Introduction

I was sitting on a plane, heading to New York City for one of the most important interviews of my life. The New York Times had asked to do a profile piece on me, highlighting the work I’d been doing in regard to dangerous food additives and dishonest tactics used by the Big Food industry.

The previous 12 months had been a whirlwind. Subway restaurants agreed to remove the “yoga mat chemical” from their bread following a petition I started.¹ Kraft decided to remove artificial food dyes from their kids’ mac and cheese products after I stormed their headquarters with over 200,000 petitions.² Chick-fil-A’s chicken went antibiotic free following my meetings with them urging them to do so.³ Anheuser-Busch and Miller-Coors both agreed to publish their ingredients for the first time in history following another of my petitions.⁴ I was finishing up my first book, exposing the chemicals in our food, and it was slated to be out in a few short months. I had just published an investigation into Starbucks’ famous Pumpkin Spice Latte,⁵ calling them out for their use of “class IV” caramel coloring (a chemical linked to cancer).⁶ This piece went viral, with millions of views and shares (which ultimately led to Starbucks dropping this coloring from their drinks).⁷ We were really shaking up the food world. Needless to say, the industry was not happy. Changing their products meant losing money. And they were scrambling to stop our momentum.

Although it was a very exciting time, I was quite nervous going into this interview. Our success in getting billion-dollar food companies to change was leading to some serious blowback. There were articles coming out calling me a fearmonger and worse. While I knew that many of my critics had an agenda—they were working with the very companies I was criticizing—I was cautiously optimistic that the Times would take a different approach.

That said, I spent countless hours preparing for the interview. I underwent a mock grilling by my book publicist. We sat in the hotel restaurant for a couple of hours leading up to the interview to make sure I could handle any question thrown my way. After this prep I thought I was ready, so I went upstairs and thought about what to wear to the interview. I ended up wearing my favorite staples: a cozy sweater with a big heart on it and a pair of heart-shaped sparkly earrings. We decided to meet at one of my favorite organic restaurants in New York City, a place called ABC Kitchen. The restaurant is magical. The windows and decor are all white or soft pink, almost heavenlike, and the food features lots of vegetables prepared beautifully. I walked in a few minutes early and the Times reporter walked in right behind me. We locked eyes and I said hello with a smile. But she didn’t smile back, nor did she ask how I was doing. As a Southerner, I’m used to warmer greetings and a little small talk about the weather. Her coldness threw me completely off; it was like she sucked the air right out of the room. When we sat down at the table, I tried to lighten up the mood and started talking about the menu. I was excited to order my favorite dish—squash toast—but the reporter quickly dismissed it, lamenting that she didn’t eat gluten.

She turned on the tape recorder and we began the interview. It went on for an hour and a half. I literally did not look up from the table. It was like the entire bustling restaurant had disappeared around me. When she got to the question I’d been waiting for, asking why so many scientists were against my work and advocacy, I gave her my most honest answer. Many of these scientists, I said, are working for the food lobby—they have a strong financial incentive to keep the status quo. Some are paid directly by the companies, or get grants from them, while others are supported by front groups. She insisted I was wrong, telling me that these were independent experts. Although she didn’t mention any of my critics by name, I had a pretty good idea who she was talking about because I’d already been attacked by them in several media outlets.

I left that interview and headed straight to the airport. I called my husband from the car. When he asked “How did it go?” I responded, “Dicey—it’s probably going to be another hit piece,” bracing myself for another highly critical article featuring food industry scientists claiming I was a misinformed woman needlessly worried about harmless chemicals.

While we were waiting for the article to be published, my first book, The Food Babe Way, came out. The book was a huge success, hitting the New York Times bestseller list, remaining there for months. I was thrilled that so many people were interested in our movement and learning the truth about our food.

