The Food Babe

Aubrey. Wait. Are you ready to tag us in? Oh, I thought we were doing the uh if post could kill I thought you were about to ask me what do I know about the food, babe. Very little. Oh, do you want me to uh I I'll be Peter today. Uh Michael. Aubrey. What do you know about the food, babe? Well, I already said very little. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where we know very little about what we're talking about.

It doesn't cut in in the same way. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is made from the same material as yoga math. 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 is Vonnie 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 Anheuser Bush, Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg's, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Subway. Starbucks, In and Out, just a it's a really long list. Mm-hmm.

That all sounds bitchin to me, except for the goals that she sets and how she achieves them. Except for what she's doing and who she is as a person. So today, Michael. Uh I'm Michael Hunt. Oh my god, what she got to 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 r 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 Podcasts, premium subscription. It's the Michael 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. Cognitive decline We are in our forties. A bunch of the sort of rhetorical devices that she uses. These are used by lots of folks in this space. So it seemed useful to sort of break down and think about like what are the components of what she's doing here and what are the red flags that folks might be able to apply to other health and wellness media and go, ooh, wait a minute. Yeah.

So, Michael. Aubrey. Vonnie Harry was born in 1979 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her parents immigrated to the US from India. Her dad was an engineering professor at UNC Charlotte and her mom was a high school math teacher. Vonnie herself goes on to graduate from UNC Charlotte with a degree in computer science.

And when I read that I was like, I don't know why, but this makes intuitive sense. There is something going on with computer science majors. I know. Having like a bizarre sense of certainty that they excel at 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 of some of them, it's real bad. Her origin story as the quote unquote food babe is

similar to many, many, many we have heard before. She talks about getting sick, she talks about changing what she ate, and she talks about feeling better. And then she says, I started looking into nutrition. So here is A

synopsis of that origin story from a New York Times piece. It says she had eczema, asthma, stomach problems, and severe food allergies, the last of which critics and at least one person who said she knew her growing up Dispute because Miss Hari has advocated lying to servers about allergies to butter, dairy, corn, and soy to avoid possible sources of genetically modified food.

At age twenty three, 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 skill she learned as an award-winning debater in high school to food. She read labels, cleaned up her diet, and saw results.

Her eczema, asthma, and allergies went away, and she said she was off all prescription drugs, up to eight or nine, depending on the season, within three to four years. Yeah, this is like all of the greatest hits of maintenance phase. It's like a Voltron. Yeah, she's got a condition with out sort of clear causes or clear treatments, which often sends people Googling and then Google gets you into the like swim with dolphins to cure everything rabbit hole.

And then she gets into this like, my diet will save me kind of thing. My lifestyle was killing me stuff. And then Into like spiritual world and then these weird claims of like I was on prescription drugs. Right. But then I stopped eating seed oils and now I'm not on any. What she does with that experience is go, Ah, this made me feel better.

We need to change the law. Yeah. I feel better because I stopped eating this thing, so we should change how they make this thing that I don't eat anymore. What was the actual diet that she switched to? Was it anything specific or just certain foods? She's a little bit Dave Asprey style in that it's like a real style. Sampler platter. Oh yeah. It's GMOs. It's food colorings. It's additives. 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 it goes You're not you'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. Aubrey. I know. Are you okay?

I'm fine. They didn't end up being super relevant to the actual episode. So it's like You wasted your time. I read these for nothing. You stopped eating seed oils months ago and you're like, why? What was it all about? I've cut out all the GMOs. What am I supposed to do now? But you feel amazing. Your energy is off the charts. She doesn't say this, but reading her work I was left with the distinct impression that her what she calls here sort of like

looking into health and nutrition stuff in that phase of her origin story was much more her Googling from a place of like, I feel better, why did this thing make me feel better? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Than a I wanna 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. 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 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 any time somebody says like I do my own research, like ninety percent of the time that's what I assume they're doing. One hundred percent.

