Feeding You Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health

For Big Food, it’s not enough to invent lies about what we’re eating—they need to spread those lies, to persuade millions of consumers that highly processed food in boxes, cans, and aluminum foil isn’t bad for us.

This chapter is about how they do that. We already know about their huge marketing campaigns, which are designed to trick us into buying their products. (Why else would we spend good money on dyed sugar water with bubbles?) But it turns out Big Food has also invested in more subtle means of spreading their lies, which often involve manipulating the media and paying “experts” to shill for their side.

Look, for instance, at how Coca-Cola uses fitness and nutrition experts to deftly spread a series of dangerous lies about soda, sugar, and calories. According to an expose in the Dallas Morning News, Coca-Cola has dozens of dietitians, academics, fitness experts, chefs, and nutritionists on their payroll.¹ When the soda company wants to get out a new message, they lean on these experts to write blogs and articles touting their new drink. That’s exactly what happened after Coca-Cola introduced smaller soda cans. At the behest of the company, dietitians and nutritionists wrote numerous pieces (several of which ended up in major newspapers) that celebrated the smaller cola cans as a healthy treat. Even worse, the articles never disclosed that they were essentially paid advertisements.²

Are you kidding me? This is blatant misinformation—soda is never a healthy treat, not even in a smaller serving size—and it’s gross that the so-called experts never disclose why they’re suddenly so supportive of Coca-Cola products.

In many instances, Coca-Cola was the main sponsor of science journalism conferences, allowing the company to plant story ideas that later appeared on CNN and in major newspapers. Coca-Cola’s sponsorship was hidden from journalists. According to the BMJ, these journalism conferences delivered far more B.S. for the buck than conventional advertisements.³ Why? Because they delivered lies that felt true. And they were everywhere.

I have to admit that, for me, the spreading of Big Food lies is a personal issue. That’s because I’ve been a frequent target of corporate attacks, as their shills try to discredit me and the Food Babe Army. While the criticisms can sting, I also know that they are a testament to our success. The more powerful we get, and the more companies we convince to remove additives and chemicals, the more Big Food tries to stop us. But they can’t.

My first memorable experience with their attacks occurred, not surprisingly, right after a big win for the Food Babe Army. We’d just forced Subway to remove the controversial chemical azodicarbonamide (the yoga mat chemical) from its bread. We had also succeeded in getting the largest beer company in the world—Anheuser-Busch—to publish the ingredients in their beer for the first time in history. Our work was making front page news all over the world.

When you put yourself out there, you have to be ready to deal with the negatives as well as the positives—and with the haters along with the supporters. And I’ve got thick skin. But I wasn’t prepared for the coordinated attacks that took advantage of the biased media. Big Food hasn’t just mastered the art of deception and distraction using lobbyists, front groups, paid scientists, and other experts; they’re also really good at manipulating the media to deliver messages that support food industry positions and refute information that might challenge their status quo.

The ugly truth is that many media outlets have become nothing more than a spin factory for Big Food.

If you read these headlines, you probably wondered, as I did: “What the heck is going on? I thought coconut oil was healthy.”

For the record, I still am convinced that coconut oil is healthy. I use it to bake cookies and to “butter” my popcorn. It’s a regular part of my diet, and I consider it to be one of the best oils to eat—period. If you dig into the unbiased scientific literature, you’ll find out a lot about its therapeutic benefits: protection against heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and various degenerative illnesses.

A little digging on my part unearthed the source: the American Heart Association (AHA). In 2017, it released a jaw-dropping “Presidential Advisory,” in which a writing panel composed of experts recommended that we avoid coconut oil, stating that it is high in saturated fat and raises “bad” cholesterol levels—which the AHA believes leads to heart disease (although there is credible evidence to the contrary).⁸ The advisory went on to recommend that we swap coconut oil with olive oil or … corn oil.

Oh, no! Corn oil is exactly the oil we should be avoiding, along with soybean and canola oils. I’ve heavily researched these oils. As I noted in Chapter 1, they go through an insane amount of processing with chemical solvents, steamers, neutralizers, de-waxers, bleach, and deodorizers before they end up in the bottle. These cooking oils are also very high in omega-6 fatty acids, which are known to promote inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation is a real killer, increasing the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.⁹ These oils are also strongly linked to cancer and are typically derived from genetically modified crops contaminated with Roundup herbicide, made by Monsanto.

