[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Our bodies are not meant to handle these man-made chemicals that have been invented in the last 50 years. These chemicals are invented for one sole purpose, and that’s to improve the bottom line of the food industry, not improve our health.”

In this episode, I sit down with author and activist Vani Hari, popularly known as the “food babe.” For over a decade, she has been exposing toxic ingredients in America’s food—and getting companies to stop using them.

“[The FDA has] not reviewed the safety data of these artificial dyes in over 10 years. However, children’s consumption of these artificial food dyes have increased 500 percent,” says Hari. “We’re not trying to stop fast food or get rid of fast food. We want to make it the same as they do in Europe. McDonald’s french fries: 11 ingredients here in the United States, including dimethyl polysiloxane, an ingredient you would find in silly putty ... but in the UK, there’s three ingredients, and the fourth ingredient is optional. It’s just salt.”

Hari argues that food companies should add a warning label to every product that uses artificial food dyes, as they already do in Europe.

“That would automatically almost force the food industry to remove them here as well, because they do not want parents to be concerned about their products,” she says.

Editor’s Note: This episode has been updated with a response from the FDA. An FDA official told us via email: 

“The FDA works to ensure the safety of chemicals and ingredients used in food in accordance with the law and within our available resources. The law requires that all chemicals and ingredients used in food in the U.S. must be authorized for use by the FDA or have scientific data that is publicly available demonstrating the use is safe before they can come to market. We conduct safety evaluations for approximately 150 submissions per year which include both new substances and new uses of existing substances in the food supply.  However, there is consensus across society that we need better oversight of the chemicals in food. We agree, and taking the lead in ensuring food chemical safety is essential to achieving our goal of access to safe and nutritious foods for all. The FDA’s new Human Foods Program is now structured to improve our oversight of chemicals in food, though this work remains under-resourced.

“The public meeting on September 25, 2024, where the FDA’s proposed post-market process was discussed, represents a critical step forward in our work to ensure chemicals added to food are safe, including ingredients considered generally recognized as safe (GRAS). A recording and transcript of the meeting is posted to the public meeting page and the comment period for the public meeting is open until January 21, 2025.

“With flat funding, our current resources and staffing will fund only two comprehensive post-market assessments per year, far less than what needs to be done for the FDA to lead the way in food chemical safety. The FY 2025 President’s Budget proposes $4.5 million to ensure chemicals in food are safe; it is unknown whether the program will receive these funds.

“It is also important to note that regulatory authorities across the globe have different legal authorities and regulatory programs, which may result in some ingredients being allowed in certain countries but not others. Just because a chemical is not authorized for use in a specific country doesn’t mean that it is unsafe at levels at which it is authorized in another country. The FDA maintains inventories of food ingredients and packaging chemicals that it has authorized for reference and transparency.

“The FDA is committed to doing as much as we can with available resources and authorities to fully support our pre-market and post-market public health mandate. ”

Additionally, a Kellogg’s spokesperson disputed Vani Hari’s claims of declining sales numbers. “For the 13 weeks prior to Nov. 3, publicly available data such as NIQ indicates sales of the brand remained stable,” they said. 

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Vani Hari:
Thank you so much, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
I was recently in Canada and I thought of you. We were at the supermarket and we said, let’s take a look at Fruit Loops and see what the ingredients are in Canada. We were shocked to discover they are quite different.

Ms. Hari:
Yes, they are quite different. It’s different in Canada, it’s different in Australia, it’s different in India, it’s different in all of Europe. And actually in Europe, there’s a cigarette type warning label that warns parents that says it may cause adverse effects on activity and attention to children when a product does have an artificial food dye. Kellogg’s and many other American food companies simply remove the artificial food dyes from these countries that have stricter regulations and they didn’t make the change across the board. They didn’t decide to make their products safer for all their customers. Instead they use the regulations to their advantage, their financial advantage. Here in the United States, because our regulatory system allows them to, they’re using the more poisonous ingredients here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Because you would think once you realize that there are these serious problems, you know, Bobby Kennedy recently was talking about the yellow food dye, right? That we would remove them, right? Just on principle.