From there, she starts blogging under the name the food babe in twenty eleven. Is she like twenty five at this point? She's born in seventy nine, so what are we talking? Yeah, thirty-two. 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 Truvanni, which you can get at Target and Whole Foods. Truvanny? That's almost Truvada. No, it's the word true and then her first name. Oh, so mine would be True Michael. True Michael. Trawbery. 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 Vonnie 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 seventy-eight percent nitrogen and she just like didn't No? 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. 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 stay metabolically impaired and torpid. That's interesting. You're afraid of sunflowers. I'm that that's never not going to be funny to me. It says. In an interview, Miss Hardy 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 Harry 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 gonna 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 in my post. She is doing seed guzzlers in my mentions. This is what these people always do. She's doing all my haters or my Become my waiters at the table of success? Another good quote from a terrible person. That's all this show is now. Oh my god, I don't know why that one gets me so hard every time.

You could have just said that and saved us both some time and I wouldn't have had to read this fucking alarmingly weird quote. That's a really, really strange response to just like a factual error. Also, like factual errors get

through. Like people we have said dumb things on this show too. Like factual errors happened. 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 and be like, yeah, that was really dumb. I don't know why I said that. Thank you to everybody who pointed it out. Like the fact that she can't even admit like oh they're nitpicking and finding all this garbage, but also it wasn't even

It wasn't wrong and also I deleted it without saying anything. All of this stuff is just like weird. Just say that you made a mistake and move on. It's not that big of a deal. To me, these are the the reactions and the comments of someone who is seeing this as like an attack on their character and not as like This is a thing that happens.

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

Unclear who. The next post we're gonna talk about is from uh July twenty twelve. It focused on microwaves. The previous one was not archived on the Wayback Machine. This one... is archived In the Wayback Machine and have I got a fucking screenshot for you. Ooh, it's got an arrow? Okay. It's got images. So I would like for you to describe the images. Oh my god, what?

I didn't know she was like this off the rails this early. Michael we're doing it. There's a 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, and I don't know why. And then alongside the arrow, it says harmful effects of electromagnetic waves, as illustrated by Dr. Mizaru Imoto in book The Hidden Messages in Water. And then under the after image,

Which also has a microwave oven. So this is like a snowflake being microwaved, I guess. It just looks like a water droplet. It says the distilled water heated in the microwave resulted in a crystal similar to that created by the word Satan. I'm not seeing Satan in this image though. Do we have to look upside down? 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 Vonnie Hari's post. She says

Last by not least, okay. Dr. Mizaro 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 microwave 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 when the words Satan and Hitler were repeatedly exposed to the water. Yep. Yep. This fact is probably too hokey for most people.

again a weird m dash, but I wanted to include it, because sometimes the things we can't see with the naked eye, or even fully comprehend, could be the most powerful way to unlock spontaneous healing. What does it mean the words Hitler and Satan were exposed to the water? Like the water was nearby? He just said Hitler, Satan, Satan, Hitler, Hitler Is that real? He just champs it at the water and then he looks at it under a microscope?

This is the first thing we've talked about on the show, Aubrey, where I'm like, don't bother like debunking this. 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 Imoto. He is a pseudoscience entrepreneur. Uh you're kidding, pseudoscience. One of his inventions is called the vibration ometer.

Got his degree in alternative medicine from a disgraced and discredited institution that no longer exists. Oh 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 drags. I love the ones that are like early life and it's like a paragraph and it's like controversies like six pages. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 is the water multilingual? Mike, I'm gonna blow your mind. I didn't read this book. She's slipping. When asked about these, she said quote

These were before I decided to make this my career. It's like saying that the New York Times or whoever aren't allowed to make mistakes. Back then I was blogging as a hobby. It's so funny to be like, how was I to know that the guy who exposed water to Satan and found crystals in it Was lying. This was only a part-time thing. It's my hobby. Of course I'm allowed to lie. Right. There's a part of me that read that it's like

You don't get mad at the New York Times for having its little hobby wordle. Yeah. Come on. Her profile continues to grow. In twenty fifteen she was named one of the thirty most influential people on the internet by Time magazine. Michael, do you wanna know who else is on the thirty most confused? I'd be like, give me the list. Are they all like discredited like crypto weirdos now? I'm gonna go rapid fire.

PewDiePie, Tanahasse Coates, 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 uh let's do it again, but do Mary Both kill.

For each one of them. It's very important to me. We have to rank these people. Oh, it's gonna be so many kills. God, 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 overt criticism from Scientists. A Yale neurologist named Stephen Novella has called her the Jenny McCarthy of Food.