But don’t take my word for it. In 2017, a large statistical study in Nutrition Journal revealed that replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats (like corn oil) is not likely to reduce risk of heart disease one bit, nor influence cholesterol levels.¹⁰ If you look at the countries that consume the most coconut oil, they’ve also got some of the lowest rates of heart disease … what does that tell you?

The AHA is a nonprofit organization with a mission to “build healthier lives free of cardiovascular disease and stroke.” But I join many other critics in believing that the AHA is not true to this calling. For example, that Presidential Advisory has since been widely criticized for using “cherry-picked” studies—and rightly so. The AHA’s main conclusions were based on only four trials, with the latest one done in 1971, making them “ancient” by the standards of modern scientific research.¹¹

The AHA Presidential Advisory writing panel was also blasted because it included a member whose previous research was funded by numerous drug companies, many of whom make cholesterol pills: Amarin, Amgen, AstraZeneca (maker of the statin Crestor), Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer, Regeneron/Sanofi, and Takeda.¹² Another member was previously funded by the Ag Canada and Canola Oil Council,¹³ while another had previously received consulting fees from several drug companies including Abbott, Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck. Another researcher has received significant research support from Unilever (maker of Hellmann’s mayonnaise made with soybean oil).¹⁴

All of this adds up to major conflicts of interest, with the food industry in bed with a medical organization, operating under the guise of truth and objectivity.

Lucky Charms Are Good for the Heart
(and Other Advertising Sins)

Big Food will heavily advertise its products; that’s a given. But let me tell you about another sneaky tactic: medical endorsements from health organizations. They know we trust these organizations, which is precisely why they’re so determined to use them to help spread their lies.

The American Heart Association is a perfect example of how this works. The AHA has a program in which it allows a “heart check” seal to be put on approved foods that are low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Those foods are considered certified by the AHA. Although a lot of healthy foods are certified (avocados and fresh sweet potatoes, to name two), there are many foods on the list that are loaded with sugar and other nasty ingredients:¹⁵

Pepperidge Farm Whole Grain Honey Wheat Bread with added sugar, soybean oil, and two additives that contain trans fats (DATEM and monoglycerides).
Frescados Tomato Basil Wrap made with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, artificial food dyes, and cellulose gum.
Westsoy Organic Original SoyMilk sweetened with brown rice syrup, containing a whopping 12 grams of sugar per serving (the unsweetened version is certified too, but it only has 3 grams sugar).
Minute Maid Frozen Concentrate Orange Juice that has the same amount of sugar as a Coke.
Classic Creations Flake Style Imitation Crab Meat made with artificial sugars, artificial flavors, and carrageenan.

Although they don’t anymore, the AHA once certified fat-free chocolate milk and Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, and Trix cereals. (Who knew eating artificially colored and sugar-filled marshmallows for breakfast was good for your heart?) They also certify heavily processed deli meats full of sugar, salt, and preservatives, like heavily processed Boar’s Head products.¹⁶ Both of these categories of food (sugary foods and processed deli meats) are associated with a dramatically increased risk of heart disease, according to research from Harvard.¹⁷

In one of these studies, scientists said this: “Over the course of the 15-year study on added sugar and heart disease, participants who took in 25 percent or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets included less than 10 percent added sugar.”¹⁸

And researchers from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health found that eating processed meat, such as bacon, sausage, or processed deli meats, was associated with a 42 percent higher risk of heart disease.¹⁹

Why, then, is the AHA certifying sugary foods and processed deli meats that are quite clearly bad for the heart? Maybe because there’s a financial hitch to this: Companies making these products and dozens more insanely processed foods have each paid thousands of dollars in fees to use the AHA’s seal. They’re willing to pay for the obvious reason: according to the AHA’s own market research, the heart-check symbol helps sell food.

Please recognize squarely where the AHA’s loyalty lies; don’t just toss certain foods in your cart because they display a heart-check seal. Looking at where the AHA’s revenue comes from, you’ve got to question the veracity of their opinions on what constitutes “heart healthy” food.

I for one do not trust the AHA—can you tell? Last year, I was invited to join some celebrities, including a few of my favorite NFL players, at a fundraiser, an even that I would have loved to go to. I declined the invitation because the event was sponsored by the AHA. It killed me to decline the opportunity, but it was the right thing to do.

