I usually shy away from direct full-on attacks, but I couldn’t help enjoying this Gawker piece, “The ‘Food Babe’ Blogger Is Full of Shit.”
It’s a frontal attack on Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, by an author who describes herself as “an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology.”
This will give you a quick taste of the article’s approach.
Reading Hari’s site, it’s rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word “toxin” anytime there’s a chemical she can’t pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it’s hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.
A number of specific rebuttals to claims of the Food Babe are included, but there’s also an attempt to describe the essentially misleading way the Food Babe’s arguments are framed.
Hari uses this tricky technique again and again. If I told you that a chemical that’s used as a disinfectant, used in industrial laboratory for hydrolysis reactions, and can create a nasty chemical burn is also a common ingredient in salad dressing, would you panic? Be suspicious that the industries were poisoning your children? Think it might cause cancer? Sign a petition to have it removed?
What if I told you I was talking about vinegar, otherwise known as acetic acid?
This is Hari’s business. She takes innocuous ingredients and makes you afraid of them by pulling them out of context (Michelle Francl, in a review of Hari’s book for Slate, expertly demonstrates the shallowness of this gimmick). This is how Hari demonized the harmless yet hard-to-pronounce azodicarbonamide, or as she deemed it, the “yoga mat chemical,” which is yes, found in yoga mats and also in bread, specifically Subway sandwich bread, a discovery Hari bombastically trumpeted on her website. However, as the science-minded among us understand, a substance can be used for more than one thing perfectly safely, and it doesn’t mean that your bread is made of a yoga mat if it happens to contain azodicarbonamide, which is FDA-approved as a dough-softening agent. It simply means your bread is composed of chemicals, much like everything else you eat.
Anyway, it’s an entertaining entry into an important debate.
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Thank you for sharing, Ian.
” Hari has declared, to date, more than 610 products and companies to be unsafe over the course of four years.
According to Hari, the problem with most of them, including Girl Scout Cookies: GMOs and pesticides. She’s even alleged that an apple can be worse for you than a hot fudge sundae, if it’s not organic.
And is there even a shred of truth to this? Not in the least. Hari claims going organic will save you from pesticides, but organic farming uses pesticides too. Some of them are far more toxic than conventional pesticides. (Remember, the dose makes the poison. Neither apple would have enough pesticide by the time it reaches market to be harmful.)
The difference between organic and conventional? For a product that’s no healthier, organic is more expensive and they give Hari a commission.
As for those GMOs in the Girl Scout Cookies, fret ye not. In order to introduce a genetically modified crop into the food supply, they have to be proven to be nutritionally indistinguishable from their non-GM counterparts.
Maybe Hari’s crusades would be OK if she had the facts to back them up. But she doesn’t, and worse, when she’s wrong, she tries to make her errors disappear. “
NYT, March 2015:
In another much-mocked post, “Food Babe Travel Essentials — No Reason to Panic on the Plane!” Ms. Hari criticized the air on an airplane. Because of cost concerns, the air “pumped in isn’t pure oxygen, either, it’s mixed with nitrogen, sometimes at almost 50 percent,” she wrote. Except ambient air isn’t pure oxygen, either. It’s roughly 78 percent nitrogen. The widely discredited post, where Ms. Hari also complained about the flight attendants’ stinginess with water in first class, was removed swiftly.
In an interview, Ms. Hari said she didn’t remember the post, which Mr. Cook brought up by name. She then said it would have disappeared from the blog because it was old. Weeks later, in an email, she admitted that it had been removed because of mistakes, and said that she planned to start noting when she clarified or corrected posts.
Of course there is a widely used chemical that can be a distinct menace. It is used as a herbicide, poisons the ground (Cartago delenda est), a preservative, can cause kidney failure, hypertension, heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis.
Sodium chloride or table salt
What fun. A very good read. Wash your veggies, only breathe half as much so you don’t get too much nitrogen, and goodness…..we all know how much trouble too much salt can cause. Aloha to Ms. Hari.
“Roundup [glyphosate], the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.” Enjoy your “nutritionally equivalent” GMOs drenched in glyphosate. And what happens to USDA scientists whose research findings conflict with big agribusiness (Monsanto) interests?
“Environmental group seeks greater protection for USDA scientists” http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/27/usda-petition-idUSL2N0WT1TQ20150327?feedType=RSS&feedName=everything&virtualBrandChannel=11563
The Food Babe and the Science Babe need to settle this dispute in the most decisive and authoritative way possible.
In a tub filled with mud.
Hey, the safety and integrity of our food system hangs in the balance.
Babes Against Babes.
Ah…very good.
Vinegar causes cancer. I read it in Ian Lind’s blog. Spread the word.
autumnrose
When you write;
“Roundup [glyphosate], the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.” Enjoy your “nutritionally equivalent” GMOs drenched in glyphosate. And what happens to USDA scientists whose research findings conflict with big agribusiness (Monsanto) interests?
You are referring to an IARC decision on the “probability” that glyphosate is “possibly” a carcinogen. If, big “if” here, you had looked in to the source and referenced this “conclusion” with others in order to better understand what this organization represents, then you would have discovered that they have previously declared alcohol to be a carcinogen, as well as working the night shift.
It’s all in the dose. Don’t stay up late worrying about this.
today’s vital news:
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