The Food Babe

hey 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 michael aubrey what do you know about the food babe well i already said very little welcome to maintenance phase the podcast where we know very little about what we're talking about boom it doesn't cut it 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 is okay she has been running campaigns usually petition drives okay that are focused on food corporations for more than a decade interesting that approach has garnered her quite a following she has currently 1.2 million followers on facebook and 2.3 million followers on instagram she has targeted anheuser-busch craft general mills kellogg's chipotle chick-fil-a subway starbucks in and out just a it's a really long list that all sounds bitching to me except for the goals that she sets and how she achieves except for what she's doing and who she is as a person so today michael uh i'm michael humps oh my god 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 yeah we don't it's not a real show it started with the fake tagline and then it just gotten less real from there if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com maintenance phase you can also subscribe through apple podcast premium subscription it's the same audio content stuff michael i'm ray today today i'm taking you into the world of the food babe you're taking me back to the blogosphere and i think that 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 and go 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 of 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 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 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 because 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 a appendicitis something she said was caused by her lifestyle of poor nutrition though most experts say it is a random occurrence she read books like spiritual nutrition and conscious eating and applied the skills she learned as an award-winning debater in high school to food she read labels cleaned up her diet and saw results her eczema asthma and allergies went away and she said she was off all prescription drugs up to eight or nine depending on the season within three to four years yeah this is like all of the greatest hits of maintenance phase it's like tron yeah she's got a condition without sort of clear causes or clear treatments which often sends people googling and then google gets you into the like swim with dolphins to cure everything rabbit hole and then she gets into this like my diet will save me kind of thing my lifestyle was killing me stuff and then into like spiritual world and then these weird claims of like i was on prescription drugs right but then i stopped eating seed oils and now i'm not on any what she does with that experience is go ah this made me feel like i was on a diet and i was on a diet and that's what 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 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 exaggerations 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 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 you're being super relevant to the actual episode you wasted your time i read these for nothing you stopped eating seed oils months ago and you're like why what was it all for i've cut out all the gmos what am i supposed to do now but you feel amazing your energy is off the charts she doesn't say this but reading her work i was left with the distinct impression that her what she calls here sort of like looking into health and nutrition stuff in that phase of her origin story was much more her googling from a place of like i feel better 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 like oh what does the science say about this yeah it's the kind of googling that most of us do most of the time right just to be totally honest right you're like you're googling like e-bike benefit benefits rather than like okay what are the pros and cons she's not googling like eczema yeah what are the treatments that are available what's the body of research she's googling quit gmos treatment for eczema or like improved eczema you're right like yeah that's my i don't know that i don't have her search terms in front of me of course i don't but like that's the impression that i got from reading her work was being like i feel better why do i feel better yeah i i feel like anytime somebody says like i do my own research like 90 of this time that's what i assume they're doing 100 from there she starts blogging under the name the food babe in 2011 is she like 25 at this point she's born in 79 so what are we talking yeah 32 so she has like a whole life as like a management consultant before she starts this like influencing stuff she's been a management consultant for like the better part of a decade at this point she's doing well enough with the blog within one year that she is able to leave her full-time corporate consulting job dude adsense getting that adsense dollars truly so she's getting money from uh adsense she's getting money from affiliate marketing of products that she says are safe and above board and oh michael she also now sells her own line of protein powder called truvani which you can get at target and whole food truvani that's almost truvada no it's the word true and then her first name oh so mine would be true michael so the early days on the food babe blog are frankly wild as fuck there was one post i only found synopses of this one it didn't get archived on the wayback machine so i couldn't find the original post but there was one post that has been much discussed and much reported on called food babe