I know it’s frustrating when there is so much conflicting health information being fired at us from all directions. How can we know what to believe? How can we know we’re getting accurate advice? Who should we listen to? How can we expect to get healthy?

When it comes to health information, we must always consider the source (and examine it well!). Even if advice seems to come from perfectly respectable organizations on the surface, like the American Heart Association, research who they are, who funds their work, and what types of health claims they’ve made in the past. This is something I do when reading health-related articles. In today’s age of political and industry propaganda, it is imperative that you take this step and thus become your own health advocate.

Those coconut oil headlines are just a single example of how Big Food can twist and distort the truth about food. It’s time to sort through the constant stream of misinformation, mixed messages, and claims that stretch, bend, or simply invent the truth in the media.

Soon after I exposed the ingredients in Starbucks most infamous drink—the Pumpkin Spice Latte—there was a media firestorm. My blog post made headlines from USA Today²⁰ to Fox News.²¹ My phone was ringing off the hook while my blog post on the subject went viral on social media, with more than a million shares. The major press up until this point had been generally positive about our work—this was when everything began to change.

Harsh critics suddenly materialized out of nowhere. It was like nothing I had seen before. They started trolling my Facebook posts and angrily tweeting at me; I received hateful e-mails and letters. Every single day.

But the most troubling criticisms started to appear in major media articles, as journalists began quoting “experts” without disclosing their conflicts of interest and ties to the industry. Consider an article that appeared on The Salt, an NPR blog.²² The journalist, Maria Godoy, reached out to me in this e-mail:

Naturally, I wanted to do the interview. I wanted to clear up any confusion and give my perspective, especially since I am very meticulous about the research I rely on. In my writing, I use a variety of published scientific papers, interviews with experts, studies, and opinions from noteworthy and respected public interest groups. We are still learning the impact of the food we eat—much of it hasn’t even been studied—and thousands of chemicals in our food supply remain untested. So much new information is being discovered every single day. And that information is constantly changing, increasing the uncertainty of concerned consumers. So of course I wanted to do this interview.

But my then publisher said no. Their rationale? They wanted me to wait to do interviews until my first book (The Food Babe Way) was published.

Not only did Godoy move forward with the piece, but she wrote a completely biased, negative view about the campaigns and research I had presented in my writings. The title of the article was “Is the Food Babe a Fearmonger? Scientists Are Speaking Out.” Guess what: only one critic interviewed was actually a food scientist.

After Godoy’s article came out, I was shocked by the people she interviewed. Here are two examples of the figures she relied on:

Kavin Senapathy. Neither a scientist nor a doctor, Senapathy calls herself a “science defender” on social media. She cofounded the organization March Against Myths About Modification (MAMyths), which is a “partner” of Biology Fortified, a website that advocates strongly for GMOs, and has on at least one occasion worked with the PR group Cornell Alliance for Science.²³ She attends marches wearing an “I Love GMOs” t-shirt and protests talks given by anti-GMO food activists. She had written for several pro-GMO blogs. She has been photographed with Monsanto representatives and their PR firm reps. She once e-mailed me for comment on a story she was writing but refused to answer my questions about her conflicts of interest.

Senapathy has taken a big interest in me personally. She spends a significant amount of time criticizing me and the work of the Food Babe Army. She acted as the spokesperson for a Facebook page that was created solely to criticize and parody me all day long, every day, sometimes in extremely offensive ways. She even cowrote an entire book about me called The Fear Babe. You’ve got to wonder why she spends so much of her time focused on discrediting me.

In more recent years, Senapathy has published several articles in Forbes and on its website, which reaches millions. In it, she spews hate for organic food and farming, and bashes non-GMO food activists like me repeatedly with articles such as:

“3 Tactics Donald Trump Shares with Dr. Oz, The Food Babe, and Other Snake Oil Salesmen”—Forbes, 10/5/16.²⁴

“The Food Babe Is a Bully and Cotton Incorporated Isn’t Going To Take It”—Forbes, 5/27/2016.²⁵

“Del Monte Joins Food Babe Army, Shuns Fruit-Saving Technology”—Forbes, 4/5/2016.²⁶

“The Toxic ‘Chemical Hypocrisy’ Of Food Babe, Joseph Mercola and Mark Hyman”—Forbes, 12/3/2015.²⁷

In Senapathy’s controversial articles, her sources are PR operatives and people who are paid to protect the profits of Big Food and GMO companies. For instance, she cites:

