The Food Babe

Introduction

0:00hey michael wait are you ready to tag us in oh i thought we were doing the uh if folks could kill i think you're 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 uh michael aubry 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

0:33we'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 gonna 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

Food Babe Background

0:58is vani hari uh 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 anheiser bush craft general mills kellogg's chipotle chick-fil-a subway starbucks in and out just it's a really long list that all sounds bitchin to me except for the goals that

1:36she 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'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

2:09subscription it's the same audio content stuff michael aubrey today today i'm taking you into the

Vani Hari's Story

2:17world 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 and what are the red flags that folks might be able to apply to other health and wellness media

2:48and 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 i know having like a bizarre sense

3:23of certainty that they excel at lots of fields we 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

Origin Story

3:45it'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 okay 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

4:19because miss harry 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

4:52season 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

5:26that experience is go uh 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 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 you're not

5:59you're not pretending to be like this is a sympathetic protagonist 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 aubry 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 were nothing you stopped

6:34eating 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

Criticism and Response

6:46her 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 then 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

7:16like 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 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

7:49search 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

8:22decade 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

8:54you 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 trubbery 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

9:28travel 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 it's mixed with nitrogen oh what this is very alarming it is alarming because air itself is about 78 percent

Pseudoscience

9:53nitrogen 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 okay far and wide to be like what is going on with this lady the new york times interviewed her about this post uh 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

10:29stay 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 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

11:03were 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

11:35another 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'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

12:08yeah 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 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

12:40whatever 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 uh 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 oh 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

13:19the rails this early 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 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

13:50it 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 i'm not seeing satan in this image though do we have to look upside down like 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 harry's post she says last by not least okay dr mazaru emoto who's famous for taking photos of various types of waters and the crystals that

14:23they 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 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

14:57when 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

15:32and 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 i you're kidding pseudoscience one of his inventions is called the vibration-o-meter got his degree in alternative medicine from a disgraced and discredited institution that no

16:07longer 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

16:45and hitler is it only like curse words in english or is the 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

17:15thing 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 like give me the list are they all like discredited like crypto weirdos now i'm gonna go rapid fire

17:48pewdiepie ta-nehisi coats matt drudge anita sarkeesian shakira oh jk 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 uh let's do it again but do mary boff kill for each one of them it's very important to me you have to rank these people oh it's gonna be so many kills what i know it's mostly kills on that so all the while while her profile is rising there is more and more and more

18:25overt criticism from scientists a yale neurologist named steven novella has called her the jenny mccarthy of food that's a good dig kevin folta 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 nestle told one reporter quote i think she means well but i wish

Scientific Criticism

18:58she 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 classic classic

19:32another 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 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 in addition to those sort of more public

20:05responses to criticism a lot of the media around vani hari 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 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

20:39became 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 i block people for being annoying mostly 10 years ago i was like a zero block purist

21:11like 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 to get more annoying 100 like if i see someone doing some real fucking bad behavior in someone else's comment section oh yeah 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

21:42starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations okay so in

Campaigns

21:492013 michael vanihari set her sights on craft foods crown jewel it's boxed mac and cheese which to be honest is like the most ultra processed food imaginable when you think about it yeah 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 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

22:25i'm like why are you campaigning around boxed mac and cheese yeah yeah yeah like do you not want to advocate for higher levels of uh money and food stamps programs right there's like a bunch of stuff that you can do that isn't focused on like craft 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 is delicious but it's like there are there are some like mega ultra processed foods that

22:57i'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 yeah 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 yeah that and then on her list and then buying into her framework and so 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 craft mac and cheese particularly yellow five and yellow six

23:32because 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 gear gerbils yeah these are true facts 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 writing misinformation this is all i want so in this craft mac and cheese campaign she did what

24:03would 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 yeah 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

24:37later they announced that they would remove artificial coloring from all of its mac and cheese products 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 craft removed

25:12yellow 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

25:43caused 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 will sometimes experience a temporary increase in their hyperactivity symptoms really yes it's very

26:19strange 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 body of research did not exist when the fine gold diet came out this was somebody who was just like right fucking vibes 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

26:52discomfort with neurodivergence also like yellow five and red 40 and these things do sound kind of like sci-fi dystopian yes because what happened to the first 39 reds 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 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