travel essentials no reason to panic on the plane okay we were just talking about this i'm an anxious flyer in a way that i didn't used to be so maybe i can benefit from these tips okay michael did you know according to vani hari that the air on a plane quote isn't pure oxygen either it's mixed with nitrogen oh what this is very alarming it is alarming because air itself is about 78 percent nitrogen and she just like didn't know this is a wild thing to publish without like a very cursory google just a google yeah so people started to critique it both in the comments and also like on reddit it sort of made its way 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 stay metabolically impaired and torpid that's interesting you're afraid of sunflowers i'm that's never not going to be funny to me it says in an interview miss harry said she didn't remember the post okay which mr cook brought up by name she then said it would have disappeared from the blog because it was old 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 going to pick apart every little sentence i've written she said her voice trailing off she added of her critics they have to dig so far and deep to find something that will make me look crazy because what i'm saying now is so sane and so real that's good i'm too real and my haters are going back to my posts she is doing seed guzzlers in my mentions this is what these people always do she's doing all my haters become my waiters at the table of success another good quote from a terrible person that's all this show is now oh my god i don't know why that one gets me so hard every time you could have just said that and saved us both some time and i wouldn't have to read this fucking alarmingly weird quote that's a really really strange response to just like a factual error also like factual errors get through like people we've said dumb things on the show too like factual errors happen i feel like the bigger thing with like if you're following an influencer or something if they can't just admit to a mistake i'd be like yeah that was really dumb i don't know why i said that thank you to everybody who pointed it out like the fact that she can't even admit like oh they're nitpicking and finding all this garbage but also it wasn't even it wasn't wrong 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 community and i think that's a really important thing and i think that's a really important thing 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 whatever i heard of a podcaster recently who called colostrum wound juice i heard about that one too unclear who the next post we're going to talk about is from july 2012 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 images oh my god what yeah i didn't know she was like this off the 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 in moto 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 oven is like a snowflake being microwaved i guess it just looks like a water wave 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 vani hari's post she says last by not least okay dr mazaru in moto who's famous for taking photos of various types of waters and the crystals that they formed in the book called hidden messages in water found water that was microwaved did not form beautiful crystals but instead formed crystals similar to those formed when exposed to negative thoughts or beliefs 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 this fact is probably too hokey for most people again a weird m dash but i wanted to include it because sometimes the things we can't see with the naked eye or even fully comprehend could be the most powerful way to unlock spontaneous healing what does it mean the words hitler and satan were exposed to the water like the water was nearby he just said hitler satan satan hitler is that real he just chants it at the water and then he looks at it under a microscope this is the first thing we talked about on the show aubrey where i'm like don't bother like debunking just like so off the rails and it's like this isn't even like a real like what possibly could he be fucking talking about so the author of this book is masaru imoto 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 longer exists hell yeah his fucking wikipedia page is listed under pseudoscience and i gotta say if wikipedia as a whole is like this is garbage yeah yeah yeah yeah then like that is the fucking drag i love the ones that are like early life and it's like i don't know i don't know i don't know it's like a paragraph and it's like controversies like six pages so his belief was that uh water's structure responded to human consciousness okay and that its structure changed when exposed to curse words and words like satan and hitler is it only like curse words in english or is the is the water multilingual mike i'm gonna blow your mind i didn't read this book she's slimy slipping when asked about these she said quote these were before i decided to make this my career it's like saying that the new york times or whoever aren't allowed to make mistakes back then i was blogging as a hobby it's so funny to be like how was i to know that the guy who exposed water to satan and found crystals in it was lying this was only a part-time thing it's my hobby of course i'm allowed to lie right there's a part of me that read that it's like you don't get mad at the new york times for having its little hobby wordle yeah come on her profile continues to grow in 2015 she was named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by time magazine michael do you want to know who else is on the 30 i was just gonna ask you this i'd be like give