Senapathy got her start at Forbes co-writing several pieces with Henry Miller, a former FDA employee who is associated with several front groups that ferociously defend the use of GMOs and pesticides. His résumé includes accolades from Philip Morris for defending the tobacco industry. Miller had been writing pro-GMO articles for Forbes for more than 10 years; however, in August 2017 his association with Forbes abruptly ended. The reason? A New York Times investigation uncovered that Monsanto ghostwrote Miller’s article defending its glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup.³⁰ Nowhere in the Forbes article did Miller disclose his relationship with Monsanto, nor the fact that the company wrote the piece for him. After this came to light, Forbes took action. While Forbes yanked the article from its website (along with other pieces he coauthored with Senapathy), you’ve got to wonder how many people it misled in the years it was online. Monsanto later admitted that their “scientists have on occasion collaborated with Dr. Miller on other pieces,” so this article was apparently not an isolated incident.³¹

Dr. Kevin Folta. You may recall Folta from the previous chapter, as one of the experts quoted in a New York Times hit piece about me who was later outed in the same publication for having ties to Monsanto. This university professor in horticultural sciences has for years claimed to be “an independent scientist” with “no financial ties to any of the BigAg companies that make transgenic crops,” yet according to his own website, TalkingBiotech.com, he has received support for his outreach efforts from several pro-GMO and biotech industry groups. His industry sponsors have included:³²

Considering this list, it’s hard to believe that Dr. Kevin Folta is truly independent and isn’t swayed by these industry sponsors. Even more so in 2017, Folta openly disclosed research funding from Bayer AG (who recently acquired Monsanto). A funding letter obtained by U.S. Right to Know shows that Bayer sent Folta a grant for 50,000 euros (about $58,000 in U.S. dollars).⁴⁰

Folta has taken the opportunity to jab me at every turn. Check out the following e-mail thread between him and the NPR reporter, which I obtained via the Freedom of Information Act:⁴¹

Maria Godoy: “I’m interested in writing a post for our food blog, The Salt (a product of the science desk) about the science community’s backlash against the “Food Babe.” I came across your blog posts from last week about Vani Hari’s appearance at the University of Florida and was hoping to speak with you about the event.”

Folta: “I would love to discuss it. My blood pressure is just getting back to the range where I can safely lift heavy objects.”

This exchange occurred on October 28, 2014, prior to the publication of Godoy’s article on December 4, 2014.

Look, I’m all in favor of honest debate. Given all the uncertainty and contradictory evidence, I think reasonable people can disagree about food and nutrition issues. When I make a mistake, I try to correct it.

However, I don’t think it’s helpful when people with clear conflicts of interest fail to disclose them. We have a right to know who takes money from Big Food and Big Ag, because that can help us evaluate their evidence and arguments. (As we saw in the last chapter, research groups funded by the food industry are far more likely to publish results that support their marketing goals.) And when journalists publish one-sided hit pieces, and never highlight the biases of their sources, they are playing right into the industry’s hands.

At this point, I’m pretty cynical about the relationship between Big Food and the media. I know that money talks, and that Big Food has a lot of it. But even I’m still amazed at the sheer brazenness with which commercial interests try to influence journalists.

In 2016, Monsanto picked up the tab—including airfare, hotels, meals, tote bags, notebooks, and pencils—to bring 20 journalists to the company’s St. Louis headquarters.⁴² The purpose of the four-day trip was to counter public perceptions that Monsanto is involved only in GMOs, and that it doesn’t care about food safety and the environment. The goal of the junket, of course, was to generate positive news stories about the company. As I’ve noted, Monsanto is the leading producer, worldwide, of GMOs, and maker of the controversial weed killer Roundup. It needs all the good press it can get.

Corporate-sponsored junkets like this are nothing new. They came into existence in the 1930s when film studios invited reporters to movie screenings and parties with actors and actresses. Since then, junkets have become a mainstay of many industries. Increasingly, however, they are being used to corrupt our food news.

But junkets are only one of the ways money shapes your news. Big Food is also notorious for paying dietitians and other experts to write positively about food products—and bash competing interests. You see this all the time in the David and Goliath–type battle between organic food producers and conventional growers.