Eventually, the Times published their article.⁸ They described me as “Public Enemy No. 1 of big food companies” (which I actually found quite flattering), but as expected, the rest of the piece weighed heavily on criticisms of my work. The reporter cited four different experts as critics of mine. Although she told me these experts were independent, only one of them was an actual food scientist.⁹ And the fact that this scientist sat on the board of directors of Sensient Technologies Corporation,¹⁰ the largest manufacturer of caramel color,¹¹ was absurdly left out of the article. This is the very same color I was actively campaigning to get out of Starbucks at the time. Corporate records reflect that this scientist, Dr. Fergus Clydesdale, was getting over $100,000 in annual compensation from the caramel coloring industry.¹² The fact that Dr. Clydesdale served on various committees for food industry trade¹³ and front groups¹⁴ was also not mentioned. In this book, we will further explore the ties between experts and the industry, and how they are slyly using the media to further their agenda.

You see, mouthpieces of the food and chemical industries have been fooling reporters for years. In this case, rather than investigate the dangerous ingredients in countless foods, they focused on me as a messenger of change, and questioned what right I had to speak out about what I’ve learned. Instead, shouldn’t the media question why certain scientists and doctors are defending a food system that is clearly making us sick?

Months later, I obtained some internal e-mails via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which included an e-mail from The New York Times reporter to one of my critics quoted in her article about me. “I’m already getting complaints I wasn’t hard enough on her,” she said. I’ve since discovered this particular critic, Dr. Joe Schwarcz, has received speaking fee payments from the agrochemical industry (Bayer Crop-Science, Monsanto, and Croplife Canada, to name a few¹⁵). In one 2014 e-mail he asked a CropLife Canada representative, “Let me be mercenary … what is the arrangement there?” upon being asked to speak at an upcoming event that CropLife was arranging at Algonquin College. “What is the financial arrangement?” Schwarcz went on to clarify, as CropLife readily assured him, “CropLife Canada will pay your travel and speaking fee; Algonquin College will provide the space and invite who they would like to attend.” Schwarcz spoke on April 3, 2014. Advertisements¹⁶ for the event touted Schwarcz as “one of Canada’s foremost science experts, as he speaks about the nutritional value of organic food versus conventional foods, genetically modified foods, and debunk some common myths about food in Canada and the science behind it.” Missing from this promotional material was any mention that his talk was being funded by the agrichemical industry. And in another e-mail he revealed how much he relished the opportunity to take part in the Times piece, telling the reporter, “It’s always fun to do a little Babe bashing. Such an easy target.”¹⁷ As expected, the attacks in the media continued and got even more vicious.

They wanted to shut me up. I’m a tough woman, and I can take my fair share of criticism. But what I refuse to accept is an environment that propagates lies and perpetuates ignorance among the public about what we should eat. We all have the right to learn about our food and what’s in it, and to demand transparency from the companies who are selling us these products.

From the very start, my mission has been simple: I want to tell people the truth about the food they’re eating. My advocacy is why companies like Subway, General Mills, Starbucks, Kraft, and Anheuser-Busch have had to either change their ingredients or become more transparent. They’re not doing this because they want to, or because they finally feel bad about selling us processed food full of artificial crap. They’re doing it because we made them do it, because we finally insisted that it’s not okay to sell us stuff that makes us sick.

And we’ve made progress, lots of progress. When you walk around a supermarket these days, it’s clear that the major trends are toward food that is organic, natural, and healthy. These trends aren’t an accident. They exist because we’ve taught people about the dangers of food that’s loaded up with dyes, weed killer, fake sugars, artificial flavors, and countless other additives that have no business being in our kitchen. Unfortunately, the food industry is the one with the deep pockets. They have the means to keep marketing their lies, pushing their products, and attacking critics of the industry like myself.

I wrote this book because it was time to fight back. It wasn’t enough to tell people about the ingredients that were making them sick—if I was going to help fix the system, I also needed to expose the lies that kept the status quo in place. I needed to give people the ability to see through these lies so they can make informed choices about the food they are eating and feeding to their families.