27:28u.s okay however the amount of dye that exists in food for people is way lower than the dose given to rats oh yeah studies right this is the diet coke aspartame right conundrum where it's like 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 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

28:00hand 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 right it is you can use up to x amount of red 40 yeah yeah according to one scientist uh 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

28:38okay yeah it really is being regulated right like there is a regulatory mechanism there make skittles beef tallow again so a big part of vani hari'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

29:10food 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 bluetooth 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 yeah so people are looking for red 40 on a label

29:43of 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 u.s 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

30:13so 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 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

30:44regulatory 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 uh hey these are different countries with different needs and different priorities about how this stuff ought to get disseminated right 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

31:15better than us so michael the craft campaign was in 2013 in 2014 she sets her sights on starbucks

Starbucks Campaign

31:25okay 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

31:55pumpkin 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 i 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 vani hari it took starbucks one year to announce that they

32:31had 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 this they added pumpkin to pumpkin spice they absolutely did 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 like poured a pound of sugar in here yeah exactly yeah it's

33:02basically a pie and liquid form 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 things is it real pumpkin i don't know well i would know aubry 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

33:38prove 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 gonna send you a quote here that is from an analytical chemist named yvette dentremont 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

34:15carcinogenic 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 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

34:45doesn'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 yeah and will assume that they are ranked by their likelihood to give you cancer yeah yeah those rankings are instead rankings of the strength and state of the evidence yeah i know the science could be way better at communicating this to be honest but like yes 100 so easy to misinterpret but also this is like directly the result of people who are untrained sort of googling around tromping around and not

35:20attempting to understand the science on the science's terms because i wish scientists were better at communicating and 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

35:53very 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 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 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 yes 2015 we're talking the campaign against subway bread i will

Subway Campaign

36:31say 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 not at all not at all i just mean like

37:03she'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

37:39yoga 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 the packaging of this alone is suspect right yeah 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

38:09just such a like on its face facile comparison you can say like yes i wash all my towels in vinegar and then i made a salad dressing right you use baking soda to clean things yeah but you also use it to put in your like quick breads or whatever or your cookies yeah so vanihari 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 vanihari

38:43launched 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 gonna watch that video okay we're gonna see this woman okay we are gonna 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

39:19nine grain bread wake up people 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 yeah 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

39:52united 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 as a 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 croissant 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

40:23babe 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 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

40:56binary of like chemical versus natural right which is like that doesn't exist yeah 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 yeah 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

41:32it says science splutter with frustration that to miss harry 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 peach pits for example are very natural but they contain cyanide 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 everything is chemicals yeah i'm against chemicals and i'm for natural

42:10foods 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 okay 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

42:44completely 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 right 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 right that's

43:17fucking 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 right about whether or not it's safe to ingest right like that's sort of an unhinged thing again like right 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 right up from forbes so how dangerous is this latest red flag food

43:50additive 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

44:21are straight up out to get you yeah 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 they came so quickly they said that uh the removal was already underway which tracks to me right if it's coming

44:51out in the next two months right i don't know enough about industrial like food creation food manufacturing um 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 like reformulate it and then like do a bunch of testing to make sure that the product is not going to be meaningfully different which like takes time there may be different equipment that's required there may be different staff training right it just seems like

45:22a big undertaking to me to get done in like 60 days or less just because there was a petition but i'm sure she declared victory anyway absolutely for all of these she claims credit pretty unilaterally yeah but again it's sort of goop style where like right as as go to the paltrow said like each of those little cultural firestorms yeah just bring more 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

45:53mention 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

46:27lobbying the corporation could have been directed at something like bad that they're doing like the way 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 yeah and that

46:59leads directly into like pretty profound anti-government sentiment yeah and erosion of trust in entities like the fda right right uh 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 uneducating 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

47:32workplaces and shit like that 100 food safety is 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

48:06anymore 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

48:37and 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 we're 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 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 did they ever do to you right like these are all sort of like institutions

49:14with 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 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 vanihari uses that i

Rhetorical Devices

49:42think are pretty common amongst maha influencers and wellness influencers sort of regardless of their political affiliation right okay 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

50:15feeling 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

50:46sort 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

51:20it 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 that the company's evil it's not just that they won't 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

51:53it 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 like i didn't see this misinformation 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 you know and the only i mean the only way around this stuff is to arrange your food so

52:24that it spells out gondi and then it becomes more healthy for you so

52:54so so so so so so so so so