One of the most egregious pieces of anti-organic reporting appeared in the Washington Post under the headline “A diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweighs the risks of pesticides.”⁴³ The article was written by Cara Rosenbloom, a registered dietitian. Rosenbloom is also the founder of Words to Eat By, a full-service nutrition communications company, in which she writes articles for magazines, blogs, newspapers and websites. She also engages in “Strategy and brainstorming sessions with PR and marketing agencies to facilitate content development, media campaigns and new product launches.”⁴⁴

Her article in the Washington Post claimed that the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen—lists researched by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) that rank fruits and vegetables by their pesticide residue loads—are “being questioned for their scientific validity—may be doing more harm than good.”⁴⁵ The article steers the reader away from organic food as the best choice and states: “Misinformation about pesticides breeds fear and confusion, and many find it easier to skip fresh produce altogether.” The messaging in the article is to forget pesticides and eat fruits and vegetables, regardless of whether they’re organic or not. Her list of writing samples shows she writes regularly for Washington Post, one of the most widely read publications in the U.S.

Notably, Rosenbloom’s article was promptly shared by the Big Ag industry front group Alliance for Food and Farming in their e-mail newsletter, stating, “Today the Washington Post ran an article titled ‘A Diet Rich in Fruits and Vegetables Outweighs the Risks of Pesticides.’ The story reflected Alliance for Food and Farming messaging and included content from our website safefruitsandveggies.com and recent press release.”

Although this article appeared in a major media outlet, it included no rebuttal or comment from the EWG on their Dirty Dozen list. If they’d been asked, I imagine the EWG would have told them how they rigorously analyzed tests performed by the USDA that revealed “that nearly 70 percent of samples of 48 types of conventional produce were contaminated with residues of one or more pesticides. USDA researchers found a total of 178 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products on the thousands of produce samples they analyzed. The pesticide residues remained on fruits and vegetables even after they were washed and, in some cases, peeled.”⁴⁶ How is this invalid science or “misinformation”? Inconvenient facts are still facts.

EWG is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. (See the latest version of the EWG’s Dirty Dozen and Clean 15.) It has its own team of scientists, policy experts, and others who do exhaustive research to make sure someone is standing up for public health when government and industry won’t.

Of course, that used to be the job of the news media. But as we’ve seen, that’s no longer the case.

You have surely encountered this phenomenon online, but may not have recognized it as an industry tactic because it is so stealthy. In what has been called “astroturfing,”⁴⁷ the industry hires groups of people to leave comments online in an effort to appear as though they are part of a large grassroots movement that stands firmly on one side of an issue. (Just as astroturf is fake grass that’s supposed to look natural, astroturfing involves fake comments that imitate the look and feel of real grassroots supporters.) As can be expected, I have been the target of several astroturfing campaigns, often appearing in the comment sections of Facebook after I launch a successful campaign. After you’ve seen it a few times, it becomes glaringly obvious what is happening. Let me give you an example from one of the first big astroturfing campaigns directed toward me (which ultimately helped bring light to the phenomenon).

When Experience Life magazine asked me to be on the cover, I was pretty excited, as it’s one of the few health magazines I read on a regular basis. And I had so much fun doing the shoot and interview—I felt like a movie star for the day, with my clothes set out for me and my hair and makeup done by famous makeup artists who had worked with some of the top actresses in Hollywood. (The photographer had just photographed Michelle Obama the week before.) What made the experience even cooler is that I wasn’t a celebrity. I was an activist.

When the issue hit the stores, I took a trip to Barnes and Noble to see it. At first, I was on cloud nine. But my excitement soon turned into horror. I discovered that an astroturfing campaign had begun, as comment sections on Experience Life’s Facebook page suddenly filled up with hundreds of negative comments about my cover. These astroturfers also went to Experience Life’s Amazon page and wrote 136 one-star reviews, driving their ranking down from 4½ stars to 2½ stars in a matter of days. This was so egregious because Experience Life depends upon their ratings for sales. I was incredibly sad that this was happening to a great magazine just because I was on the cover, exposing the truth about the food industry. The purpose of this astroturfing campaign, of course, was to make sure that no other magazines would ever have me on the cover again (they’d see that if they put me on the cover, they’d be punished). This is how they stifle our message.