Ms. Hari:
Yes, absolutely. But unfortunately, our FDA is asleep at the wheel and they’re actually driving a bus right now through the gates of unhealthy hell with, with big food, big chem, and big pharma all in the passenger seat
driving the shots, right, and calling the shots. We’ve got the FDA commissioner, the current one, Dr. Robert Califf, just saying in a Senate testimony that he will not criticize the food industry.

Senator Bernie Sanders: (recorded audio)
Are you prepared to tell us that this committee, this Congress, needs to take on the food and beverage industry, whose greed is destroying the health of millions of people?

Dr. Robert Califf:
I’m not going to castigate the people that work in the food and beverage industry.

Senator Sanders:
You’re not?

Dr. Califf:
No, what I will say-

Senator Sanders:
That is your job!

Dr. Califf:
No, it’s not to castigate, it’s to point out how to make progress in this area.

Ms. Hari:
If the FDA will not criticize the food industry, who’s going to do it? They admitted they have not reviewed the safety data of these artificial dyes in over 10 years. However, children’s consumption of these artificial food dyes have increased 500%.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you make of these new appointments at HHS, like Bobby Kennedy and Marty Makary as the prospective incoming FDA commissioner?

Ms. Hari:
Those two appointments that you just mentioned are phenomenal. Those two gentlemen get it. They understand that American companies should not poison us with ingredients they don’t use in other countries. They understand the failure of our regulatory system allowing over 10,000
chemicals in our food supply here in the United States versus only 400 in Europe. They supported my campaign to take petitions to Kellogg’s headquarters. We took over 400,000 signatures to Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg’s headquarters, and they basically told us to get off their lawn.

So we started a national boycott, and now we have one of the largest grassroots movements, and we are affecting sales at Kellogg’s.
Right now, over the last 12 weeks, Fruit Loops sales on grocery store shelves have gone down 54%. Their stock price of Kellogg’s has gone down 14%. We are making a fundamental change. We’re saying, dear food industry, if you continue to poison us with ingredients you don’t use in other countries, we’re going to bankrupt you into oblivion.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does good policy look like? Let’s start with this area, but of course your interests are much broader than just food dyes.

Ms. Hari:
I think good policy looks like doing common sense things. For example, red dye number three [Red 3] was banned in cosmetics over 30 years ago because it causes cancer. You can’t apply Red 3 to your skin, but you can still consume it. The reason is because the alcohol industry conspired with the government to continue to allow it because you know what Red 3 is in? It’s in maraschino cherries, and that would reduce alcohol sales because they couldn’t put that bright red cherry in their drinks anymore. These are the common sense policies we need to fix. And we need to get the conflicts of interest out of the government so that we can get this solved.

Mr. Jekielek:
What would be some of the things an FDA commissioner should do on day one, from your viewpoint?

Ms. Hari:
The first thing they could do is add a warning label to every product that has artificial food dyes, just like Europe has. That would automatically almost force the food industry to remove them here as well, because they do not want parents to be concerned about their products. It is informed consent. We need to know what we’re consuming. We need to know what we’re putting in our bodies. We need to know what’s happening in the healthcare system with medications, with pharma. We need to have this information. We need transparency into the things that are causing the chronic disease rates to skyrocket.

Mr. Jekielek:
What other kinds of chemicals are commonly found here that have been removed from food systems in other countries, like say Europe, for example?

Ms. Hari:
There’s one in particular that I petitioned Subway to remove, and it’s called azodicarbonamide. It’s found in yoga mats and shoe rubber. Actually, when you turn a yoga mat sideways, you can see little air bubbles. It does the same thing in bread, and it makes it very uniform. It’s banned in Europe, in Australia. If you get caught using it in Singapore, you get fined and put in jail. But here in the United States, bread manufacturers are allowed to use it.

