Food Babe: Hypocritical As Well As Scientifically Illiterate

‘The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite’ 

– Tennessee Williams

When I feel a bit down, I have a routine. I check The FoodBabe blog for a bit of a laugh, which usually turns into a laugh riot more often than not. I have written about her before, when she was lobbying for subway to remove chemicals from bread and her accuracy in the science of how Starbucks was killing us with their carcinogenic PSL. However, I was more than annoyed with a title of a post she posted this week entitled ‘These Hired “Experts” are infiltrating the media to confuse you about food’ – My initial reaction: ‘Yes someone’s hacked the food babe blog and posted a hilarious blog’. However, It turns out she’s a hypocrite as well as unable to understand irony. Who’d have thought, eh?

Source

What’s so bad about it?

Where to start. At the beginning, with the first scientifically illiterate pesticides. Now, pay attention to the title of this blog and read the following sentence:

"Every day more people are becoming aware of the chemical pesticides, synthetic food additives, antibiotics, and growth promoting drugs that are used to make conventional food products, and are choosing cleaner organic food thanks to you!"

Chemical pesticides…didn't really need the work chemical there? Synthetic…didn’t really call for that either. Fearmongering much? So in her first sentence she’s managed to create a level of hypocrisy which pissed me off, straight off the bat. Even further: ‘Antibiotic’ – What? I genuinely don't know what shes getting at there, vaccines probably. Although, to her credit, people are becoming more aware of things in food. Only, this awareness stems from something called a ‘scientific education’, something, I point out with as much emphasis as I can, Vani has zero of. This woman believes microwaves put ‘bad’ energy into water, for the love of science.

HELL NO, GMO

Yeah, back on these. GMOS are bad. They will kill us. We have to do something. Organic is better than everything ever made. No, it really isn’t. What happens here is we ignore scientific consensus and then that becomes a fact. Ignorance, truly, is bliss. But hey, as long as people are following this quackery, let’s go with it. 

"They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on stealth public relations (PR) campaigns, using deceptive front groups to push coordinated messages that attack organic food, and activists like me, while defending the continued use of synthetic pesticides, antibiotics, GMOs, and chemical food additives."

Okay, deceptive whilst attacking ‘activists’ (which I can only assume she means ‘moron’) so they can push an ‘agenda’ of GMO and ‘chemical’ food additives. I’d love to see a food additive that isn’t made up of chemicals. Oh yeah, it’s called ‘nothing’.

Sidebar: I even had this argument on GMO’s on twitter with the proactive scientist Fran Drescher. Oh wait, she’s not a scientist? Well, she seems to think she is. I found a blog that pretty much sums up the event where this abhorrently uneducated woman decided she knew better than every scientist in the world because her husband is a bad one. What is it with celebrities thinking they know absolutely everything? Our ‘conversation’ is shown below.

 

 

I then asked her ‘what question she would like me to answer’:

 

Shame on me indeed. 

‘Yoga Mat Chemicals Are Not Safe’

Still beating the dead horse, Vani shows that she hasn’t shifted her unscientific view on how chemicals can have a multitude of uses and properties, she believes that the chemicals used in yoga mats, azodicarbonamide, are also used in preservatives in bread. Come on, so is water, I bet you still drink that though? Of course, unless it’s been exposed to anything negative. 

Then she does something strange. She acknowledges that fact she doesn’t know anything:

"They accuse me of all sorts of things – “I’m not qualified”, “I’m not a scientist”, they dig up old errors on my blog that I have removed or corrected and they bring it up over and over again as a way to discredit me. The truth is (as many of you have seen through my campaigns) there are plenty of scientists and consumer organizations (including my advisory council) that back my work and there is a mountain of evidence that synthetic, carcinogenic and neurotoxic insecticides are bad for human health and the environment."

First off ‘old errors on my blog’ – this was a woman who was campaigning about them pumping nitrogen onto a pressurized air cabin. This is because she thought that the air we breathe is composed of 100% oxygen. Seriously.  However, before she could delete this blog, people had ripped her apart. If you are reading this and you are a part of the ‘food babe army’ read this carefully again: She campaigned against airplanes not pumping 100% oxygen on board a plane, because she thought that’s what we breathed. If that doesn’t scream incompetent in scientific knowledge, how about she believes water has memory. And by the way Vani, that's how the scientific world works, you write crap, you get treat like it. Get a thicker skin.

