Ingredients Matter: How to Choose Real Food & Avoid Toxic Chemicals – with Vani Hari

Dr. Mindy  

On this episode of The resetter podcast, I bring you Vani Hari, okay. You may all know her as the food babe. And if you have been a nutrition, obsessed person like myself for the past decade, you probably know what Vani did to help get good quality ingredients into our food system. So I started following Vani I don’t know, like maybe it was 15 1015 years ago when my kids were little. And she was literally going into the lobbies of some of the biggest food companies and sitting there and demanding that they tell her why they have put cancer causing toxic ingredients into their food. And as you will hear, she is incredibly tenacious and really overturned and got some major companies to change the quality of ingredients that they put in. It’s it’s quite an impressive story. And why I brought her to you now is I not only wanted to have a really detailed discussion about how do we navigate ingredients, because that’s so important for everybody’s health path, but especially if you’re trying to lose weight. But she’s also taken some of these really toxic foods like I’ll just call it out like Doritos, and Chick fil A chicken sandwiches and she has reverse engineered them and made some really good at home recipes you can use to get better quality, better tasting versions of those toxic foods. So she has a new book coming out. It’s called Food babe family, it is a cookbook slash. The front part is all education lots of lists on foods to avoid foods to add in it is really a true food manual mixed with a whole bunch of recipes 100. And I’m just in love not only with her mission, not only with her heart, but I’m in love with what she’s doing when it comes to teaching us how to eat good quality food at home. So I tell you all that to say that this is a very detailed conversation, we’re going to talk not only about one major food ingredient you need to avoid in order to stay healthy, happy and and prevent chronic disease. And she makes it very simple. There’s one ingredient so I want you to hear that we talk about the four oils that you need to add in the number one oil you need to avoid and how to read an ingredient list and what chemicals do you need to know about? Then we talk about the art of cooking the Art of Having great meals, we went all over the place in this interview. So if you’re a menopausal woman who is an empty nester, there’s something here for you. If you’re you’re just starting a family, I promise you there’s something here for you. If you have food addiction issues, and you’re trying to overcome some of these toxic ingredients. We talked about this. Please listen all the way through there is so much to learn. In this episode. I’ve never done an episode like this, you’re gonna enjoy it, go grab her book, you can go to food, babe family.com. I’ll leave the link down there. But most importantly, let’s make smart choices around our health. And that is what Vani is going to teach you in this episode. A Dr. Mindy hare and Welcome to season four of the recenter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. funny the first thing I have to say is I feel like the reseller podcast is like inviting somebody into my home. So I have to just start by saying welcome to my home to my virtual home.

Vani Hari  

Oh well thank you. It looks beautiful with all the flowers and gorgeous greenery in your back. So I’m so excited to be here and your nice Himalayan salt lamp. And

Dr. Mindy  

this is this is actually my office. It’s my happy place. And it’s like a jungle back here. You know, I told you in person, but I just want to, you know, bring everybody up to speed for people who may not know you. You’re a you’re a warrior, my friend. And I watched you when you were going into corporations and you were sitting in the lobby waiting for the powers that be to come out to ask why they were putting toxic ingredients into their food. And I was cheering you on from my home. And I’m just so honored to be having this conversation with you because you you, to me, when it comes to food ingredients, you’re the goat.

Vani Hari  

Thank you. I’m just so excited, we’re connected, because I’ve been watching, you just spread the message of like real truth about food and how it affects the body. And I’ve just been so enamored with what you’re doing, and I started following you on social media, and then we were just just Kismet to meet like right after that. So, so awesome. Agree.

Dr. Mindy  

And you know, what’s really cool is that one of the reasons I fell in love with fasting is I got so exhausted trying to teach my patients how to navigate a frickin nutrition label. And I was like, if I can’t get a very educated person to understand their ingredients and buy good quality ingredients, I got to find a different door to go in. And that’s when I was like, Well, how about we don’t eat at all. And we can look at what the benefits of not eating are. And that’s how I found fasting. So where I’d love to start this conversation is, what do we need to know about ingredients? I know, we could probably talk for hours, but why do we need to care? And what do we need to know?

Vani Hari  

Yeah, so um, you know, for most of my life, I was on prescription drugs, very sick, had eczema all over my face, asthma, had intestinal issues, I had my appendix taken out, I had endometriosis, I was on nine prescription drugs at one point in my life. And so I’ve been through the gamut. And in my early 20s, when I finally decided to make health my number one priority, and this is several years before I started food, babe, and becoming a food activist and all of that. And it was really that quest to learn what I was doing and what wasn’t serving my body. And I just remember, realizing like the first goal was like losing weight and feeling better. And I just remember following and falling in these traps of, for example, looking at Weight Watchers, for example, and looking at points, or counting calories, or counting fat grams, or counting carbs, and realizing that every single one of these diets had actually one fundamental thing missing from them, which was ingredients in weightwatchers, you could still eat red licorice, licorice, full of artificial refined sugar, and red number 40 in a product. And it would be one point, you could eat that all day and stay within that diet. And they would say you would lose weight and feel better, right. And that’s just not true. That’s not real science. And when I started to delve deep into what these chemicals were doing in food and why they were there, I found out they’re there for one sole purpose. And that’s to improve the bottom line of the food industry. It was not actually those chemicals were not actually created to improve the nutrition of my body or anybody else’s body, it was literally to make food preserve longer and stay on the shelf so it doesn’t go bad, or to make food that would normally not taste great to taste better with added chemicals and flavorings, or to make food behave in a certain way so that it tastes the same every single time. And so they create that addictive quality to that food. So people always remember that flavor and that taste. And so And there’s all kinds of chemicals in our food supply that create an emulsification or they add some kind of component to to mimic real food, but their food like substances, and they’re not real food anymore. And they’ve been completely denatured in the terms of how nature intended for us to eat them. And so I realized that the most important thing that you actually have to look at in order to lose weight and feel great and start to feel really good about your body was the ingredients. And when I started paying attention to the ingredients and a lot of eliminating all of the calorie counting and the fat gram watching and worried about my carb count and all of that stuff or points. Everything started to change. I started to lose the weight. I started to keep it off without even worrying about food anymore. As long as I real food. I was the way I was supposed to be. And I felt great about my body. My skin started to clear up I went off every single prescription drug and that’s when I became the food babe because people around me were like whoa, what are you doing? You look totally different. You are acting totally different. You’re You’re very concerned about these ingredients are eating and we don’t we don’t understand why you avoid all the things we’re eating. And we want to know more from you and that’s when my family and friends begged me to start food baby and I started it just for that I’m really and wanted to teach them what I was doing.