The problem is that when it’s heated, it turns into a carcinogen, and even more so when the factory workers use it to mix in the bread. It can get in their lungs and cause lung issues. So this is a very hazardous chemical that, again, is still allowed for use by our FDA, but banned almost everywhere else across the globe. So these are the kind of things we need to look at and see what makes sense to let the food industry know that they can’t continue poisoning us with man-made chemicals, taking our God-given fruits and vegetables and all the things he gave us to eat
and making them less nutritious, more addictive, full of additives so that they can make more money. That has to stop.

Mr. Jekielek:
In terms of all of these additives, you’re talking about highly processed food, right?

Ms. Hari:
I actually own a company that produces processed food, but we’re using real ingredients, ingredients that you would find in your own kitchen. We’re sourcing organic ingredients that haven’t been sprayed with pesticides or grown with antibiotics and growth hormones. We’re using real food that nourishes the body, that you can recognize that came from God and earth. That’s the kind of processed foods we need in our world, and that’s the products I wish to see in the world. That’s why I started my company, Truvani, because there were so many products out there that are literally poisoning us to death.

Mr. Jekielek:
A lot of people at this event might be big fans of Chick-fil-A. But you also have raised some criticism of them. How has that whole process gone?

Ms. Hari:
They should actually call it chemical filet, because it’s full of chemicals. After I consulted with the company to remove several different toxic chemicals, which they did, which was fantastic, there’s one ingredient they told me they couldn’t remove, and that’s the MSG. Well, MSG is fed to rats in obesity studies to make them fat. And we have an obesity epidemic in this country where three-fourths of our nation is overweight.

We have to look at what the food industry is doing to make us eat more than we should. When you look at studies where they put people on a real food diet versus a processed food diet, every single time the processed food diet group eats more. Why is that? It’s being engineered to be addictive and we’ve got to stop that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Okay. That’s really interesting. I’ve heard this and I believe it.
I used to eat Cheetos.

Ms. Hari:
Cheetos has Yellow 6 in it, which is linked to rats getting tumors in lab studies just reported in the Wall Street Journal. I’m not making this up. It will turn the skin of mice transparent. What is happening to our bodies is like a science experiment. As Americans we have to rise up. We have our moment right now. We have top-down leadership happening for the first time in history.

We actually have a moment right now to educate the public in such a way that these issues can finally get the truth out, right? And we have the opportunity to reach every single person and tell them the truth about what’s happened to the food supply and tell them the things that my parents didn’t know when they came here to America from India. They were so trusting of the American food system. They thought it was so amazing being able to go to McDonald’s and find a cheap meal for their family, right?

We need to tell Americans the truth of what’s been done. And then we got to force the food companies to undo it. And that’s what I’ve been doing with the Food Babe Army and so many different advocates. And I can’t tell you how excited I am for the Make America Healthy Again movement and for President Trump himself to be sharing information that I’ve been sharing for over 10 years. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My jaw was wide open. I was like, wow, this is getting out there now in a way that I never thought was possible.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was your reaction to that famous photo where President Trump, Bobby Kennedy, and Speaker Johnson are sitting there having McDonald’s? One of the comments on it was, MAHA starts tomorrow.

Ms. Hari:
Yes, that was Don Jr. making a joke. It’s funny that the immediate thing that came to my mind reminded me when I was in corporate America and my bosses would go out to eat and I would kind of be like not making a big deal out of it and I would just kind of join in because I wanted to fit in
and I was like, well, is RFK Jr. doing that? I’m not sure, you know? And so that was the first thought that came to my mind.

But I think what’s more important is that we’re not trying to stop fast food or get rid of fast food or get rid of fast food, we want to make it the same as they do in Europe. McDonald’s French fries, 11 ingredients here in the United States, including dimethylpolysiloxane, an ingredient you would find in silly putty. According to the FDA, it can be preserved with formaldehyde, a neurotoxin. They use that here in the United States, but in the UK, there’s three ingredients and the fourth ingredient is optional. It’s just salt.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about this addiction piece. At some point, someone must have said, let’s make food addictive, which sounds terrible.

Ms. Hari:
What happened is R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris bought up the food companies long ago, and they saw there was this opportunity to diversify their portfolio because they saw consumption of tobacco go down.
And they said, we can use the same science for food to make it addictive and we can make cheap food like substances and put chemicals in it and people will eat it and we will make a lot of money.