me the list are they all like discredited like crypto weirdos now i'm gonna go rapid fire pewdiepie tanahasi coats matt drudge anita sarkisian shakira oh jk rowling narendra modi oh yeah 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 we 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 overt criticism from scientists a yale neurologist named stephen 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 she would pick more important issues and pay closer attention to the science classic marion nestle she's saying the same thing but like way nicer yeah trying to put it in a nice way it is like pick better goals and also look at science i love your energy but if you were a different person it would be better when asked to respond to her critics she generally responds in one of a few different ways her most common one is by uh asserting that the scientist in question is a paid industry shill classic another one comes from a quote that she provided to the new york times she said quote this whole idea that i'm not scientifically accurate okay fine if you want to say that but i'm translating stuff so that the layman can understand it and that's why i'm so effective yeah well how else would we know that the water exposed to satan and hitler is poisoning us she's like i'm trying to make this available to the people 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 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? No way. I definitely think there's like a point at which it just became like a little hater factory and all the people who disliked her joined in. But like it seems like initially it really was like a shit ton of people who had been blocked by her. Yeah, this was also summarized in one of the Times profiles. Quote, Ms. Hari said that people are only blocked for obscenities. But Dr. Schwartz, who is among the band, though not a Facebook group member, said he merely questioned her credentials. I block people for being annoying, mostly. Ten years ago, I was like a zero block purist, like no blocks, not doing it. You can't do that. You can't do that on the Internet. Today, I'm not a responsive blocker. I'm like a preemptive blocker. You're like, this is only to get more annoying. 100%. Like if I see someone doing some real fucking bad behavior inside. Someone else's comment section. Oh, yeah, I do that too. I'm just like, cool, block. So we stan a queen, a blocking queen. A blocking queen. Join that Facebook group, everybody. The thing is, there is a block by Michael Hobbs Facebook group, but it's just Mumsnet. Where she really starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations. Okay. So in 2013, Michael, Vani Hari set her sights on Kraft Foods Crown Jewel. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. boxed mac and cheese which to be honest is like the most ultra processed food imaginable 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 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 it is delicious but it's like there are there are some like mega ultra processed foods that i'm like yeah this stuff is killing us sure that if there was real evidence for it i would buy in wholeheartedly again i think this is sort of her model right just pick things where you're like that sounds about right yeah and then say the scariest version of the thing about that and get a bunch of people on board right with uh 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 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 percent backwash richard gear gerbils yeah you know like that just community knowledge my sincere goal in high school was to start a nationwide rumor you fucking gremlin of course you started a fucking podcast i know this is what i think spreading misinformation this is all i want so in this craft mac and cheese campaign she did what would become a real sort of classic tactic of hers which is she launched a petition on her website and according to her she got 350 000 signatures oh wow she's a huge audience and each one of these campaigns grows her audience considerably right she gathered all of these signatures she did a big theatrical petition delivery like physical petition delivery at craft hq and had a meeting with executives there craft initially said that they weren't going to change the recipe but two years later they announced that they would remove artificial coloring from all of its mac and cheese products 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 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 yellow five like okay fine do you know what the concern is with food dyes when people are like get artificial food coloring out of our food shrinking your balls no that's all i've ever heard about i've never heard anything specific this one dates back to the 1970s with something called the fine gold diet okay the core idea behind the fine gold diet it was the like strip all of the additives out of your kids diet okay the assertion behind this and the fine gold diet was that additives and food dyes caused adhd 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 the fine gold diet came out in the 70s so even our language around adhd was very different than what it was yeah there is some evidence today that in kids who already have adhd some of those kids when consuming foods that have food coloring in them will sometimes experience a temporary increase in their hyperactivity symptoms really yes it's very strange so as a result some countries require a warning label on foods with food coloring wow okay the u.s does not require that warning label but that body of research did not exist when the fine gold diet came out this