Dr. Mindy  

I love that. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard me say this before, but part of the way I see health is I always ask myself, what is the body doing? Like, why is it doing that? Because the body doesn’t do anything without a specific reason for it. So when we’re gaining weight, you know, yes, we can say, Oh, you ate the wrong amount of calories day after day after day. But if you’ve ever studied anything and with the setpoint, and how if you change your calorie output and your input that that theory completely goes away, the thing that makes the most logical sense to me as to why the body gains weight, is that it has to put these toxic ingredients somewhere. And it’s so smart, it knows not to put it around your heart and lungs, around your liver around your your organs, that’s going to be the last place it wants to put it because for survival reasons that makes no sense. So it puts it around fat. And then what do we do, we look in the mirror, and we’re like, Oh, I hate that fat. But actually, your body did the most brilliant thing it could do to save your life. And it did it by putting around your belly and not around your heart and lungs. So if we right, if we tap that theory, we take that core, then the most important weight loss tool is your ingredients.

Vani Hari  

And this is why I love this conversation we’re having right now, Mindy, because I believe that like, you know, intuitively it’s so easy to understand how to eat. But it’s someone like you that explains the scientific happenings behind the scenes of what’s actually in your body to make it all make sense. And you know, when I after I had my children, like one of the things that enters a lot of women’s minds, like when they have children are like, am I going to look the same afterwards am I going to be you know, is my body going to change am I going to not be able to fit into the clothes that I used to have like all of these things, enter your head as a woman. And it entered my head too, even though I’ve maintained my weight for over 10 years since that pivotal moment. And, you know, now was my time to become a mother. And I’m like, in my late 30s. And it’s not as easy to keep weight off, you know, etc. Like you can really, you know, get off the bus or the train right and have to get back on again. And so after I had my daughter, I was floored at the fact that the weight came off at a very normal pace. By six or nine months, I was fitting back into the clothes that I’d worn before. And I didn’t do anything. Yeah, all I did was eat real food. I didn’t have to go on a crash diet or worry about that. And if that isn’t a testament to real food working, and really nourishing your body in a way that like allows your body to go back to equilibrium. I don’t know what is. And scientifically you can probably explain that better. But yeah, no

Dr. Mindy  

it because there was no the only reason the body gains weight is it needs a place to store toxins, and you were not so you know it puts more weight on during pregnancy actually just read something really interesting. In this book, it’s called Eve. And it’s a book about all the ways that we’ve looked at the female body over millions of years. It’s really cool. And one of the things they were saying is when we get pregnant, that the reason that we gain more weight around our hips and our glutes is to store this is how brilliant the body is check this out to store Omega three, six and nine healthy fats so that when you nurse, that’s the most important nutrient for the brain, for your baby’s brain when you go to nurse. Now let’s say you’re eating the corn oils that cottonseed oils, the canola oils, and that is getting still stored in that area. And now you are going to nurse not only are those inflammatory oils potentially going into your baby, but they’re going to be harder to break down. Because those are synthetic manmade oils. So the fact that you’re so clued into ingredients that makes complete sense to me that you would drop weight so fast. That is just

Vani Hari  

amazing to hear. And like intuitively, when you look at a lot of these different chemicals that I talk about all the time. I mean, I’m thinking of really very interesting ones like dimethyl polysiloxane. This is an anti foaming agent that they add to the majority of oils in America that they fry foods in and this is a chemical that can be preserved with formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen according to the FDA, they own their own FDA documents on this chemical of why it’s approved for use and it says it can be from you know, have formaldehyde in it. I mean, this is insane that it’s doing anything in our food system. And you wonder like what’s happening in your body when you’re eating a french fry that’s been fried in that or a Diet Coke that’s coming out of a fountain a lot of people don’t realize this, but Diet Coke that comes out of a fountain machine has dimethyl polysiloxane. In it, it’s not the same ingredients that you would find on the back of a Diet Coke can. And so these are the type of chemicals that I believe don’t belong in the food supply. I know that they can take out these chemicals and still have businesses because they’re doing this overseas in Europe, when you buy french fries at McDonald’s. And in Britain, it doesn’t have dimethyl polysiloxane. Here’s the United States it does. And so these companies, these food companies are American companies, and they’re still serving us the toxic versions of their products. And they figured out how to make their products healthier and better for people overseas. And I find that extremely unethical and hypocritical. And this runs the gamut not just McDonald’s. Its General Mills, its Kellogg’s, you know, they’re making Froot Loops here with artificial dyes. But in Europe, they take them out because in Europe, they require a warning label that warns parents that it causes hyperactivity in children.

Dr. Mindy  

That is crazy. Okay, so just so we can pull everybody up to speed, I think the first place to start with this is, what does the FDA do for us? And what does the FDA not do for us, because two years ago, during the pandemic, a huge article came out that the joke within the FDA is that the F is silent. So if you know what the F stands for food, the D stands for drugs. And so the joke within and it was a huge article that came out in a major newspaper, and it was saying how they don’t put enough effort into protecting the quality of food of those ingredients. So can you talk a little bit about what the FDA is doing for us with ingredients and what it’s not doing so that if anybody’s like, well, I this seems a little extreme. A really hang with us here, because what we’re talking about is life saving. And you need to know that the powers that be here in America, they don’t have your back when it comes to things like food ingredients, causing cancer and food ingredients causing Alzheimer’s and dementia. They don’t care about that they care about profits.