They started to use the same science that they used with tobacco to addict people to cigarettes to addict people to food. Now, there’s a major lawsuit just filed in Pennsylvania from a teenager who has type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease that is suing 11 of the top food companies for his ailments because he did not know that his food was being engineered to be addictive. The lawsuit is like reading a horror movie about the American food supply.

Mr. Jekielek:
Is there actual evidence that shows there were deliberate attempts to make this processed food addictive?

Ms. Hari:
Yes, absolutely. When these lawyers go through discovery, it is going to be a field day. It’s going to be like a birthday gift to me. I won’t stop reading it.

Mr. Jekielek:
If you’re in the business of making money off of addiction, it makes sense that you would continue with that business model. At The Epoch Times, we cover a lot of things that are hard to believe, but then turn out to be true. This is one of those things.

Ms. Hari:
You’re doing fearless journalism and I really appreciate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Can you tell us about the evidence that already exists that shows this was done deliberately? Because it might sound unbelievable to many people.

Ms. Hari:
Let’s just look at the ingredient, natural flavors, that you see on a label at the grocery store. However, it can mean thousands of different chemicals that they’ve synthesized to create the one millionth best part of a taste.
Literally taking over your entire old factory system of your nose. A lot of people don’t realize that flavors also bring smells to products.

So that when you open up an ice cream sandwich packet, the smell of it immediately hits your nose. Because when something’s frozen, it mutes the senses, right? There are all of these tricks being played, including with the texture of processed foods. They actually make the texture easier for you to digest, so you eat more of that product before your brain can recognize that you’re full.

Look at processed bread, how soft and easy it is to digest. Compare that to a homemade loaf of sourdough bread, how it’s chewy and crusty and it takes you a long time to bite through it and chew it up. You can eat five, six, seven, eight slices of processed bread in the same time it would take you to eat a piece of bread made at home. Every single thing down from the actual additives to the texture to the type of chemicals like MSG that we’ve already talked about, they’re using those in combination with our basic human biology of loving sugar, salt, and fat combined together. They’re using that against us.

This is why I’ve decided not to be part of that experiment anymore. I’ve decided these processed foods are not good enough for my body. And I went on a real food diet and I went off nine prescription drugs when I changed my diet. And this is what I hope for every American out there to not walk around like a zombie like I used to as a child and be in and out of doctor’s offices all the time and getting organs taken out of your body, which has happened to me. And this is an option now to recognize that you have the power. You can decide how to eat. You can take back control of your health. You can fight these giants and tell them, I’m done with you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Vani, you are so passionate about this issue. Please tell us about your backstory and where this passion came from.

Ms. Hari:
I hit rock bottom in my early 20s when they told me my appendix was about to burst. I had to get my appendix taken out and I almost died. I didn’t know what was wrong. I almost didn’t go see the doctor. Thankfully, my parents made me go see him and he’s like, you have to have emergency surgery. The first doctor I saw actually told me nothing was wrong.

In that hospital room, recovering, I made a commitment to myself that I would research my health and figure out what was actually happening because something didn’t make sense. It did not add up to me that my appendix is just a useless organ and I didn’t need it. I found out things that were the truth, which is the appendix is actually there to populate your gut with good bacteria. The reason it became inflamed is because of the inflammatory diet that I was on.

I was eating Chick-fil-A for dinner after my workout, because it was only 400 calories. I didn’t know that it had 100 different chemicals in it. Our bodies are not meant to handle these man made chemicals that have been invented in the last 50 years. These chemicals are invented for one sole purpose, and that’s to improve the bottom line of the food industry, not improve our health. It’s to make them more money.

When I see an ingredient on a food label that isn’t real food that has come from the earth, I put it back. When I see monoglycerides or natural flavors or high fructose corn syrup or any of these chemicals that we’ve talked about here today, I put it back. When I see the artificial dyes and the artificial flavors and the partially hydrogenated soy and corn and canola oils, those are things that we didn’t evolve to consume. I really think that it’s simple.