was somebody who was just like on fucking vibes yeah yeah right and again this is like 70s natural food freak out sort of suspicion about newer foods kind of stuff so this fit right into a worldview and a discomfort with sort of like the modern world as a whole yeah and also a fundamental discomfort with neurodivergence also like yellow five and red 40 and these things do sound kind of like sci-fi dystopians 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 since been discredited the other concern with food dyes that pops up is about cancer in rats okay that's a really good question i don't know if you've heard that is a result of a dye called red three the fda has banned red three you can't use red three in the u.s okay however the amount of dye that exists in food for people is way lower than the dose given to rats in studies right this is the diet coke aspartame conundrum where it's like yeah 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 hand like fine we don't have the cancer causing dye in our food anymore it seems fine to me 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 interviewed by new york magazine a 60 pound child would have to eat eight bags of skittles a day to get to harmful levels of red 40 okay yeah it really is being regulated right there is a regulatory mechanism there make skittles beef tallow again so a big part of vani 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 food coloring that is allowed in the u.s is used in the eu okay yellow five used in the eu red 40 used in the eu blue two used in the eu they are just named differently oh is it like red 41 red 40 is called allura red okay and when it shows up in ingredient lists it is listed under its e code name so all of these have like an e dash yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so people are looking for red 40 on a label of food from like the uk and they're like where is it and it's e 129 that's red 40 right yellow 5 is e 102 blue 2 is e 132 these are labeling differences between the u.s and EU. The EU is more likely to use technical names or these sort of coded names for ingredients and labeling. But regulation in the U.S. prioritizes consumers' ability to understand what's in their food. So we're more likely to use and to require language that's more accessible to more people, right? 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 regulatory systems deal with them differently. I think there's a temptation to go, this food system is doing a better job on every measure and not like, hey, these are different countries with different needs and different priorities about how this stuff ought to get decided. 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, the Kraft campaign was in 2013. In 2014, she sets her sights on Starbucks. Okay. She writes a blog post called, You'll never guess what's in a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. Is it union busting? Is it union busting? No, there are two main claims that she makes. One of them we're going to dig in on and one of them we're not. The one we're going to dig in on is that the caramel coloring used in pumpkin spice lattes is quote unquote linked to cancer. 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. It's nutso. I don't know if she's the one who originated it, but she is definitely a big force in popularizing it. This made me laugh because I just always assumed that a pumpkin spice latte did not contain pumpkin, that it was pumpkin spice. Yeah, we're both bakers. We both understand that the pumpkin spice is the spice you put on the pumpkin. It doesn't contain pumpkin. So here's the thing that I find fascinating. How worked up I am about this? According to Vani Hari, it took. 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. I remember this. They added pumpkin to pumpkin spice lattes. They absolutely fucking 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. At Starbucks, we just poured a pound of sugar in here. Yeah, exactly. 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, 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 Aubrey because I always bake my own pumpkins when I make pumpkin pie. He's farm to. Table. I did live in Europe. You know what? I just like eat like this. That's why I'm like so healthy. He's got the superiority complex to prove it. That's why I'm like so masculine. Like the internet is saying like he's so masculine and like it's mostly like the vegetables that I eat from Europe, the way that I make my vegetables. She gets hooked on this caramel coloring thing as being like a source of carcinogens in pumpkin spice latte. I'm going to send you a quote here that is from an analytical chemist named Yvette Dentremont. Who wrote a piece for Gawker called The Food Babe Blogger is Full of Shit. Nice. Okay. So here is that chemist's breakdown of the PSL of it all. It says, And what about that carcinogenic caramel color? Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your pumpkin spice latte that's in carcinogen class 2B. There's also coffee. Coffee is class 2B because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process. Coffee. Before Starbucks turns it into a milkshake is pretty healthy for you. Class 2B means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out, but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer. Okay. So it's like a maybe we can't say it doesn't cause cancer, but there's no affirmative evidence that it causes cancer, right? The evidence doesn't allow us to prove a negative that it absolutely never causes cancer. This is a sort of classic thing where health and wellness influencers will pull from these rankings of carcinogens and will assume that they are ranked by their likelihood to give you cancer. 