Vani Hari  

Yeah, there’s this underlying assumption that the FDA has sat and regulated and looked at every single chemical in our food supply and their third party safety testing these chemicals before they’re approved for use. That’s the actually opposite of what actually happens. The food companies that create the chemicals themselves, submit the safety data, and then the FDA just rubber stamps it because they don’t. They look at the data. And they’re like, Oh, it’s fine for us. This company says so so we will approve this for us. And there’s over 3000 chemicals right now in the food system that have never been regulated at all heavy. There’s no safety data on them whatsoever. And so there was a very important point where the deputy director of the FDA came out and admitted that they don’t have the resources to look after all of these food chemicals that are in our food supply. So it’s really up to us to decide whether we want to be part of this experiment or not. And if you look at examples, and I’ll tell you one very important example that will just blow your mind. Read number three, read number three was banned in cosmetics because it causes cancer in lab animals. Okay, but what happened at the last minute is the mayor Tino Ceri industry that worked very closely with the alcohol industry came in at the last minute, and made a line item edit to that law and said, You know what, we’re still going to allow it in food, because we won’t be able to make our Marish you know, cherries that were popular at the time with surely temples and all the drinks that you would find at bars. So we’re gonna allow red three in food, but you can’t put it in your lipstick. And this is how screwed up. Yeah, this is an example of how screwed up the food system is. Just this week, California has now banned red three, and they’re going to have up to like three or four years to enact that. And I think that should hopefully nail the coffin on red three across the United States, because California is such a huge market. And that’s why it’s so crucial for California to lead the way in a lot of these regulations in terms of food. But for so long, this was happening. And this is just that’s just one chemical that I’m talking about. This has happened across the board with several different chemicals that are allowed for use in our food.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah. Which, you know, again, when you dive into this, it’s so depressing. And and this is why we have to take matters into our own hands. So if you’re gotten this far in the podcast, you’re like, Oh my God, what’s going on? This is a large part of why you did this cookbook. Your last book is amazing. I devoured that one as well. But I think it’s really important we educate ourselves. So in the cookbook, by the way, which is awesome. And I’m I love to cook so I’m really excited to try a bunch of the recipes. But what I love about a well written cookbook, is that the first part of it educate It’s you. And it’s lists, and it helps you navigate certain things. So one of the things you help us navigate in here are the 10 ingredients that are like, the worst ones, can we go through some of those? And why do we need them out of our? How do we know if we’re eating them? Let’s just start there.

Vani Hari  

I’m gonna give your listeners a cheat sheet on how to avoid nine of those chemicals by just avoiding one of those chemicals. Oh, man, that, yes, if you avoid this chemical in the grocery store, you will have a probably a 90% chance of avoiding the other nine on that terrible 10 list. And that is called natural flavor.

Dr. Mindy  

Oh, that was so good. Okay, wait, you have to say that, again, I want everybody to hear that, that’s gonna say it again. So

Vani Hari  

I have a list of 10 Terrible ingredients that you should avoid in your family’s diet. And if you just eliminate one of those, you will eliminate 90% of the other nine. So and that is natural flavor. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

And just so natural flavors, just so everybody knows, is at the end typically have an ingredient list. And my understanding of natural flavors is they can put small amounts of a lot of toxic ingredients in there that have been deemed grace or generally recognized as safe. So it’s a mishmash of small doses of toxic ingredients. Is that correct?

Vani Hari  

That? Well, that’s true, but it can mean 1000 different chemicals under that one label because the FDA does not require food manufacturers to actually list the chemicals that were are within the natural flavors. So they can add adjuncts and other things that you know, make that flavor come to life. But they can also add all sorts of additives that trick your brain. And this is a part where I think is so important for families and women and everyone out there to recognize how the food industry has gotten away with getting us hooked to their food. Okay, so the reason we have picky eaters in this yes, it’s because because of this natural flavor, when they put a natural flavor in a product, it makes it taste and look and feel the same damn time, same day, same way every single time. So when you are giving your kids goldfish every single day for a snack, and then all of a sudden you want them to eat better, and it’s a blueberry that blueberry is sometimes sweet. It’s time to Mauer. It’s sometimes mealy, it’s sometimes juicy. It’s there’s a variety of things happening in your child’s mouth and tastebuds when you’re eating real food. Real Food is different every single time. And so you’re like completely energizing the brain to accept all different kinds of flavors when you’re eating real food. But when you’re eating processed dead food, that’s with added flavoring that hijacks your brain chemicals into like experiencing bliss and experiencing a flavor that’s not in nature, because they’re creating the 1,000,000th best part of the taste. And a lot of those flavors. They’re hijacking your tastebuds. And so you’re, they’re gonna automatically make you more picky and not enjoy real food. And so it’s up to us to take control of our little kids bodies in our own bodies and say, You know what, I don’t want to be part of that experiment. And, and what’s so sinister about this situation is there using the same science that was involved in getting tobacco hooked to people in terms of nicotine and all of that, and using that same brain excitotoxins that are happening in the brain, in our food today. And that’s why we’re experiencing the problems we have.

Dr. Mindy  

I mean that I think that is such a brilliant explanation. Because I can tell you and I know you’ve probably interacted with these people, a lot of the people we work with have serious food addictions. And they want to make changes, but they can’t make changes. So if we take the theory that you just said, where somebody has been on a highly processed diet, where it’s been very consistently divvying up a flavor profile to you stimulating very consistent neuro chemicals in your brain, and now we want to get them to eat better, so that they can start to have a stronger health benefit with their food. What does that transition look like? How do we get them from the process addicted brain and tastebuds over to nature’s food?

Vani Hari  

I mean, I’d say at the very least you have to start adding raw food into your diet that’s been unadulterated. That’s from nature. To have something right every single meal if you’re going to be eating Cheetos, fine. Eat an apple with it too. Right eat the apple for right You know, and, and so like, that’s one of the things I talked about my first book way back when I wrote wrote it in 2013. I believe that like, you have to eat as much unadulterated food as possible in order for your body to get the nutrition. And when you are eating these processed products, your brain is constantly being energized by those flavors. And it’s, it’s you, you have to make a commitment and say, am I am I going to allow my brain to keep doing this, or maybe I’ll opt out and not do that. And thankfully, there’s amazing snacks and products out there and companies that are making food the right way and processed foods the right way. And you can eat some of those fun for you, you know, fun to eat foods still, without with with also avoiding natural flavor and all these chemicals that they’re putting in the food to make it taste good. You know, a lot of people think it’s the sugar. And I asked people I say, Is it really the sugar? If I put sugar in water? And I gave you a cup of that? Would you be addicted to that? Would you be drinking that all the time? No, that one tastes good. It’s the flavoring that and that triggers the brain to create that addictive quality of food that makes you overeat.