At the time, I wanted to hide under a rock. This magazine had taken a courageous stand by putting me on the cover, and now it was being attacked. Fortunately, Experience Life noticed what was happening and made a very bold statement on their Facebook page about astroturfing: “Over the weekend, we received an unusually large influx of negative Facebook comments regarding our October cover subject, Vani Hari (a.k.a. The Food Babe). As a whole, these comments bear the earmarks of an industry-coordinated response—one designed to appear as though it is coming from individual consumers, but that is motivated and subsidized by a behind-the-scenes special interest.”⁴⁸

This only further angered the astroturfers, but I’m glad Experience Life understood what was happening and ultimately ended up covering the topic of astroturfing in a piece called “Turf Wars”:

Knowing that this can happen has made me extremely wary of comment sections on social media, blog posts, and even news sites. When you see dozens or hundreds of comments that make similar statements, go on the attack, and all appear at once (like a mob), there’s a good chance you’re looking at an example of astroturfing.

We know, for instance, plaintiff’s attorneys claim in court documents that Monsanto has a program called “Let Nothing Go,” which is designed to leave no critical comment about them unanswered. As was noted in a court document, Monsanto, “through a series of third parties, employs individuals who appear to have no connection to the industry, who in turn post positive comments on news articles and Facebook posts, defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs.”⁵⁰ That’s textbook astroturfing.

I believe that having food that’s safe and free of additives is not very controversial—the vast majority of Americans want exactly that. But if you read the comments on Experience Life, or on nearly any article that criticizes Big Food, you’d probably think that most Americans want soda full of sugar and chemicals, unlabeled genetically modified ingredients, and lots of additives. Don’t let them fool you.

What to Do When You Witness an Astroturfing Campaign

Remember: astroturfing is used to create shame in sharing content online (so we will stop) and to create the illusion that there are negativity and ignorance around the good-food movement. They want to create confusion so you never know who to trust or what to believe. Here’s what to do next time you witness it online:

Call it out for what it is. Use this as an opportunity to educate others about astroturfing. Making people aware of this tactic takes away its effectiveness.
Share a positive result to counter negative comments. For example, you could say how awesome you feel giving up processed foods and how paying attention to what’s in your food has helped you and your family.
There is no reason to engage with astroturfers online. You can block or ban them from your social media accounts if necessary. Bless them and move on.

Sometimes, instead of spreading lies, those working to keep the status quo will do everything in their power to prevent activists from getting out the truth about what is really in our food. This has happened to me and countless other activists in the food movement. It has even happened to respected scientists who are breaking rank and speaking out about the industry. This is not a new tactic; Rachel Carson, a pioneering and outspoken activist in the 1960s, was prominently attacked in this way as well. One of the main ways they silence activists is by using astroturfing (and sometimes threats) to prevent us from speaking at events. I was once the victim of this while preparing to give a talk in the beautiful state of Hawaii.

Hawaii is a hotbed of research and development of chemically intensive genetically modified crops and a testing ground for many experimental chemicals; it is essentially “ground zero” for agrichemical companies. I was invited to come speak there by the Hawaii Center for Food Safety (Hawaii CFS) for an event called “The Ethics of Eating.” This is the Hawaii chapter of the Center for Food Safety (CFS), a nonprofit organization that promotes organic and sustainable agriculture. They fight back against the corrupt food system with petitions and have bravely taken legal action to force our government to create stronger regulations in regard to GMOs and chemicals that are harming our bodies, the environment, and farm animals. Much of the work Hawaii CFS is doing is focused on the public health impacts of the pesticides and herbicides used on GMOs, and because of this, they are heavily targeted by the biotech companies who are profiting off of these chemicals and technologies. The people who work with CFS are very well respected and fearless activists in an increasingly aggressive climate.

I was thrilled that CFS invited me to come speak at the event, yet I had no idea what absolute chaos would soon ensue. As soon as my upcoming appearance was announced, the Big Ag industry quickly engaged and astroturfing began on the Hawaii CFS Facebook page. CFS suddenly began receiving hundreds of insulting and inflammatory comments, mainly criticizing me personally, characterizing me as “hilariously uninformed” and “a crazy food blogger,” and accusing Hawaii CFS of promoting “pseudoscience” and “fearmongering” for bringing me in to speak. The astroturfing was unprecedented. As the director of Hawaii CFS, Ashley Lukens, Ph.D., put it, “Vani’s visit to Hawai’i would unleash the most powerful display of the pro-GMO public relations machine that I have witnessed since taking my position with CFS.”⁵¹

This just goes to show the great lengths the industry will go to in an attempt to silence activists and make it difficult for anyone to ever ask me to speak again. They were defaming me in an attempt to harm my future speaking engagements—but they didn’t stop there.

