Eat Me Babe, I'm GMO free.

I eat food. You probably do, too. I want to be healthy. You probably do, too. That makes us a target audience for some of the worst kind of fear-mongering, pseudoscience, mumbo jumbo snake oil salesmen around. I touched on good ole Dr Oz in my first post but if you haven't met Vani Hari - AKA (self proclaimed) Food Babe you are in for a comic treat. This chick is her very own Oz - as in wizard of Oz and she recruits munchkins to help spread her disinformation. She calls them the food babe army but they are as blind to her tricks as the munchkins were to the wizard.

Vani is the author of a blog called Food Babe and of a recently published book that is full of outlandish fear mongering about the safety of the food on your plate, yet promises to heal you in a mere three weeks. She happily publishes shopping lists of "babe approved food" along with recipes, all the while telling you the perils of not doing things her way. OK, so nothing wrong with eating healthy but scaring people out of eating perfectly safe FDA approved foods and into non-FDA regulated products IS wrong.

Let's start with the biggest issue for me; her credibility or lack thereof. I am flummoxed that anyone can put any stock whatsoever in what comes out of this chick's mouth. She has the gall to weigh in on every scientific aspect of food production (not to mention vaccines),  though she has zero scientific background.  You see, Vani used to be a coder - as in software nerd - with bad skin, a runny nose and more than a few extra pounds. Not uncommon for the stereotypical coder who sits for hours at a time, chugging mountain dew and eating M&Ms as if they were their own food group. I know coders. I've worked with a lot of them. But then Vani started eating right and exercising, lost the weight and cleared up her skin.  She claims all this is due to ridding herself of artificial flavorings and colorings, however. In one interview about her book she claims to have completely overcome all of her health issues, including allergies.

Fabulous. I applaud that but I guess the fat to thin diet book market was oversaturated so she embarked on a quest to blame her former physique on everything from pesticides to GMO and (cue the music) the dark conspiracy behind it all; Monsanto. I think she watched Food Inc one too many times and decided that the Monsanto corp was equivalent to Hitler's 3rd Reich. I mean, she did tweet that vaccines had been used as genocide. I kid you not. Her claims are absurd but since it's fear based, it can be effective to all those tin-foil hatters who are simply into confirmation bias.

But let's go back to the allergies and bad skin. If, indeed purging her kitchen of all evil chemicals (which includes any chemicals at all according to our food barbie - er babe), then why is she touting bizarre skin rituals and hawking skin care products on her site? In addition, why is she posting to facebook that her eyes are swollen due to allergies? Yeah, you smell a rat, too, don't you? Here's a link for you - if you can stomach watching it, the part about your blood circulating through your skin is quite amusing! Food babe skin crap.

You know I like to keep a sense of humor about these things, so let's take a look at some of her more comical assertions. My personal favorite was the post she made about the airline conspiracy to deprive you of oxygen onboard an aircraft to save money! OK, wait. I'm laughing again... She claimed in an article she posted in 2011, that the airlines were mixing as much as 50% nitrogen in with their oxygen and this would make you feel bloated aboard an aircraft. Seriously, I can't make this crap up! Any 5th grader knows that air comprises a mix of nitrogen and oxygen at about an 80% - 20% respectively. She later pulled the post, alternately saying it was an old post and saying, she had made an error.

No, that is not an error. An error is a misspelling or something, it isn't declaring the airline guilty of sabotaging its own passengers based on a ridiculous lack of understanding of the basics of natural sciences. For an absolutely hilarious reply to her airplane article - click here. It is so full of baseless blather that I can't even cover it all here!

Now, if she were simply stupid and touted her thoughts as opinion, that would be one thing. What she does is tout her opinions as fact and if anyone dare challenge or even <gasp> disagree; she labels you as a Monsanto shill and encourages her mob - er, "food babe army" to attack and discredit you all over social media. This is typical Dark Triad behaviour from a previous post.  She also makes claims about microwave ovens and irradiated spices that have no basis in fact whatsoever. She knows they are fake but she pushes them. Why? Because on her site she shills for 'natural' foods and other products, one of which had to be pulled from shelves for salmonella - wow, sounds healthy to me! She also wants to earn big bucks on her new book, written in conjunction with Dr Hyman ( a close pal of good old Dr Oz) - another woo peddler extraordinaire. She claims to use peer reviewed academic papers in her research, but I gotta tell you, if those peers are Dr Mark Hyman and Dr Mehmet Oz, then you'd better get to the bank, because any science they are selling you is designed and communicated to line their pockets. Nothing more, nothing less. (we'll talk more about the good Dr Hyman and his pals pictured here in a future post).

Now I've got nothing against eating right and leading a healthy lifestyle but when you take it to extremes to bash companies and proven science based on a random thought you had in the middle of the night while consuming contaminated coconut oil with a spoon; maybe, just maybe, you've gone off the deep end. That would be a compliment though I don't think our little naturopathic shill HAS gone off the deep end. I think she's in it for the money, and I'd love to check her sock drawer for a hidden cache of gummy bears.

But hey, you don't have to take my word for it - google her or here's an article to get you started from the Atlantic (and incidentally this is the most positive article from a reliable source that I could find.)

For these reasons and many of her public outright lies, we're gonna award her a big fat, way off the scale, 5-alarm, Pants-on-Fire.

So with that, I do believe I will eat a yoga mat and wash it down with a Starbucks Pumpkin Latte!

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That's all folks!

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