Dr. Mindy  

So that’s so brilliant the way you say that, because I think a lot of people beat themselves up because they’re sugar addicted. And one of the ways I like to look at the chemical addiction that we have to food is it also comes in the microbiome. And so so many of those toxic ingredients, start to destroy the microbiome and change the whole inner workings of your gut. And now those bacteria are also telling you, hey, go crave this food because they’re trying to stay alive. So what I just heard in what you said, and what I really want to point out to people, is that if we start to slowly get out of the processed foods and go into nature’s foods, it may be a little boring for a hot moment. Like we might not be as excited about food, do we have any understanding of how you don’t

Vani Hari  

have to I mean, like you don’t have it doesn’t have to be boring. And that’s this is the part where it’s just like people think that like, you know, they’re like follow me on social media or they see like all the things I talked about, and like I won’t eat McDonald’s or Domino’s, or Pizza Hut or Burger King or any of those places. And so like my life’s not fun, I’m still eating everything I’m eating ice cream and pizza. And like everything, I’m just using good ingredients. I’m still enjoying life. I’m eating croissants, you know, like all of these things, but it’s not destroying my body because I’m eating real ingredients. And so one of the reasons I wanted to write food babe family is because I wanted to give people a slew of recipes that are fun to make that are easy that everybody will enjoy when you sit down to eat, you won’t have to do short order cooking and make something different for every single person in your household. You’ll be able to like all sit down and enjoy something and it’s one of the reasons why I remade some of the things that have some of the biggest excitotoxins out there like Chick fil A chicken nuggets that normally have MSG added to them if you buy them at Chick fil A but I wanted to make a version that didn’t have MSG, but tasted just as good. But same with their waffle fries and in in in homemade rice krispie treats that didn’t have you know the blue one and the other things from the marshmallows that you would typically buy at the grocery store How to Choose the Right marshmallows and the right Rice Krispies the brown rice crisps or whatever to make a treat that tastes great and it’s so delicious. And you’re putting like three tablespoons of grass fed butter in there. So you’re getting that in there and that’s actually a great little treat, right and it’s like but if you buy the regular rice krispies that are with BHT and like all of the other refined sugars and then you’re putting the real chemicalized marshmallows in there that’s not going to be good or if you buy the pre made ones or even worse and so there’s an a way to like navigate this over process and ultra processed world but it’s still enjoy life and eat something that’s really tasty. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

I so I wish I’d given you my kettle corn recipe. Do you have a Kettle Corn Recipe?

Vani Hari  

I love popcorn more than anything on earth. I like just my thing that I go to in the evening. I sit down and eat lesser evil coconut oil popcorn. Yeah, I love that. So what’s your kind of Corn Recipe?

Dr. Mindy  

Well, I came up with this when my kids were teenagers because all the information was coming out about how carcinogenic the microwave popcorn was. Yeah, and so I you know and that’s what they wanted to buy and like put you know put in the microwave. So I came up with organic popcorn in I put it in avocado oil or you can put it in coconut oil. You’d have something that when it heats up doesn’t become inflammatory so I pop it in our own pan. I do grass fed butter. I put it all in a in a bowl and I add pink Himalayan salt. I like Redmond sees All Yes, it’s my love, right? Because there’s no plastics in there. And then I sprinkle I dust it with coconut sugar. And I mix it all together. And we can I tell you how many kids when they were teenagers would come to my house and ask for that over the microwave popcorn they were getting at home.

Vani Hari  

That’s amazing, especially when it’s made fresh to and it’s hot. Oh my god. Yeah, it’s just great. It’s so yeah, it’s that is awesome. And then

Dr. Mindy  

you also have a recipe in here that’s really interesting. For Doritos, and I get that Doritos long ago, because I was like, There’s they’re never coming back. I’m never gonna be able to eat those. So did you just take some of these toxic foods and just like create a lab in your kitchen? How did you find that you can taste them, they tasted similar?

Vani Hari  

Well, what I would do is just use as many real foods as possible to create, you know, a similar effect. You know, my Doritos don’t taste exactly like the Doritos that you could get in a bag. I mean, but they have way better ingredients for you. And you, you make them at home. And it satisfies satisfies that urge for a chip, right? If you love chips, make these instead. Right? And there’s better for you options of all the things out there. I believe that like, you could find just an alternative product that someone’s creating, or a way to make it at home. And I want people to know that like living this lifestyle isn’t a lifestyle of, of not having what you want and not enjoying life. You know, it’s really about eating all the good things in life, but just really good ingredients.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah. Okay, so I have two scenarios that I’d love to run past you that have have baffled me and tugged at my heart that came during the pandemic, I was asked to go and speak to a group of high school teachers that were very concerned about their immune system. And I gave what I thought was like a brilliant food and supplement and fasting presentation to them. We did it all on Zoom, I was really excited. We I come from a family of teachers. So I was really excited to give back to these teachers. And at the end of the whole presentation, one of the teachers, he bravely raised his hand and he said, So I hear what you’re saying about oils. But if I’m sitting at the grocery store, and I’m looking at a jar of nut butter with inflammatory or oil, or the jar of nut butter with with less inflammatory oil with a healthier oil, that’s an $8 difference. And that’s $8 I don’t have. And then another woman says to me, Well, I get up at 430 in the morning, and I go off to school, I get my classroom ready, I leave, you know, I work all the way through lunch. And at 334 o’clock in the afternoon, I start to go home, I’m so exhausted, McDonald’s is the easiest place for me to go through and grab some food. How do we help those people? They don’t have time. And there have limited economic resources, how do we help them?

Vani Hari  

Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I’ve found is real food isn’t expensive, if you plan. And so one of the things that I talk about in the book that’s so important is meal planning, you have to plan in advance of what you’re going to eat. So you don’t waste food number one, but number two, you prep your kitchen ahead of time, every weekend whenever you have time, with good ingredients so that they’re available in there. And if you meal prep for those times where you’re getting home late from school, or you’re getting home late from your classroom, or wherever, you can have something available in the freezer that you can warm up, or maybe you throw in the crock pot before you leave for work right or the night before that’s cooking all day. So that it’s ready to go and so a lot of those strategies are in food babe family, because I personally don’t like spending all day in the kitchen. Like I don’t I’m not Julia Child, I don’t want to spend all day making something and watching it prove and like all the things right? Like I want to get in and get out and have real food and real good food. And I want to be able to feed my kids so I can go do the other amazing things that I want to do in terms of like, you know, change the food world or run my other company change the world. Like, right, like I want to I want to have just little things right.