This book is inspired by people like you, people who are trying to take the best care of themselves and become informed about the food we eat. While the Times piece hit me really hard, I was lucky enough to spend the next several months traveling around the country on my book tour. I met thousands of readers—together, we are known as the Food Babe Army—and made some of the most meaningful connections of my life. I heard stories of healing families and children and how changing your diet can help change your life.

And that’s when I decided that I wasn’t going to let the critics beat me down. Not when many of them are cashing checks from the Big Food or Chemical industry. Not when they’re telling lies. So I turned off my Google News alerts. I got a Facebook moderator and stopped reading those hateful comments and tweets. I focused on what matters, which is this powerful sense of purpose I feel when educating people about how to eat food that makes us feel good.

One of my favorite sayings goes like this: “No mud, no lotus.” What the saying means is that without struggle there is no progress. Together, we’ve struggled through all the food industry’s lies. We’ve put up with their terrible products and dealt with the downward spiral of obesity, diabetes and disease they’ve largely caused.

And now we have a chance to finally change things. But first we have to understand who and what we’re fighting against.

We have to understand the lies so we can learn the truth about our food.

Who is doing the lying?

The food industry, that’s who.

Remember how the tobacco industry lied to us about the dangers of cigarettes? Or how the drug companies have hidden information about the dangerous side effects of their medicines? Well, the same untruths, cover-ups, and deceptive practices are occurring in the food industry.

Many so-called “healthy foods” are not healthy at all.

Many food products are not what their labels say they are.

Many studies on foods are being manipulated, and are funded by self-serving food companies.

Many statistics are being taken out of context, with deliberate attempts to mislead.

Many medical groups, doctors, dietitians, and other health experts are taking money in exchange for endorsements, regardless of whether or not a food or food product is healthy.

It’s shameless.

You just need to take a short step back in history to see how the Big Food industry corrupts everything it touches. In the mid-1930s, Margaret Rudkin began baking loaves of stone-ground whole-wheat bread to help her son Mark, who had severe food allergies and asthma that prevented him from eating processed foods. This bread was quite different from the mass-produced fluffy white breads that proliferated at the time. Her first loaf was not a success: it was “hard as a rock,” she said, and didn’t rise at all. But Margaret kept at it and by 1937 she was selling her healthy loaves (made with real butter and honey) to the local market, which her family claimed was the best tasting bread they’d ever had. She named her bread after her small farm in Fairfield, Connecticut: Pepperidge Farm.¹⁸

Before long, her bread gained a devoted following. Doctors recommended it to patients with digestive issues; newspapers celebrated it as a “healthful bread” eaten by America’s “elite”; Margaret was able to charge more than twice as much as ordinary commercially baked white loaves cost because her bread came with added health benefits.

As the years passed, Margaret slowly increased the product line of Pepperidge Farm. One of her biggest hits was a fish-shaped cracker she discovered while traveling in Europe. The original recipe was simple, consisting of little more than wheat flour, nonfat milk, yeast, leavening, salt, and spices. As snacks go, it was a fine alternative since it didn’t contain any preservatives or artificial flavors or colors.

In 1961, Pepperidge Farm was bought by Campbell’s Soup Company. It was an early example of food industry consolidation. While Campbell’s initially made few changes to Pepperidge Farm’s lineup, by the 1970s they began introducing new products and revising the recipes for old ones in ways that dramatically differed from Margaret’s original mission.

Consider the cake that my family ate to celebrate countless birthdays: Pepperidge Farm Golden Layer Cake. It came out of the freezer section in a white box. I remember struggling to wait while it thawed on the counter. I always begged for a second piece.

My family didn’t know it at the time, but we were being duped. My unsuspecting parents probably thought the cake was frozen because it had been baked fresh (probably on a farm as the label suggested) and needed to be preserved. They had no idea that it was actually preserved not by freezing but by a slew of additives and other artificial ingredients that kept it from breaking down. The ingredients of this cake are like a greatest hits of food ingredients to avoid. The first ingredient is sugar (of course), followed by ingredients like hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, regular corn syrup, mono- and diglycerides, and polysorbate 60. In this book, you’ll come to understand why many of these ingredients are potentially dangerous.

