Subway that there's close to 50 ingredients in the piece of bread at Subway like she needs to know? And so I started this petition and it went so viral that the company by the end of the week made the decision to remove the chemical. And not only that, But every single bread manufacturer in America virtually removed the chemical too So we shut down the azodicarbonamide chemical factory Okay, so you can only imagine how much money was involved with reformulation removing that chemical changing all the ingredient lists all the Packaging all the things that the food industry had to do at that point.

28:59You're a big spanner in the works of a lot of the Operations. Yeah, they were not they were not happy and so as a result I started to be targeted by these organizations, these front groups, and paid for in quote -unquote independent experts that started to show up in every single article that was detailing my work. On one hand, it would say, you know, Bonnie has gotten these chemicals out with her food babe army and all these concerned citizens. And on the other hand, she doesn't know what she's talking about. She's pseudo -scientific. She's got no education. She has no right to talk about any of these chemicals.

29:40And she is dumb as a doornale. She's a food bimbo. She gets all the... No, that was the headline of one of the biggest lobbyists against me and for the food industry. And he's quote unquote, his nickname is Dr. Evil because he does that. I mean, he was against mothers for drunk drivers. I mean, he's just an evil man, but that was a headline and I think it was the Washington Post, Food Bimbo. Another one is she gets on all these programs because she's easier to look at. That was written by a professor in McGill University in Canada who was getting paid by Monsanto, Bear, to attack me, which I found out through Kingdom of Information Request Acts that I submitted to his university.

30:39These are the conversations that we're having to destroy my character at the time. And because I was so unaware of what was going to go down taking on the industry, I became very scared, because they went hardcore. I mean, death threats, rights, people coming by my house, every single talk I gave that was a public talk had to have security there because people were trying to shut down the conversation. Presumably that's not operators from Kellogg's or Monsanto sending you that directly. Presumably that's people who are downstream from the news articles and that have read the criticisms of you and stuff like that.

31:28Yeah, so it was being funded by the chemical and food industry. However, they were using these front groups that you can't tell what the industry funding happening behind the scenes because they hide it. And we were able to discover a lot of this until we were able to see it through FOIA documentation that this was actually happening. And then on top of that, there was, and this just happened three weeks ago, Lighthouse Reports released a exposé about a private social network that was being funded and directed by the communications director, Atman Santo, to hold information about critics to the chemical and food industries, personal data, personal information, my address, my parents' phone numbers, my parents' names, my spouse's name on my profile, a three -page dossier on how to doxing information on given to people of the chemical industry and the entire chemical industry to use this information against me any time that my name would come up.