Dr. Mindy  

Take down the whole food system, you know, little things like that. I’m excited.

Vani Hari  

You know, but, um, but yeah, so I don’t like spending a lot of time into like, I want to shit. You know, it’s so funny. Like, the other day I got off a podcast, you know, my books coming out. I’m on a lot of podcasts. I’m doing a lot of interviews, and I’m in my office like all day and I’m rushing out the office and I have like 20 minutes to get food on the table. But I’m like maybe I have like 10 extra minutes. If the kids are playing outside a little bit longer. They won’t notice that they’re hungry because I swear like five o’clock hits and they’re so hungry. And I put together this amazing Dinner in less than about right at 30 minutes. I mean, it took me less than, like 10 minutes in the kitchen. You know, it was a piece of fish that I marinated real quick while cauliflower was baking at 375 in the oven for 30 minutes, and I had just happened to put a sweet potato or two in while I was doing the podcast earlier in the day at 400 for an hour. And so like that was already done. And it was just like, we had sweet potatoes, we had cauliflower, and we had this beautiful piece of halibut. And it was like that was a perfect meal. It doesn’t need to be, like expansive, it doesn’t need to be like 18 menu items. For dinner. It can be three, you know, a good vegetable, a good protein, and a nice carb, right? Like it can be really simple like that. And yeah, that’s how we eat every single night. It’s really simply it’s it’s as true to real real food as possible. And then we have fruit for dessert, you know?

Dr. Mindy  

And right, which is even easier, because you just pull out a bowl of cherries and some like Greek yogurt or something like that. Yeah, what what I heard in what you did, compared to the questions I got from these teachers, and it’s not, it’s not a criticism, it’s more I’m I’m right there with you in this deep desire to solve the food problem that we have. And I love how you went after the corporations, you can keep going after the corporations if you want, I’ve kind of decided we need to educate the people. And we need to make sure that the people understand that. And one of the biggest challenges we have is people don’t realize if you do not prioritize food quality, you will have to prioritize sickness at some point. And we’re not making that connection. So in the the example you just gave what I heard was, you probably already had good ingredients in the house. Yeah. And so how often do you shop? You went probably at some point in that week. And you got those ingredients. And that was what was there. So talk a little bit about the Cheyenne experience. Yeah,

Vani Hari  

so one of the things that I think is absolutely crucial is like stocking your pantry with the right stuff. And so in the first half of food babe family, my new cookbook is all guidebook on how to stock your pantry with the right stuff and like what are the right brands? What are the good ingredients? What are the companies not using seed oils or natural flavor? You know what what are the brands that are doing the right thing so that I know what to stock my pantry with. And so every single Sunday morning usually I go grocery shopping or on the weekends I that’s just when I go grocery shopping, I go in during the week, it’s just not an option for me, I’m too busy and, and the kids have school and like we have bedtime and like everything’s happening, right. So the best time to go is Sunday morning. And usually one of my kids go with me too, or both of them. And we make it a thing and we go to the farmers markets too. And so I’m stocking as much stuff as I can on the weekend. So during the week when I’m crazy busy and I’m working and everything’s going crazy and you know, their school lunches to be made and all that stuff. I have the ingredients there because that’s like half the battle. Like I think it’s actually maybe even more like 80% of the battle. If the food’s they’re unhappy to cook it and get it on the stove and like eat it right. But if it’s not there, I’m have to go shop and then unpack all the stuff carried up my flight of stairs, do all of that. And then cook it’s too exhausting. So you have to like break it up. You have to make it a priority as you said. And you also can I think budget in a way that will allow you to enjoy the products that don’t have the seed oils like you made that example of peanut butter. There are so many awesome grocery stores right now that are yes selling less expensive organic items and items that are real food I was I’m thinking of Lidl, I’m thinking of Aldi, I’m thinking of Trader Joe’s Costco. Costco is the big house consumer Yes, sprouts, sprouts.

Dr. Mindy  

Amazing. You know,

Vani Hari  

there are so many great grocery stores out there that are affordable and you can find affordable organic goods or at least real food that doesn’t have the different chemicals added to it.

Dr. Mindy  

agreed and it’s funny because we started I mean, I shouldn’t say names but I’m gonna say names. When Amazon bought Whole Foods in my opinion, they destroyed Whole Foods and so I’ve been looking for other places to go find to go shop so we go to farmers markets, we do the same thing on Sunday. And my new favorite place is sprouts, sprouts has a lot of really cool well priced. So to your point, I think that’s something that everybody know we have a worldwide audience but I feel like don’t forget that there’s some really in Costco don’t forget that there’s some places that are trying target even is trying to put some more of these healthier foods in there. But one of the one of the things that I see that trips people up is that damn ingredient label. Is there anything on the ingredient label that we should know about that we could navigate as Are anything helpful for us there?