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, this is 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 other people's responsibility. 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 2015. We're talking the campaign. 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 US. 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 trapped. 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 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 US 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. This was the first campaign of hers that sort of made its way onto my radar. The allegation sort of at its core was that Subway's bread used ingredients that were used to make yoga mats. Love it. A friend of mine told me this at the time. And I remember being like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah, I remember that too. Like, like it really felt like scientific information that had been delivered by like one of the minions memes on Facebook or something where you're just like the, the package. 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, yes, 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 Vonnie Hart. Vonnie Hart 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. And that's what it's shortened to. Sounds bad. Sounds scary. Vonnie Hart launched a petition in February of 2014 demanding that Subway remove ADA from their bread. And she made a video to go along with that petition. And Michael, we are going to watch that video. Okay. We're going to see this woman. Okay. We are going to see this woman. Oh, hi there. I'm the food babe. I love yoga. It is so amazing for your body and stress and well-being, but it really does make me really hungry. Oh my God. She's taking a bite out of the yoga mat. Wake up, people. Take a look at the ingredients in Subway's nine grain bread. Wake up, people. Did you know that one of them is the same ingredients found in yoga mat? This stuff called azocarbon, you know. It's this stuff here. The name's on the screen is banned across the globe. If you get caught using it in Singapore, you get fined and put in jail. 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 US is one of the only countries in the world that still allows this ingredient to be used here in the United States. In the US, big food companies use this as a flour bleaching agent. In other countries, they wouldn't. They wouldn't. wait a week to turn their flat hour white. Not only is Azek, 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 croissants. Keep the yoga mat out of your mouth and on the floor. Do you know friends and family that eat yoga mat? Then share this video with them and go to foodbabe.com for updates. Until then, I'm the food babe. You have no real enemies. You're afraid of yoga mats. I shouldn't be, but I'm so annoyed at how she's pretending not to know how to pronounce it. Totally. 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 behavior. She relies really heavily on of like chemical versus natural, which is like that doesn't exist. Almost everything in the natural world is also chemical, has a chemical name. This is once again, I would say neophobia in sheep's clothing. The assumption is that new techniques and new ingredients and new foods are inherently sinister. I thought that this quote from a professor of food science at UMass, was a really good sort of encapsulation of what she's doing here. This is from a New York Times piece. It says, science splutter with frustration that to Ms. Hari, the word chemical is always a pejorative and that she yells fire about toxins, but ignores that fruits and vegetables are full of naturally occurring toxins. Beach pits, for example, are very natural, but they contain 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, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts, 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. It doesn't have anything to do with consumer consumption. It's just like completely apples to oranges. And 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 fucking true. Hey, like food processing is like a notoriously exploitative sector. The leap from if it's not safe to inhale, why would it be safe to ingest without looking into what we know? Right. About whether or not it's safe to ingest. Right. Like that's sort of an unhinged thing. Again, like part of the way that she talks about this stuff is completely devoid of context. She doesn't talk about like, why is this used? Right. Right. Here is a little right up from Forbes. So how dangerous is this latest red flag food additive? Honestly, not so bad, at least when compared to some of the other chemicals like BPA that have raised a hue and cry in the past few years. Interestingly, ADA was actually brought in as a substitute for a much worse chemical, potassium bromate, which was phased out after California's Proposition 65 called it into question as possibly dangerous to human health. Right. So this was an attempt to actually improve the safety of the food system. Yes. And there's no real acknowledgement of that. There's just the like, look how sinister this shit is. Right. She genuinely just makes it seem like they are straight up out to get you. Yeah. And not like they're solving a problem in an 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 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 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. Cause 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. Yeah. Different equipment that's required. There may be different staff training. Right. It may