That's a good dig. Kevin Fulta, who leads horticultural sciences at the University of Florida, said quote She found that a popular social media site was more powerful than science itself, more powerful than reason. More powerful than actually knowing what you're talking about. That is accurate and very sad. Marian Nessel told one reporter, quote, I think she means well, but I wish she would pick more important issues and pay closer attention to the science. Classic Marian Nessel.

She's saying the same thing but like way nicer, yeah. Trying to put it in a nice way and is like pick better goals and also look at science. I love your energy, but if you were a different person, it would be better. When Asked to respond to her critics, she generally responds in one of a few different ways.

Her most common one is by uh asserting that the scientist in question is a paid industry shill. Classic. Classic. Another one comes from a quote that she provided to the New York Times. She said, quote, So this whole idea that I'm not scientifically accurate, okay, fine if you wanna 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 responses 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 blocked it Extremely liberally inclined to like slightly defend her on this. Do you have a Facebook group called Banned by Food Babe with over ten thousand 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. I block people for Being annoying mostly. Ten years ago I was like a zero block purist. Like no blocks, not doing it. You can't do that. You can't do that on the internet. Today I'm not a responsive blocker. I'm like a preemptive blocker. You're like, this is only gonna get more annoying. 100%. Like if I see someone

Doing some real fucking bad behavior in someone else's comment section. Cool block. So we stand a queen, a blocking queen. A blocking queen. Join that Facebook group, everybody. The thing is there is a block by Michael Hobbs. Facebook group, but it's just mum's net. Where she really starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations. Okay. So in twenty thirteen, Michael, Vannie Hari 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's targeting things like Chick-fil-A sandwiches, craft mac and cheese. She had a whole Fruit Loops campaign. Okay. All of them are like, Can you believe they're putting this in there? Right.

We deserve healthy, safe food. And I'm like, why are you campaigning around boxed mac and cheese? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, do you not want to? advocate for higher levels of uh money in food stamps programs. There's like a bunch of stuff that you can do that isn't

Focused on like crap, mac and cheese is poisoning you or 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 it! It is delicious, but it's like There are s 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. Yeah. And then say the scariest version of the thing about that. And get a bunch of people on board, right? With uh that and then on her list and then buying into her framework and so on and so forth. So her complaint with Kraft 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. Because they shrink your balls. Oh good. That was what I learned in middle school. Yellow five, which was in Mountain Dew. Shrinks your balls. And also the last sip of Mountain Dew is 80% backwash. Richard Gear Gerbil. Yeah, true fact. My sincere goal in high school was to start a nationwide rumor. You fucking gremlin.

Of course you started a fucking podcast. I know. This is what 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 three hundred and fifty thousand signatures. Oh wow. So 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 Kraft HQ. and had a meeting with executives there. Kraft initially said that they weren't going to change the recipe, but two years later they announced that they would remove artificial coloring from all of its mac and cheese products. Okay. But they said the change had been in the works since twenty twelve. 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 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 craft Remove.

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 nineteen seventies with something called the Feingold Diet. Okay. The core idea behind the Fine Gold diet, it was the like strip all of the additives out of your kids diet. Okay. The assertion behind this in the Fine Gold diet.

was that additives and food dyes caused ADHD. Was it like a line go up thing that like Rates of ADHD have increased as at the same time as yellow five consumption has increased kind of thing? No. The Fine Gold diet came out in the seventies. So even our language around ADHD was very different than what it was. Yeah. There is some evidence today that in kids who already have ADHD

Some of those kids when consuming foods that have food coloring in them will sometimes experience a temporary increase in their hyperactivity symptoms. Really? Yes. It's very strange. So as a result, some countries require a warning label on foods with food coloring. Wow. Okay. The US 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. Here's what I think, right?

And again, this is like seventies natural food freak out sort of suspicion about newer foods kind of stuff. So this fit right into a world view and a discomfort with sort of like the modern world as a whole. Yeah. And also a fundamental discomfort with neurodivergence. Also like yellow five and red forty and these things do sound kind of like sci fi dystopians. Yes. Because what happened to the first thirty-nine reds?