And it’s not just the Golden Layer Cake. A quick glance at the Pepperidge Farm product line reveals many of the fundamental problems with processed food. Those goldfish crackers, for instance, now come in dozens of different flavors, many of which are laced with hidden MSG additives. Some Pepperidge Farm breads, meanwhile, are filled with the artificial sweetener sucralose, chemically refined soybean oil, and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides (DATEM). I doubt Margaret Rudkin would approve.

Of course, Pepperidge Farm isn’t unique. Most of the frozen cakes, snack foods, and breads in the supermarket are just as bad. But I’m picking on Pepperidge Farm because the company had such virtuous origins. As such, it perfectly illustrates how Big Food corrupts our food system, selling us lies so we keep buying its products even when they make us sick. We see that Pepperidge Farm logo with the red barn and we think it must be wholesome and natural, just like the first healthy breads sold by Margaret Rudkin. But the logo at this point is just meaningless marketing: many of these products are industrialized foods, full of ingredients made in chemistry labs and giant factories. They are crammed full of salt, sugar, and concentrated flavorings so we can’t stop eating them. While Margaret Rudkin set out to create a bread that helped her son feel better, most of these products are designed solely to pad the profit margins of Big Food, even if it means we might get sick.

For way too long, we’ve outsourced our dietary decisions to Big Food, letting them decide what we put in our bodies. We eat their sugary cereals for breakfast and their frozen cakes for dessert; we make sandwiches full of their processed bread, processed meats, and mass-produced cheeses; we gulp their sodas and then, when we’re trying to lose weight, switch to their diet sodas, which are just as bad, if not worse! This is a huge mistake because Big Food doesn’t seem to put our health first—they just care about their bottom line. And that’s why we can’t rely on them for our meals, snacks, or food advice. In this book, you’ll learn how to see through their lies and make food choices that are good for your health.

* * *

My name is Vani Hari, aka the Food Babe, and I’m one of the country’s leading food activists and bloggers. What exactly does that mean? Well, I—along with my Food Babe Army of fellow activists—campaign food companies to persuade them to remove unhealthy additives or to disclose the ingredients in their products. As a result of our efforts, Kraft dropped the artificial dyes (Yellow #5 and Yellow #6) from all of its Mac & Cheese products. After Kraft’s announcement, other major food conglomerates, like General Mills, Mars, Hershey’s, Nestlé, and Kellogg’s, vowed to be artificial color–free in coming years. Subway eliminated the risky dough conditioner azodicarbonamide from its bread after our petition¹⁹ and now most major brands have followed suit. General Mills is dumping the controversial preservative BHT from cereals, just as it did overseas.²⁰ Panera Bread got rid of 150 artificial additives from its products, and those additives included artificial colors, BHT, nitrates, high-fructose corn syrup, hidden MSG, and partially hydrogenated oils.²¹ Chipotle officially did away with all genetically modified (GMO) ingredients in its food (excluding animal products and drinks).²² This is just a handful of the changes we have helped create.

In fact, even Pepperidge Farm has begun to change. Campbell’s, their parent company, announced that they are switching to antibiotic-free chicken, eliminating BPA from cans, cutting out all artificial colors and flavors,²³ and leaving the biggest food industry lobbying group. After Campbell’s announced they would begin labeling GMO ingredients, including on Pepperidge Farm products, I organized a letter-writing campaign thanking the former CEO of Campbell’s, Denise Morrison, for taking that important step. Denise then sent me a picture on Twitter of all the letters on her desk. Eventually Denise resigned as CEO because even these positive changes could not change the trajectory of the shifting food economy. Campbell’s has continued to see declining sales for their processed food lines.

The moral here is that change is hard, but it’s possible. In just a few years, we’ve helped eliminate lots of bad and dangerous ingredients from products eaten billions of times every year. When we work together, we can make sure our voices are heard.