Vani Hari  

I mean, honestly, there are in terms of the calorie, you know, the nutritional facts panel, I just feel like you should just ignore. Yeah, I mean, it should be like, second, it should be the second thing that you focus on, you should definitely ignore the front of the package, which is all the marketing, right. And then you should just go read the ingredients. And if the first ingredient is sugar, and the second ingredient is riched, flour, those are two items that you should avoid, you know, those are two ingredients that are on the terrible 10. Right? And, and then, if it has natural flavor, just avoid it too. And you’ll see yourself. I mean, if you just go in your pantry right now, for everyone listening, and you go look and see how much natural flavor is in there, it’s you’re gonna blow your mind. The average American, I mean, I’m telling you, it’s like it’s gonna blow your mind. And you’re gonna be like, what have I been doing to my tastebuds? Right? And so when you look at an ingredient label, I believe, like the number one question you ask yourself, every time you sit down to eat, or what are the ingredients, you need to know what ingredients you’re eating, if you don’t know you need to go find out. And if they won’t tell you if you’re at a restaurant or somewhere else, and they won’t tell you, then that’s a red flag. So if you were sitting down and you’re trying to figure out what you’re eating, and you’re eating a sandwich, and you see the words mono diglycerides, on the package of bread that you’re eating, you need to know why you’re eating that, like, what is that substance? Okay? Yes, well, if you Google it, you’ll find out it’s an emulsifier and preservative that they put in bread, they started putting it in bread, once trans fats was banned. It has minut amounts of trans fats actually still in it. And so it’s something that you don’t want to be putting in your body. So next time you sit down and have a sandwich, you’ll think, Oh, well, I need to buy bread without mono diglycerides. Because this is an ingredient. I don’t know why it’s in there. It’s just to serve the food industry and not my body. It’s not a nutritional ingredient. And it’s something that I shouldn’t be eating. And so once you start to ask yourself, what are the ingredients I’m eating? Then you can say the next question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? And you don’t need to be a rocket scientist, nutritionist or doctor to understand if the ingredients are nutritious or not, you can use your common sense. Yes. And then you find out where are those ingredients coming from? Are they made in a factory factory laboratory in a chemical factory, right? Are they things made from a factory farm, right in terms of meat? And so you start to ask yourself these questions. And if teachers ask yourself, those three questions every single time you sit down to eat, you will start to make better choices, because you’ll stun yourself at the crap that you’re eating.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, and you know, a really good hack for those people that have kids. Have them go Google it. I did that one time. My, my nephew asked me about some frozen waffles he had bought at Trader Joe’s. And he was like, I think my parents actually bought them. And they he was like, Are these healthy? And I said, read the ingredient labels to me. And he couldn’t, he couldn’t pronounce them. He was like 13 at the time. And they said, go Google it. And look, tell me what those those were. So off, he went, like 45 minutes later, he came back and he’s like, some of these cause cancer, how can they put that in our food. And like after that, it was like, I didn’t have to teach him anything he taught himself. So I think it’s highly combat is

Vani Hari  

such an important lesson, Mindy. And I just, I just want to stop you there because like, oh my gosh, that right there is what we need to be doing as parents, like, I believe we have the greatest responsibility more than any other generation to teach our kids the truth about what’s happened to our food. And that starts with learning ingredients. And if we teach them that, they automatically will become healthier eaters, and be aware and they’ll teach their friends and it will be such an amazing thing to see. And they can start a whole new revolution a better for you companies because they’ll they’ll start to reject the legacy companies of the past and start to vote with their dollars and it will be just this amazing thing that I see happening and I see it with my own daughter with her standing out in school and in talking about how she doesn’t eat artificial food dyes and and she’s six and a half you know and it’s like she’s educating those around her and I’ve taught her in such a way that we don’t shame anybody for their food choices, but we teach them the truth about what’s actually in our food so that they learn about these ingredients you know, my parents didn’t have this information is probably why your parents think Trader Joe’s is great because my my mom thinks that trader like everything’s organic at Trader Joe’s is hilarious because Oh, it’s organic. I got it from Trader Joe’s I’m like Wow, mom. Oh faculty.

Dr. Mindy  

Right. You know, Trader Joe’s gives the illusion. Yeah, illusion

Vani Hari  

is not that easy, right? You gotta be a little bit more investigative their mom. But, you know, they didn’t have this information at their fingertips like we do about what’s been done to the industrial food. So Fly and we have this information available. There’s resources. I mean, I’ve written four books now on this topic that you can take in, become an expert at this. And then you can just, you know, share that knowledge with your children and your family, and then they’re going to have a healthier life, you’re going to save their life, I believe.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah. And one of the things I used to tell my kids, if people who have, once they get to those teenage years, even the middle school years, you know, they start pushing back on you a little bit. And I used to get questions. One day, my daughter said to me, why don’t we always eat organic, like, when I go over to my friend’s house, they don’t always eat organic. And, and I, my response was a loving response of like, you know, I’ve just done a lot of research. And I know what’s going to help build you a healthy body and what’s going to actually be toxic for your body. And not every family’s done that perhaps, so maybe you could just share it with them when you learn something, share it with them. But I didn’t make her feel bad, I made her feel empowered. Like we I’ve just taken an extra step. And I really am conscious about what we’re eating as a family. So I found that to be really helpful. The second thing that is a great trick that is work so well for even adults, is I made a rule that no toxic ingredient came into our house. So if they went to a birthday party, if they went out with friends as they became teenagers, and they wanted to do eat crappy food, do it just our house was a food sanctuary. And we would not bring bad food in there. And that

Vani Hari 

works really well too. I love it. I love it. And you and that’s one of the things that parents forget that they’re in control. And so if you’re going to bring in Doritos and Cheetos and eat them in front of your kids, your kids are going to also want that. But if you make your food, your pantry, a sanctuary, like you said, that foods not going to be available in there, and they’re not going to have it and it’s going to be better for you too. So you might as well make those choices for your family and have some rules around what we bring into our household. I love that because that’s exactly how my pantry is it’s very, I would say it’s very hard to find natural flavor in my pantry is probably in like the yum earth like natural, organic gummy bear versions that I have, like hidden in the back for my kids, like you know that they’d get birthday parties or wherever but like, but that’s it. And so if you make that decision, when you’re buying food, you’re not going to have those struggles in terms of like, you know, saying no to your child when they want to eat this or that it’s going to be like, Okay, enjoy, enjoy what’s in the pantry, or no to yourself,

Dr. Mindy  

I mean this, you can take that same theory for those that are listening, and they’re like, maybe they don’t have kids. But they’re like, I keep tripping up with my food choices. So could you just make it a rule that you would only bring the healthy food in. And if that’s a hard, you know, you can get Vaughn his book and really look at like the love that you have all these cheat sheets. So thank you for that. That makes it so much easier for all of us. So you know what to not bring in I love that we can say natural flavors, definitely a no, because everybody listening to this podcast can now go and look in their pantry and get rid of everything with the natural flavors. So you can create this food sanctuary. And then when you go out, it means if you want to have a soda, if you want to have fries. Every once in a while it’s like your jam, fine, go do it. But you need one place in your life that is a food sanctuary and the home is where it should be. And I recently tested this on a man who has food addicted who came to me and he said that buffalo wings and sodas were like and fries he couldn’t over overturn that, that addiction. And he was over 300 pounds. And I got him down. He’s now down 150 pounds by just making smarter food choices, eating the crap outside of his house, and then attaching fasting to that. That’s all he did. And he dropped 150 pounds. That’s awesome. It’s insane. So, okay, the next ingredient I have to to work through with you is one that I’m really struggling to educate people on and that’s

Vani Hari  

oils. Yes, yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

Can you talk a little bit about good oils and bad walls? Yeah, a lot of people really, this can confused about this.