Approximately 24 hours before I was scheduled to take the stage, I was informed by Hawaii CFS that a pro-GMO and satire activist group I mentioned earlier, March Against Myths About Modification (MAMyths), had launched an aggressive campaign to sabotage the event.

Although the tickets to the event were free, there were a limited number available, as the venue could only accommodate a certain number of people. When word spread that I was coming to speak, MAMyths asked their followers to reserve blocks of tickets using fake names and fake e-mails so the event would appear to be sold out and I would be speaking to an empty venue. On their Facebook page they announced, “Join us in reserving seats! Free tickets available RIGHT NOW and you can get up to 4 of these limited seats for your friends. Who doesn’t want to see the Food Babe speak in person?! #noShow Protips: Order on a future date other than today. Use a disposable email address like mailinator.com (check the alternative domains on front page).” They also suggested using a “random name generator” to get through any controls on tickets.

Their followers proceeded to reserve over 1,500 tickets using names like “Fraud Babe,” “Organic is Dumb,” “Susi Cream-cheese,” and “Harriett Tubman” from proxied IP addresses outside of Hawaii and overseas in the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Thailand, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. They were ultimately unsuccessful because Hawaii CFS discovered where these bogus requests were coming from and was able to easily cancel their tickets. Although MAMyths was trying to destroy the event in a very offensive manner, thankfully the CFS event in Hawaii turned out to be a huge success (granted, CFS had to hire extra security). We had a packed house, with some in standing room only!

Food companies increasingly utilize the Internet and social media to generate brand buzz and boost sales. More than ever before, we learn to cook, save recipes, plan our meals, purchase food, and share food tips with others via websites, Facebook, apps, or blogs.

But you should be wary. Many websites look legitimate but are really digital fronts for Big Food. GMOAnswers.com, for instance, is a joint initiative by the very companies who make GMO seeds and pesticides. While the website asserts that it is committed to transparency about the use of GMOs in agriculture, it’s really a vehicle to promote GMOs and pesticides, run by the PR firm Ketchum and funded by the GMO companies.⁵² It is not credible at all.

And then there are the many food company–sponsored websites geared to lure kids into the world of junk food. They can log on to Cheetos.com, for example, and watch the brand’s mascot, Chester Cheetah, in all sorts of entertaining videos, or play games to earn prizes.

In fact, many of the top food brands that target children through TV ads also have websites geared toward kids and teens. This is scary stuff, especially when you consider that around 9 million young people between the ages of 6 and 19 are overweight and at a greater risk of heart disease and diabetes. It took decades of hard work before the tobacco industry was forced to stop marketing to kids. My hope is that one day, we might also regulate the ability of soda and junk food companies to target our youngest eaters.

I think we can all agree that no one should grow up on a diet of soda and Cheetos.

You’ve seen this tactic daily, but probably don’t even realize it. That’s by design: native advertising is when ads are interwoven with web content to match the look and feel of a particular website. In short, it’s a means of disguising the ad, making it seem less like a paid commercial and more like all the other content on the site. On television, this type of advertising takes on the form of an “infomercial,” while in print media it is called an “advertorial.”

To understand the impact of these native ads, look at WebMD,⁵³ the most visited health site on the web. A recent sponsored video on the site by Walgreens encouraged people to continue taking their prescription heart medications—and to make sure to visit their local Walgreens, of course. Another video sponsored by Humira (a prescription medicine for psoriasis) was essentially an advertisement for the drug featuring a dermatologist. In the past, Monsanto was a buyer of native ads on WebMD and had crafted a number of sponsored ads that looked like real content rather than marketing, using WebMD’s influence to serve its own agenda.⁵⁴

Knowing that WebMD is considered a trusted source for health information on the Internet, Monsanto has attempted to enlist academics to write articles for WebMD so that “search algorithms” would pick up their content when searched by consumers online. For example, private e-mails obtained via a USRTK FOIA request show that in 2015 Monsanto pitched University of Florida scientist Kevin Folta to submit a blog post to WebMD on the safety of GMO technology. In the e-mail written by Monsanto’s Lisa Drake, Dr. Folta was asked to “Please consider insert [sic] the word ‘labeling’ somewhere in the content in order to get search algorithms to pick it up.” (Folta has since claimed he never wrote the piece.)⁵⁵

During this period of time in 2015, GMO labeling was a hot button issue, which Monsanto was trying to stop regulatory action on. Enlisting an “independent” scientist to write an article for WebMD could have bolstered their efforts at stopping GMO labeling.