‘Plenty of scientists that support her views’ playing it fast and loose with the word scientists, not to mention, her source to that is just someone from a news article typing up information about what she believes. Most certainly not a scientist. ‘Including my advisory council’ – Once again, this is probably the advisory council she asked about oxygen on planes. One can only assume these people have banded together to troll her, and she’s just really not caught on. 

Here are her specific recommendations from that blog for health and safety when flying:

1- Drink 8 ounces of water for every hour of flying time
2- If you experience a headache, pains or aches, think about using turmeric, garlic or willow bark which are all natural alternatives to aspirin
3- Fast or eat small light carbohydrate rich whole foods.
4- Limit any heavy dairy or protein rich foods.
5- Whole grain carbohydrates are better tolerated than proteins at a high altitude.
6- Do not drink alcohol or caffeine on long flights
7- Walk or stretch every 30 mins while in flight, if you can’t get up from your seat, rotate your ankles and raise your arms over your head to stretch
8- Keep your hands clean with natural hand sanitizer spray and avoid touching your face as much as possible
9- Don’t forget to take your natural herbs that can strengthen your immune system

I mean…I can’t even. 

A Sexist Note

She complains that the ads from Monsantos (a major GMO organisation) are ‘plastered’ all over women’s magazines. Well, yes. Women do more cooking and more food shopping, statistically speaking. Which she openly acknowledges. So what is the issue? Advertising companies target their audience. It’s like moaning because they’re advertising high priced cars in a men’s magazine when you can’t drive. I don’t drive, I don’t really know anything about driving. Thus I wouldn’t look twice. But if I a saw an acronym involved in food or science I would look it up and look into it, and guess what; I did and GMOs are perfectly safe. 

Commonly, people like this go to one thing ‘you’re being paid to say this’, which is what Vani ultimate does. I had this argument with Fran Drescher whose view was ‘I don’t like what you are saying, therefore: Monsanto’. This lead to me being blocked, clearly the truth is a little too close to home. They attack how much money these corporations earn from their work, therefore it must be bad and they must be paying people to do their bidding of evils. But, is that not what you do Vani? Recently you released a book, you’re not poor, so why would this criticism not apply to you? Are you not in the hands of ‘big organic’? (See my image at the top of this page, some things just speak for themselves).

Source (I recommend this blog too)

Conclusion

I’m sure that Vani has made enough royalties off of her book to put her through a proper scientific college education, just to show her how hard it is to critically analyse information, read a scientific study that’s actually viable and use actual evidence to justify your means. But no, she decides to use uneducated fear-mongering for her ‘army’ and band of misfit quacks to promote pseudoscience at its highest form of annoyance; hypocrisy. She ends her blog with ‘The next time you read a biased piece…we all need to use increased scrutiny when reading these topics’. Does she actually see herself typing these? She posts numerous blogs on pseudoscientific nonsense, to the point where studies are thrown out and people have been disbarred from their medical professionals of their claims, and says that we need to use scrutiny when reading scientific evidence in the media whilst still being anti-vaccinations.

Yes, I encourage you all to use criticism and scrutiny when reading any article. Including this one go look and judge Vani for yourself, don’t just take my word on her biased, self-pompous, uneducated propaganda. And finally, she uses the term ‘use facts, not fear’, to which I can only say: You hypocritical bloody moron. What you have been doing is the equivalent of screaming to worn people of the dangers you know nothing about. You have 'researched' with your vacuous 'Google scholar' type of thinking and found what you want to find, anyone can do that. If I did that in my degree, I wouldn't have made it past the first year. Your fear-mongering is disgraceful at best, but to turn that round and say that 'bloggers who support GMO' and scientists are the ones who are fear-mongering is just freaking ludicrous.

PS: If you want a laugh, watch her fail at an interview. Epically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0aweCbjVZU