take 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. But again, it's sort of goop style where like, as, as go to the Paltrow said, like each of those little cultural fire storms, increased traffic, increased her business, all of that kind of stuff. And that is also whether or not that's her intention. That is also an effect that appears to be happening here. Right. Well, the thing is, I mean, it's also the thing that she didn't mention the actual danger with Subway sandwiches, that if you arrange them in a way that they're not going to be in the shape of the word Satan. Oh, it changes their molecular structure. They actually get so much worse. The sandwiches respond to human consciousness. But only in English. And I guess the real issue with this isn't necessarily that Subway removed this thing from their bread, because honestly, who gives a shit? It's more like it's the opportunity cost of, first of all, giving people this bizarre, like anti-system, anti-government, everything message. And also like the energy of people doing petitions, and lobbying the corporation could have been directed at something like bad that they're doing, like the way 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. Most of the things that she lands on, I'm like, I don't care. But I think the issue is that she is doing a bunch of world building that is like, they're poisoning you. The food supply is out to get you. That she's sort of painting this much broader picture about like, most of the sources of your food are inherently suspect and are trying to hurt you. And that leads directly into like, pretty profound anti-government sentiment and erosion of trust in entities like the FDA, right? Right. You know, the FDA has a great deal of sort of power, but in terms of like a social media following, she's definitely winning that war, right? And instead of educating her followers on like the actual problems in the food supply, she's essentially like 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 ability of like the FDA to like inspect workplaces 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 going to say. It's like, whatever the FDA does is not a measure at this point of like, whether or not it's true or false. But also, I hate this so much because we're now going into a world where basically anything the FDA does, you're like, oh, fuck it. It's RFK Jr.'s weird bullshit. Right. That's exactly the kind of distrust in institutions that she is fomenting. However, these institutions are not trustworthy anymore because they are run by degenerate psychos. Right. It's now true what she's been saying about these government agencies for decades. It's true as a direct result of what she has been campaigning for. Yeah. And then we result in this like low trust society. They were trustworthy or considerably more trustworthy on a bunch of different things. And as a result of. Of her like straightforward misinformation campaigns on a bunch of this stuff that is now eroding public trust, at least amongst her audience and sort of adjacent audiences for institutions that were by all accounts, not doing a perfect job, but on the stuff that she was talking about, were taking those decisions pretty carefully. Right. And we're like really genuinely weighing consumer safety and that sort of thing. And also then now it. 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 Jr. Oh. It makes a lot of sense to me. Her approach is. It's sort of right in the pocket of RFK Jr.'s, right? Yeah, of course. So like their alignment makes a ton of sense to me. Yeah. The thing I wanted to close with is talking a little bit about sort of the rhetorical devices that Vani Hari uses that I think are pretty common amongst Maha influencers and wellness influencers sort of regardless of their political affiliation, right? 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, Fanihari does not spend much time explaining why things are the way they are. Okay. Again, there's only this sort of fallen society narrative. The last one that she uses very liberally is this deployment of questions with sort of heavily implied answers. The one that she uses the most is what are they trying to hide? Oh yeah. I love that. That's super conspiracy brain because it's like, we can't find evidence of this, but that's evidence of the conspiracy. Right. This is the thing that will show up sometimes where people will be like, I called General Mills and asked them who grew the oats that are used in Cheerios and they couldn't even tell me. That doesn't necessarily mean that someone is concealing sinister information from you. It may just mean, hang on, I don't have that answer handy. It might take me some time to find it. Or I don't even know how to get that question answered. I'm so sorry. I can't do it. Right. Or maybe it does mean the company's evil, but you need actual evidence that the 100% right. All of that felt important to sort of lay out because I think all of these are like increasingly commonplace as there's more and more sort of health and wellness quote unquote information being shared on social media with the rise of Maha influencers with like more and more sort of like algorithms tuned toward rage bait and controversial shit. It means we're just going to keep seeing more and more and more of this stuff. So it felt like worth lifting. Up. Like here's how this shit shows up. And if someone opens with like, I didn't see this information, what are they trying to hide? It might be 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 that it spells out Gandhi and then it becomes more healthy. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.