This is a good reminder to examine carefully who is writing or sponsoring the content you find online—even on the most widely used websites in the world.

Right before my first book was published, someone created a Wikipedia page about me. At first, the page seemed benign and I paid little attention to it. Eventually, though, my page was hijacked by a group of editors who manipulated the content dramatically. Suddenly, my Wikipedia profile made me sound like a crazy person. It stated I was a conspiracy theorist and a hypocrite selling the poisons that I was lobbying against. (A complete lie.) Several editors tried removing positive attributes about me, such as being a New York Times best-selling author and a successful consumer advocate. They rewrote my profile, emphasizing criticisms and citing critics known to be pro-GMO and pro-corporation—while removing any mention of all the doctors, nutritionists, and other noted experts who support my work and my cause.

This group of editors watched my page like a hawk—and still does. I’ve been told that if anyone goes there and tries to make an edit that puts me in a positive light it is swiftly removed, often within minutes. It’s pretty crazy.

I watched my Wikipedia page get overrun and realized there was little I could do. You see, per Wikipedia guidelines in general, you are not permitted to edit a page about yourself. Of course, I wondered where these editors that had taken over my page came from. And why were they spending so much time guarding the content? Was someone paying them to do this? That seemed like a logical explanation.

A few months later at a book signing in northern California, a gentleman approached me and confessed that he was one of those Wikipedia editors. He told me he had been hired by a PR firm to make sure my entry would be cast in a negative light. He apologized profusely to me after learning my story and using some of my advice to regain his health. I was stunned. Up to that point, I had no idea that Wikipedia is frequently manipulated by the corporate world.

An investigation by The Atlantic confirmed that many people, groups, and corporations resort to paying freelancers, PR firms, and other Wiki “experts” to make edits to the site. The Atlantic article stated: “… the site has enormous reach, and the information it contains makes its way to nearly everyone, from consumers to policymakers to people Googling innocuous questions on their phones. Even minor changes in wording have the potential to influence public perception and, naturally, how millions of dollars are spent. What this means for marketers is that Wikipedia is yet another place to establish an online presence.”⁵⁶

A search on Upwork (a freelance job posting site) turns up several Wikipedia editors for hire, asking upward of $50 per hour. Not a bad gig, huh? While Wikipedia has rules put in place that are supposed to discourage paid editing, The Atlantic reported:

Many people who work within companies’ public relations departments are inexperienced in the ways of Wikipedia, and some firms look outside of their ranks for editing help … ‘Wikipedia writing is like no other writing,’ says Mike Wood, a freelancer who makes a living editing Wikipedia pages for clients, referring to the site’s tireless pursuit of a neutral tone. Wood has set up his own website, and scores of other Wikipedia editors for hire await on freelance websites such as Elance. He says he works with highly visible people and companies, who pay him anywhere from $400 to $1,000 per article, but he won’t name names, for fear that someone might seek out and dismantle the Wikipedia pages of his clients.⁵⁷

What this means for companies, including Big Food, is that Wikipedia is yet another place to sway consumers and spread lies. How, then, can we separate truth from fiction?

I suggest that you use Wikipedia as a starting place, not as the ultimate word. Keep in mind that human beings with biases (and in some cases, paid agendas) have posted the information you are reading.

Then dig deeper into other sources of research. The footnotes and references given in Wikipedia can help you. Read the listed academic papers and review articles, and then look for the disclosure statement of the scientists and authors; find websites and blogs that deliver complex and comprehensive insights into your topic.

As you can see, information released to the public is often corrupted by commercial interests. As I’ve hopefully made clear, we must stay skeptical and think critically. We shouldn’t believe everything we read.

Someone once said “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

It’s often hard to figure out the facts. However, when it comes to your diet and health, I think it’s absolutely worth investing the extra effort and time to determine what’s real and what’s not. At the end of the day, it’s nobody else’s responsibility to tell you what’s true. You alone are responsible for the news you consume. If you want to be healthy—and don’t we all?—determining which foods are actually good for you is imperative.

On that subject: in the next part of this book, we’ll look at the specific food lies we’re being fed—and how to avoid their consequences. Before we can learn the truth about healthy food, we have to learn to avoid those foods that are making us sick.