As the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. goes to the full Senate, healthy food activist and entrepreneur Vani Hari is thrilled by the national attention on his “Making America Healthy Again” movement.
Through her blog, called FoodBabe, she has been a relentless advocate for healthier, safer products from America’s largest food companies — and frustrated by the capture of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by lobbyists for Big Food.
Hari has written four bestsellers on healthy eating and joins hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on The Drill Down to discuss her own health journey and answer whether she might join the new administration of President Donald Trump.
The child of two Indian immigrants, Hari grew up eating typical American fast foods and the highly processed foods of her new country. “We were one of the only Indian families in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the time,” she recalls. Later, as a young professional working in management consulting, Hari gorged on expense account meals of rich food.
“I was in and out of doctor’s offices as a result of the way I was eating,” she recalls. “However, no doctor asked me what I was eating. They literally just put me on four different medications to control my asthma, three different medications to control my eczema, antibiotics, and prednisone.”
She wound up in the hospital with an appendix that was close to bursting and had an emergency appendectomy. She put her analytical mind to work, researched appendicitis, and realized that her diet caused her problems. She realized it was not normal for a twenty-something woman to have appendicitis. “My body,” she remembers, “was inflamed.”
Today, through her blog and an organic food business called Truvani, Hari encourages healthy options while she goes after Big Food, particularly for the amount of unhealthy dyes it uses in its products.
“When I quit my job to do FoodBabe full time, the first company I took on was Kraft. Kraft was selling a version of mac and cheese without artificial food dyes in Europe, using paprika and beta carotene. But here in the United States, they were using Yellow Dye #5 and #6. The reason they removed the artificial food dyes in Europe is because the Europeans started using a cigarette-type warning label on their products that had artificial dye,” she tells the hosts.
She got nearly 400,000 signatures on a petition that she took to a meeting at Kraft’s headquarters — which initially dismissed her but eventually agreed to make the change for the American market.
“This worked faster than the government,” she realized, which was slow to discover and study health problems from food and subject to heavy pressures from industry.
Quaker Oats Strawberry Oatmeal, she learned, was made for the U.S. market with bits of apple artificially dyed with Red Dye #40, a petroleum-based dye linked to hyperactivity in children. In Europe, the same product used real strawberries.
Red Dye #3 was just fully banned after a nearly 30-year effort, she noted, describing how she learned there is a lobby for the maraschino cherry industry. “They actually worked with the powers of the alcohol industry,” she tells Schweizer and Eggers. “They said that removing those little cherries from drinks at the bar would hurt alcohol sales.”
She is excited about RFK Jr. becoming head of the Health and Human Services department (his nomination is pending before the full Senate), which includes the FDA, because she has seen how the regulators there have been “captured” by lobbyists for the big food companies. “He’s going to dismantle the corruption that has allowed our country to be the worst in terms of health outcomes, even though we spend the most on health care,” she predicts.
Would she join the administration? Hari says no; “My power is to stay outside.” She believes the companies that will push back the hardest against Kennedy’s efforts will be PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, which have the largest market shares of products containing a lot of artificial ingredients including dyes and sweeteners. “PepsiCo even has a robot that mimics human taste buds, which they use to test various things,” she says. Doritos alone, she says, is a $5 billion per year industry, and changing a product like that to be healthier will take years.
“Warning labels would make them move faster,” she believes.
Agreeing with Schweizer, she believes in warning labels, particularly for products whose ingredients have been scientifically linked to disorders such as ADHD and childhood diabetes. She wants parents to be able to make an informed answer to their constant question: “Maybe if I avoid these products, I can take my kids off the meds?”
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