We've had to iterate on this. We're finally at the decent one after 39 tries. The idea that food dyes cause ADHD has long, long, long since been discredited. The other concern with food dyes that pops up is about cancer in rats. Okay. That is a result of a dye called RED 3. The FDA has banned red three. You can't use red three in the US. Okay. However, the amount of die.

that exists in food for people is way lower than the dose given to rats in studies. Right. This is the Diet Coke aspartame. Right. conundrum where it's like Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're drinking aspartame, you're worried about like like brain cancer from rats, are you having aspartame directly injected into your brain? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At like double your body weight. No? Okay, cool. It's always like a an indicative mechanism, not necessarily like a 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 US 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 forty, right? Right.

It is you can use up to X amount of red forty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. According to one scientist uh interviewed by New York magazine A sixty pound child would have to eat eight bags of Skittles a day to get to harmful levels of red forty. Okay. Yeah. It really is being regulated, right? Like there is a regulatory mechanism there. Skittle's 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 US? This comes up all the time in these conversations. Yeah, that came up with the seed oils thing too. Yeah. Sort of sounds right that the EU would have a stronger regulatory food system than the US. But that is not the case. Oh interesting. Okay. Every food coloring that is allowed in the US

is used in the EU. Okay. Yellow five, used in the EU. Red forty, used in the EU. Blue two, used in the EU. They are just named. Differently. Oh, is it like Red forty one? Red forty is called Allura Red. Okay. And when it shows up in ingredient lists, it is listed under its E code name. So all of it's a good thing. Oh yeah, yeah. The Evil. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So people are looking for red forty on a label of food from like the UK and they're like, Where is it? And it's E one twenty nine, that's red forty. Right. Yellow five is E one oh two, blue two is E one thirty two. These are labeling differences between the In 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 US

prioritizes consumers' ability to understand what's in their food. So we're more likely to use and to require language that's more accessible to more people, right? 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. Ponzo

four R 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 uh Hey, these are different countries with different needs and different priorities about how this stuff oughta 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 better than us. So, Michael. Mm, Aubrey. The craft campaign was in twenty thirteen. In twenty fourteen.

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. Okay. 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. Nutso. I don't know if she's the one who originated it, but she is definitely a 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 those. According to V Vani Hari. It took Starbucks.

One year to announce that they had removed caramel coloring from their pumpkin spice lattes. Again, each of these campaigns, she gets what she wants. Yeah, that's weird. But often what she wants is not the full picture or not correct or whatever. Yeah, like physically incorrect. Like they I I remember this. They added pumpkin to pumpkin spice line. 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, I'm not sure. Starbucks like we just like poured a pound of sugar in here. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's basically a pie in 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,'cause 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 Aubrey because I always Bake my own pumpkins when I make pumpkin pie. Farm two table. I did live in Europe.

You know what? I did live in Europe. I just like eat like this. That's why I'm like so healthy. He's got the superiority complex to prove it. That's why I'm like so masculine. Like the internet is saying like he's so masculine and like it's mostly like the vegetables that I eat from Europe, the way that I make my vegetables. She gets hooked on this caramel coloring thing as being like a source of carcinogens.

in pumpkin spice latte. I'm 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 carcinogenic caramel color?

Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your pumpkin spice latte that's in carcinogen class two B. There's also coffee. Coffee is class two B because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process. Coffee, before Starbucks turns into a milkshake, is pretty healthy for you. Class two B means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out.

but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer. Okay, so it's like a maybe. We can't say it doesn't cause cancer, but there's no affirmative evidence that it causes cancer. Right. The evidence doesn't allow us to prove a negative that it absolutely never causes cancer. This is a sort of classic thing where uh health and wellness influencers will pull from these rankings of carcinogens.

Yeah. And we'll assume that they are ranked by their likelihood to give you cancer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those rankings are instead rankings of the strength and state of the evidence. Yeah, I know. Science could be way better at communicating this to be honest, but like yes, it's 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 attempting to understand the science on the science's terms. Because I wish scientists were better at communicating this stuff, but also ultimately the responsibility is of the influencers or whoever the pundits Who are saying like this causes cancer without like reading the documents in question, which are always very clear about like what these terms mean? Right. And meanwhile.

Vani Hari is out here in the press repeatedly saying, You don't need to be an expert to understand this stuff. Yeah, but you don't understand it. Really fundamentally misunderstanding like big, big, big parts. And not even caring to like check in with experts, be like, hey, do I have this right? Yeah. This is what like we do with our episodes very frequently. It's like we'll send a rough cut to somebody and be like, are we saying anything boneheaded here? Does this sound roughly true?