When you start to eat real food; meats, cheeses, nuts, seeds, beans, fruits, and vegetables, your body starts working in a way that really makes you closer to finding your purpose in life. I really do believe that. I don’t think you can find your purpose in life until your brain is functioning correctly, and when you’re hopped up on all these chemicals that we have here in America. I think this is one of the reasons why we suffer so much.

Mr. Jekielek:
Was there a particular moment where you got that clarity? You started researching and you changed your diet. Was there a particular moment when your brain started working clearly?

Ms. Hari:
It was the moment that I started to change the food industry. I don’t think I would have been an activist or been able to change the food industry had I not had my brain working correctly because I was able to actually research and read and be an activist and rally the troops in a way that I didn’t have the energy to do that kind of work before, right? I wanted to sit on the couch after work and veg out on TV. I didn’t want to research what had happened
in the food industry and investigate these different fast food chains and other big food companies, right? I didn’t have the energy to do that. I was in a zombie-like mode.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us about your blog which has been remarkably influential.

Ms. Hari:
Thank you. It’s called foodbabe.com. When I first started it, I wanted to call it eathealthyandliveforever.com. My husband thought that was a terrible name. He found the name food babe for $10 on a web domain auction, and yelled it out from the other room. We were living in a two-bedroom apartment at the time. He yelled out, how about food babe? I said, that’s great. That’s kind of catchy. It’s short and people will remember it.

But it made me feel a little bit nervous because I didn’t feel like a food babe for most of my life. Why don’t I just teach other people to become a food babe? So for the first year-and-a-half of my blog, I never even had my photo on there. I hid behind this name, food babe, and these cartoon characters up there.

I was still working in the corporate world, working for big financial institutions, consulting for C-level executives. I wanted to hide this passion that I had, but it was hard to hide it. You can see how passionate I am about this topic. At work, I was known as the health freak. Eventually, I found myself taking off work to go write, to go investigate, and then eventually getting invited by these fast food giants to consult and get some of these chemicals out of their food.

When that started to happen,I made a commitment. I said, this is way more impactful than what I’m doing at the banks. This can change millions of lives, so I quit my job cold turkey. I remember I wasn’t making a dime doing food babe. I just quit my job cold turkey. It was that moment I really started this fight and this research about how American food companies are poisoning us with ingredients they don’t use in other countries.

The first investigation I worked on when I didn’t have a job was comparing product labels from Europe to the United States, the exact same product label. One of the first products I found, which I just couldn’t even believe, was strawberry Quaker Oats. Here in the United States they were using apple bits dyed with Red 40 to make strawberry oats. But in the UK, they were using real strawberries.

They don’t make that product anymore, thankfully, because of that investigation. But this was one of the things that I discovered, as well as Kraft macaroni and cheese doing this as well, using Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 here in the United States, whereas in other countries they were using paprika and beta carotene. I decided to take on Kraft and start a petition. I was very inspired by Bettina Siegel who took on pink slime at the USDA level, and also inspired by Sarah Kavanaugh who took on brominated vegetable oil and Gatorade. I said, if they can do it, I can do it too.

I started a petition against Kraft to remove artificial food dyes. I took those petitions to their headquarters. They basically told me to get lost. They sat down with me and told me we have to agree to disagree. I didn’t stop there. I decided to keep going and educating the public about artificial food dyes. Eventually, all the people who were buying Kraft started moving towards Annie’s, their competitor who didn’t use artificial food dyes. General Mills also looked at Annie’s. They ended up buying Annie’s for $800 million just a few months later and then crap had to change.

It was the best moment when they went to the press and they said, we’re changing this, we’re listening to consumers. When they asked, was this in response to Vani Hari’s petition? They just said no. It just made me laugh so hard because it was clearly a response to the new awakening about these chemicals and how they were poisoning us with ingredients they don’t use in other countries.

Mr. Jekielek:
On the one hand, you’re shaming the industries for not using these less problematic ingredients. But you also said you were consulting. So people are actually inviting you to show them how to do it. Please tell us about that part of your efforts.