Vani Hari  

Well, here, here’s an oil that you may not buy at the store, but it’s in probably every single restaurant across America with the exception of just a few write probably, maybe two to 3% Probably don’t use this oil, but it’s cottonseed oil. cottonseed oil is a byproduct of the cotton industry. It’s actually raised like a textile. So it has different EPA standards. So the types of pesticides that are being used in the amount of pesticides being used is totally differently regulated than food, but they found a use for cottonseed oil which is a byproduct of the cotton industry. And they decided to use it in food. And the way it gets into our food is by fry oil, like anything that’s fried and a lot of these fast food chains or restaurants out there in and out used to use cottonseed oil before I called them out, they changed it cents and outside. But, but cottonseed oil is not only using those heavier, toxic pesticides, but it’s been genetically engineered as well to withstand heavy doses of Roundup and glyphosate, which now has been implicated to cause cancer. Across the court cases across America, they’re awarding plaintiffs billions of dollars. And also not to mention that it completely destroys our gut bacteria. And you can probably talk to the science that quite quite a bit. And so we have this cottonseed oil, that is you know, doused with all these chemicals. And it’s not even a real food that we should be eating. And then it’s the way it’s extracted. They’re using chemical solvents, like hexane, which the FDA doesn’t regulate the amount of residue that remains in food. So this is something that is a carcinogen, and something that we don’t want to be consuming. So the way it’s produced, it’s deodorize. It’s bleached. It’s in these, they’re using these chemical solvents. And then the way it’s, you know, grown is also toxic. And so this is one of the worst things that you could have in your body. And this is actually how corn is paid to corn oil, soy oil, and canola oil. And soy the worst. You see those for the absolute? Yeah, yeah, absolute worst. And so this is something that we want to avoid, because what happens is it ends up having high linoleic acid in it. And that’s what’s turning on cancer cells is what I’ve been reading in the literature. And maybe you can talk more about the scientific, you know, facts behind that. But like, that’s what’s really scary to me that these, it makes sense in the way that it’s produced. Like when you’re asking yourself, what are the ingredients? Okay? Are they nutritious? I’m not sure about that. But then, where do they come from? Like, how do these how are these oils produced? When you ask yourself that third question, you’re like, oh, my gosh, like it’s so denatured, from where it started that of course, our bodies can’t handle the load of that. And then the fact that the majority of oils that are being used across like in salad dressings to saute your favorite restaurants, like it’s everywhere, yep. Every time you go out to eat, you’re being exposed to these high omega six fatty acids. And these, you know, genetically engineered oils. And then we’re wondering, like, why we’re getting all of this disease. And so this is stuff that you have to change, it’s like the number one thing you have to change. Yeah, when you start to eat a real food diet, if you just change that and say, I’m going to eat only olive oil, and avocado oil and coconut oil and grass fed butter. If you just eat those four things and change the way you make your food at home and you eat the majority of time at home and why it’s so important why I wrote another cookbook is because I believe when you take back control of your food, you need the resources and the recipes that you can make really quickly with good ingredients. And when you start to do that, you start to realize a level of health that you never thought was possible because your body starts automatically feeling better.

Dr. Mindy  

And I have a theory that you don’t need motivation to get healthy you need momentum. And so when you start to eat the right quality ingredients, you get that momentum you get a new experience with your body you kind of go oh my joints move a little bit better. I think a little bit better. I’m sleeping a little bit and it’s so subtle, but you got to you got to really check in with yourself. And to me what you said is so spot on. I want to make sure that everybody heard that because the number one food macro and my opinion that needs to repeat, we need the most attention outside of that. I love your natural flavors want. I think that’s brilliant. And I look at that from like a neurotoxic lens and like how and they have food addiction lens. But from a this is killing you lens. It’s the oils. Yeah, the oils are killing you. And literally like if you do not know this, I’m gonna say it again, the oils are killing you. Because your cells are made up of a by lipid membrane on the outside of that cell. And when you’re eating cottonseed oil, you’re gumming up that cell and what the nutrition can’t get into the cell now, and toxins can’t get out. And now you’ve got like a fire inside that cell and all kinds of genes will be triggered. So the four oils just so we’re clear that you should be eating. Go ahead and say those again, just so I’m grass

Vani Hari  

fed butter, avocado oil, olive oil and coconut oil.

Dr. Mindy  

Perfect. And what do you think of the difference between what well let’s just say this. What do you say to people who are like well, my doctor helped me to stop eating coconut oil because it’s raising my class?

Vani Hari  

Well, I’ll tell you who know why your doctor so confused is because the canola industry actually, you know, Unilever paid scientists and doctors at the American Heart Association to sponsor a study to try to, you know, to basically demonize coconut oil, and in this study was flawed. And then the, of course, the conflict of interest involved in that I remember when that first came out, like a few years ago, I mean, it’s, it’s, I feel like some version of that study has come out every four or five, six years over the last 30 years or so. And, and they want people to believe the saturated fat in coconut oil is unhealthy for you, but it’s actually a medium chain, triglyceride is actually really healthy for you, and you can metabolize it much better than any of the seed oils out there. And, and then it does kind of help your metabolism too. And maybe you can talk about why that is. But it’s so funny when when those articles started hitting the web where they’re like, coconut oil is not healthy, and it’s never been healthy for you. My mom who doesn’t love the taste of coconut oil is like texting me like I told you so like sending me these articles. I was like, Mom, do you know who sponsored this? You know, study and who is behind all of this? Like, are you kidding you? Do I need to take you to school right now. And so it’s like, you know, and this is what is beautiful about the fact that podcasts like yours, Mindy is demystifying the playbook behind what the food industry does to confuse us about what’s actually healthy. Yes,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah, thank you and I, one of the things I have, like three areas that I feel like I can have a deeper discussion that aren’t just little sound bites. And my obviously books are one my YouTube channel, we have a little we can now at least go 15 minutes and educate people if they’ll hang in there. And then a podcast like this. And I and I’ve really thought deeply about this recently, and I hope everybody hears this is that it is now time for us to be critical thinkers, we really have to dive in to asking like I love the way you’re like ask yourself this, ask yourself this. But if you just take what if you assume what’s in the supermarket is absolutely vetted and in your best, best health interest. I really want to ask you to think differently. It’s time for us to educate ourselves. And in a world where we’re scanning through Instagram and saying I like you I don’t like you. And we’re like cutting off the conversation. We’re losing the depth of of nuance that needs to be had like in a conversation like this, don’t you think? I mean? I want to empower people to educate themselves. educate yourselves. Yeah, so absolutely. Okay, I have two last questions for you. But the first one is literally a family a family conversation. So our we love mineral water. And our favorite mineral water for many years was Topo Chico Oh till I made your posts. And I came home and to my kid my family I’m like, You guys gotta see what the food babe just said. Did they fix Topo Chico? Is it still