And like it's really useful to check in with experts on that stuff. And we will absolutely get very useful feedback being like, ah, this part's not quite it. I think the only way you can do this and not bother to reach out to people is if you think scientists are like fundamentally part of the problem. Paid industry shills, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael, 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 twenty fifteen. We're talking the campaign against subway bread. I will say every subway in the whole world has the same weird smell when you walk in there, which does have like a sort of formaldehyde kind of quality to it. So I get why this sounded true to people. There's something weird about the way that it smells, because it doesn't smell like baking bread. even though they are baking bread in there. Subway is not a top tier

Fast food place in the U.S. coming, you're going for it, you're coming for Subway. You're like, We don't care about what you eat, how you live your life, however, if you go to Subway, you're trash. No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all, not at all. I just mean like She's reaching for a restaurant that Not very many people are gonna 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 US as any other fast food restaurant. Oh really? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Did he talk about talk about how six inches isn't enough food and twelve inches is too much. That's my beef with Subway. So

This was the first campaign of hers that sort of made its way onto my radar. The allegation sort of at its core was that Subway's bread used ingredients that were used to make yoga math. Love it. And I remember being like That doesn't sound right. Yeah, th I wouldn't do 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 just such a like on its face. Facile comparison. You can say like I wash all my towels in vinegar and then I made a salad dressing. Right. You use baking soda to clean things, but you also use it to put in your like quick breads or whatever or your cookies.

Yeah. So Vani Hari went about looking at Subway's ingredient lists and she found one ingredient in particular that troubled her. It's called azodicarbonomide. We'll call it ADA. That's what it's shortened to. Sounds bad. Sounds scary. Vonnie Harry launched a petition in February of twenty fourteen 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. 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. Taking a bite out of the yoga. Subway's nine grain bread. Yoga mat. This stuff called Azocarbon. This stuff here, the name's on the screen, is banned across the room. If you get caught using it in Singapore, you get fined.

Yeah. This is a very hazardous That is linked to lung issues and workers who are exposed to the other. If it isn't even safe to be around and brew it. In the US. In other countries they wait a week to turn their flower Not only is that. It's on the screen and Subway's nine grain bread, but you'll find it in the Starbucks Christmas. Keep the yoga mat out of your mouth and on the floor. Do you know friends and family that eat? Until then You have no real enemies.

You're afraid of yoga maths. 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 a whole campaign and you're like One of her sort of core rules about

Food is if a third grader can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it. Third graders can't pronounce very much. I couldn't say refrigerator when I was in third grade. She relies really heavily on this sort of proposed binary of like chemical versus natural. 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. It 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 cyanine, said Fergus M. Clydesdale, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts. Oranges have methanol, which is very toxic, and we've been eating those for thousands of years. Professor Clydesdale also pointed out that the body is made of chemicals, and that we eat partly to replenish those chemicals with chemicals.

From food. Everything is chemicals. Yeah, I'm against chemicals and I'm for natural foods. Like neither one of those things mean anything. So ADA, what it does. Is that it's essentially like a foaming agent. It helps foams retain their structure. And bread is a fucking foam. Okay. So this is an additive that helps you sort of maintain that like bread foamy kind of structure. She does point this out in her video that like.

The core reason that this is banned in other places is because of worker safety. Right. It doesn't have anything to do with consumer consumption. Right. It's just like completely apples to oranges. And again, she's reaching for sort of the scariest thing. It's also wild to look at that and not to frame this as Hey the people who make your

Food deserves 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 for Hey, workers are underprotected in this country. That's fucking true. Hey, like food processing is like a notoriously expensive.

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 about whether or not it's safe to ingest, right? Like

That's sort of an unhinged thing. Again, like part of the way that she talks about this stuff is completely devoid of context. She doesn't talk about like why is this used? Right. Right. Here is a little write-up from Forbes. So how dangerous is this latest red flag food additive? Honestly, not so bad, at least when compared to some of the other chemicals like BPA that have raised a hue and cry in the past few years.

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

Right. So this was an attempt to actually improve the safety of the food system. Yes. And there's no real acknowledgement of that. There's just the like, look how sinister this shit is. Right. She genuinely just makes it seem like they are straight up out to get you. Yeah. And not like they are.