Ms. Hari:
Yes, absolutely. Chick-fil-A was one of those companies that I think handled this correctly. Kellogg has handled it miserably. It will actually be the biggest mistake in the food industry when it’s all said and done. They should have invited us into their headquarters that day when we took the petitions to their Battle Creek office. Chick-fil-A did it proactively.

They said, your blog post went viral. We hear you. We want you to come to our headquarters. We want you to meet with our executives. We want to listen to your concerns. They sat me down. First of all, they picked me up in a cow-covered car. Then you walk into their headquarters and there’s a huge Batmobile there. You’re just like, what? I guess that’s what they do with all their money. They buy the Batmobile.

Then I sat down with all the executives, the guy who is the head supplier for the chicken, the head of marketing, the head of operations, all surrounding me. They even let me bring a camera that day to document this. It was absolutely astounding. They listened to me and actually implemented a lot of changes. I whiteboarded it out for them that day using my consulting skills. They asked, out of all your complaints about our food, can you help us prioritize them?

The first priority I asked for was for them to remove antibiotics from their chicken feed. They told me it wasn’t possible. I told them, you can do it, because Chipotle is doing it. They’re converting their current chicken feed over. You can do that with your suppliers because you buy enough chicken to have that influence. Eventually, they made that change. Then they took out artificial food dyes from their ice cream product that they offered kids as part of their kids’ meal. They introduced a kale salad. There are so many different things that they have made progress on.

There’s one that I give them a very hard time about still, and they know it. They said that they have tried. They can’t make their chicken taste that good without MSG. Natural flavors and MSG, those types of additives, are the reason why you know the difference between a Wendy’s hamburger, a McDonald’s hamburger, and a Burger King hamburger. They are the reason why you know the different flavor profiles. It is because of these additives. But when you make a burger at home, do you remember it every single time? No, not really, because every single time it tastes different. Interesting.

Mr. Jekielek:
What does your research tell you about GMO foods? Are GMO foods completely off limits for you? And if that’s the case, why?

Ms. Hari:
My biggest problem with genetically engineered food is the way that they are designed to withstand heavy doses of Roundup and glyphosate. I saw the $2.2 billion verdict that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s law firm brought to their plaintiffs showing that there is a link between Roundup and glyphosate and cancer, which is very alarming to me. For me, that’s why I avoid GMO foods.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a very specific type of GMO that you’re talking about.

Ms. Hari:
Yes, it’s the one that’s in 85% of foods at the grocery store are shelves that are processed. It’s the corn, it’s the soy, it’s the canola, it’s the sugar beets, and it’s in cottonseed, too. Let’s talk about cottonseed oil, because cottonseed oil is a byproduct from the textile industry, so it’s not even regulated like food is. They can use much worse pesticides on textiles than they can on food, and then the byproduct of that ends up in our food. Then the way they deodorize it, bleach it, and extract it with hexane, it’s absolute poison for your cells.

Mr. Jekielek:
If I believe that the way that industry answers this question, it’s like, yes, there may be a cost, but it allows us to feed so many more people by using these chemicals.

Ms. Hari:
That’s just not true. That has been disproven. Regenerative agriculture and regenerative farming is actually going to be the method that saves the most people. If we can actually change the way we subsidize our farmers to promote biodiversity of crops, that is what is going to solve the issue.

Mr. Jekielek:
Vani, this has been a wonderful conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Ms. Hari:
My final message is, food industry, we are coming for you. It is very exciting to be part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. I was actually a
delegate for Obama in 2008 and 2012. I'll have to tell you, this is the time where I have the most hope that our government leaders may be able to get something done. I just can’t wait to see what happens, but I’m here to continue to spread the truth about the food industry and tell people what’s really happening behind the scenes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you have any plans to be involved in the U.S. government, assuming Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Marty Makary and others get confirmed?

Ms. Hari:
The biggest impact I can make is from the outside.

Mr. Jekielek:
Vani Hari, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Hari:
Thanks.

Mr. Jekielek:
The FDA, Kellogg’s, RJ Reynolds, and Philip Morris International did not immediately respond to requests for comment.