Because of these successes, Time magazine described me as one of the 30 Most Influential People on the Internet,²⁴ and The Daily Meal called me one of the 13 Most Powerful Women in Food.²⁵ It’s nice to be recognized, but it has cost me.

I’ve been in the hot seat as well as in the spotlight since starting my blog in 2011. I’ve been falsely accused of demonizing common food ingredients, pushing alternatives for profit, and declaring victory when a big company makes positive changes in its product. All of this is untrue—except the latter. I love declaring victory every time food companies change their ingredients.

Yes, there has been tremendous blowback to what I do. There are those unfair articles in places like the Times, of course, and I’m also personally subjected to hate speech, harassment, and cyberbullying on a daily basis. Instead of focusing on the issues I’ve raised about the food industry, they attack me as a woman, often in ways they’d never attack a man. Death threats, rape threats, drive-bys of my home, all to intimidate me and get me to stop.

Although I don’t have evidence pointing to one specific company, group, or individual who was involved, these terrifying threats escalated to the point where I had to ban numerous profiles from my Facebook page who have been persuaded (and in some instances paid) by the public relations departments of the food companies to harass me on a daily basis. Some of these “Internet trolls,” as they’ve been termed, include top executives from the largest food companies and scientist professors from public universities, who have also been given a platform in the media. Rick Berman—a controversial PR agent who has been described by some as “Dr. Evil”—called me a “food bimbo” in the Washington Times.²⁶ But I refuse to stop. My life’s mission is to help people like you live healthier, better lives, regardless of food industry influences.

I feel so strongly about the truth about our food because I wasn’t always the healthy person I am today. For most of my life, I ate terribly. I was a candy addict, drank soda, never ate green vegetables, frequented fast food restaurants, and gorged on processed food (we all have our moments!). My diet landed me where a bad diet typically does: in a hospital bed. There I was at the age of 22, feeling weak and fragile instead of strong and healthy. It was then that I decided to make health my number-one priority.

I used my newfound inspiration for living a healthy life to investigate what is really in our food, how it’s grown, and what chemicals are used in its production. I didn’t go to nutrition school to learn this. I had to teach myself everything, and I spent thousands of hours researching and talking to experts. As I began to learn more, I could see through big business marketing tactics and lengthy food labels. Most importantly, the more I learned and the more lessons I put into action, the better I felt—and I wanted to tell everyone about it!

Personal attacks and threats don’t scare me in the least anymore; they come with the territory. I hope the trolls know that I will not stop. I will not shut up. I will not fade away. I am a very vocal, widely followed consumer advocate on a lifelong mission to educate the public about what is really happening to our food, and how we have been misled by the food industry, paid media messengers, and slick, slimy con artists operating under the guise of being “independent” experts.

Being lied to is just wrong.

It’s time to learn the truth.

TIRED OF BEING FED LIES?

This is a new kind of diet and health book. I provide you with the knowledge you need to make informed decisions. I help you overcome the obstacles standing in the way of your taking greater responsibility for your health. I help you dig deeper and look for your own evidence of deception in today’s food world. I help you take control of your life—and change it for the better.

This book isn’t only a manifesto that recounts the sins of the food industry. I go beyond that. I give you recommendations for personal action that can protect you from cheap, processed, unhealthy foods and the health problems and suffering they cause. In every chapter, I offer action steps—including my 48-Hour Toxin Takedown at the end of the book—that will help you avoid chemical onslaughts from food, and get healthy in the process. You’ll end your sugar and processed food addictions, lose pound after pound, never diet again, and rejuvenate your energy levels, mental fitness, and overall well-being.

Health is the greatest gift for a happy, productive life and the greatest wealth anyone can have, but we could lose it at any moment if we’re not vigilant. All it really takes is the belief that you are worth the effort. I invite you to step up, take charge, claim that gift, and keep it forever.

Now is the best time to change your life.

Vani Hari