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 fifty thousand signatures just in the first twenty four hours. Wow. Which is also how long it took Subway to respond and agree to remove ADA from its bread within the next two months.

That's actually fascinating that they cave so quickly. They said that uh the removal was already underway, which tracks to me, right? If it's coming out 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 gonna be meaningfully different, which like takes time. There may be different staff training. Right. It just seems like a big undertaking to me to get done in like sixty 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 unilateral.

But again, it's sort of goop style where like as as Guda Paltro said, like each of those little cultural firestorms Yeah. Increase traffic, increase her business, all of that kind of stuff. And that is also Whether or not that's her intention, that is also an effect that appears to be happening here, right? Well the thing is I mean, it's also the thing that she didn't mention the actual danger with Subway sandwiches that if you arrange them in

Oh, it changes their molecular structure. They actually get so much worse. The sandwiches respond to human consciousness. But only in English. And I guess the real issue with this isn't necessarily that Subway removed this thing from their bread because honestly who gives a shit? It's more like it's the opportunity cost.

Of first of all, giving people this bizarre like anti system, anti government everything message, and also like the energy of people doing petitions and lobbying the corporation could have been directed at something like bad that they're doing, like the way that they treat workers or union busting or Something that's like actually real. I think that's the vibe with kind of all of her stuff. Yeah. Most of the things that she lands on, I'm like, I don't care. Yeah, yeah.

But I think the issue is that she is doing a bunch of world building that is like they're poisoning you. The food supply is out to get you. That she's sort of painting this much broader picture about like most of the sources of your food are inherently suspect and are trying to hurt you. Yeah. And that leads directly into like pretty profound anti government sentiment 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. Right. And instead of educating her followers on like the actual problems in the foods of flash, 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 workplaces and shit like that. One hundred percent 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

But isn't that just like RFK Jr. being like whatever? That's what I was gonna say. Is like whatever the FDA does is not a measure at this point of like whether or not it's true or false. But also I hate this so much because we're now going into a world where Basically anything the FDA does, you're like, oh fuck it, it's RFK Jr.'s weird bullshit. Right. That's exactly the kind of distrust in institutions

That she is fomenting. However, these institutions are not trustworthy anymore because they are run by degenerate psychos. Right. It's now true what she's been saying about these government agencies for decades. It's true as a direct result of what she has been.

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 amo at least amongst her audience and sort of adjacent audiences. for institutions that were by all accounts not doing a perfect job, but on the stuff that she was talking about were taking those decisions Pretty good.

carefully, right? And we're like really genuinely weighing consumer safety and that sort of thing. 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 with very few defenders.

Right. This all sort of culminates with her attending the confirmation hearing for RFK Junior. Oh. It makes a lot of sense to me. Her approach is sort of right in the pocket of RFK Juniors. Right. So th 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 think 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 feeling that we weren't quote unquote meant to eat something. Right. We're a fallen society. Yeah. There are also a few devices that we haven't talked about quite as much. One is that in her work, Vanihari does not spend much time explaining why things are the way they are. Okay. Again, there's only this sort of fallen society narrative.

The last one that she uses very liberally is this deployment of questions with sort of heavily implied answers. the most is what are they trying to hide? Oh yeah, I love that. That's super conspiracy brain because it's like We can't find evidence of this, but that's evidence of the conspiracy. Right. This is the thing that will show up sometimes where people will be like, I called General Mills and asked them who grew the oats that are used in Cheerios and they couldn't even tell me. Yeah.

That doesn't necessarily mean that someone is concealing sinister information from you. Right. It may just mean Hang on, I don't have that answer handy, it might take me some time to find it. Or I don't even know how to get that question answered. I'm so sorry I can't do it, right? Or it 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.

All of that felt important to sort of lay out because I think all of these are like increasingly commonplace. There's more and more sort of health and wellness quote unquote information being shared on social media. With the rise of Maha influencers.

with like more and more sort of like algorithms tuned toward rage bait and controversial shit. It means we're just gonna 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 information. What are they trying to hide? It might be worth considering that that is a person who hasn't done their due diligence or doesn't understand what's in front of them.

Rather than just the person they're pointing the finger at or the company they're pointing the finger at is necessarily doing sinister things. Right. And the only I mean the only way around this stuff is to arrange your food so that it spells out Gandhi and then it becomes more healthy.