Vani Hari  

I think they’re trying to I need to I want someone to independently test it and tell me it’s okay. But it tastes so good. It has that bite for like Christmas of a mineral water like the sparkling mineral water oh it’s so good. It’s it’s so good right and and the way the bottle the way the bottle is shaped like everything is so great about it. It’s like it’s I haven’t sit down at the end of the night and just drink that my popcorn and I was just you know I was so happy but anyways no I don’t drink it anymore because of that they found high levels of P FOSS like forever plastic chemicals in it and so now I do mountain valley spring I have it delivered to my house and so I have cases in cases of it in my garage and you know it does is doesn’t hit as good as top and Chico but it does it does the job so Okay,

Dr. Mindy  

well I’ll have to take that back because everybody was really mad at you and my household for

Vani Hari  

myself. I was I was like I can’t believe I’ve been doing this to myself and I’m so mad about it that I have to share it and I sad because it’s so good.

Dr. Mindy  

Oh God it’s so good. Okay, so just finishing this conversation up what I want to do is is this is too important of a conversation to lose people in the all the information we’ve given. So if you were to give like the top three things that people could do right now after this podcast to change the quality of their food, what would those be?

Vani Hari  

Remove seed oils, remove natural flavors, and eat on a Delta on unadulterated out of a package or unbox food as much as possible. So do those three things and watch your body change.

Dr. Mindy  

easy, so easy. Okay, then taking you on a totally different turn. The last question I always ask every guest this season, I have a theme each season, that it’s a two prong question. Do you have a self care routine that you do throughout the day? And what do you think your superpower is that you bring to the

Vani Hari  

world? Okay, so my self care right now is not so great.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, but you’re lucky to have buckets that you get your mansion this week in three weeks? No.

Vani Hari  

Yeah, I mean, you know, I would say like, every morning, I wake up, my husband makes my lemon water and my coffee because I’m nursing a child still and, and I’m getting their breakfast and their lunch is packed, and like all that kind of stuff going on. And so he takes care of me in that way. And so I feel very like nourished first thing in the morning, because he’s got my lemon water ready, I gulped that down, and then you know, I’m ready to have breakfast. And so it’s just, it’s like, it’s so nice. So that’s kind of how my morning starts. And then I always do some kind of activity, like some kind of exercise during the day, because it helps my mental state. Like, I feel like it’s my anti anxiety medication. Yes, it just makes me a happier person, I’m able to be more present with my kids and more relaxed and like just everything. So that’s kind of like a non negotiable. I mean, sometimes on the weekends, I’ll give that up to like, go on a long bike ride with the kids or like, do something as a family, but during the week, I really, it’s a non negotiable. And then I, you know, I sit down with my kids three times a day and have have meals with them. It’s one of the most important things to me to sit down with my family and have meals that, you know, we don’t have screens allowed, we sit down together, as a family, we sometimes read to our kids, like, if they’re feeling a little antsy, or whatever, like we’ll read to them. And that’s a nice time, just because when you read to your kids, it’s great for them, but like, also, we’ll sit and have conversations, and it’s fantastic. And my kids are two and six and a half. So I’m starting really early in terms of like, letting them know kind of how our family dynamics are in terms of how we eat and so when we go out to a restaurant, I can take my kids to a super fancy place because they sit and they eat there and they’re they’re used to it without electronics and they can like kind of entertain themselves with like a book or two you know that kind of thing. So it’s great for me because one of my passions is to eat like really long lunches in France and like just enjoy Yeah, there and like, you know, have a three hour conversation with someone you love. And so it’s Yeah, that’s me like my life heaven. Oh, life says Oh, life yes. And so I just want my kids to I if I can, you know, pass that down to them then that would be great. And so and then it you know, I tried to get some outdoor time usually in the afternoon after my kids like one of my child you know, one of my kids goes to school so when she gets back we’d like to try to stay outside as much as possible before dinner and then we have dinner and then we do bath and bedtime and then at night you know when they go to bed it’s kind of like my time on the couch. And that’s when I get out my popcorn and my used to be top of Chico now my mountain valley spring. And you know, I just enjoy some time with my husband and we watch a you know, a show or something like that together on

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, I love that. One thing I have to say on the on the meals and family. I think this is really another key important piece is just how important for your life quality it is to sit down in a positive environment, eating good food and having good social connections. I what we did in my family is every Sunday night was a night everybody had to be home. And there was a we made a big elaborate meal and you could invite your friends if you wanted. And we would have these really, really cool conversations. So all these kids have grown up in our household with this Sunday night, like they wanted to come. I love that. I want to start that I want to start that I highly recommend you do you know these kids are now in their early 20s. And when they come back at the summertime, they’ll say to us, I had one kid whose parents have have taken him all over the world. He’s been at the nicest resorts. And he saw us sitting at the dining room table and he said, I have had the best food with the best conversations sitting at that dining room table. And I looked at my husband, I’m like we did our job. We are done.

Vani Hari  

I’m done.

Dr. Mindy  

So okay, you have to tell me your superpower before we close this down.

Vani Hari  

Okay, so I think my superpower is tenacity. I want to say that I just I don’t I don’t like to give up. Like, like when Kraft decided to remove artificial food. Who dies out of mac and cheese? It was after four or five times of telling me no. And it was after me showing up at their headquarters with 350,000 petitions and, you know, writing a million letters to them and like doing everything that I possibly could going on 100 tv shows and like, you know, doing all this stuff, right? I exaggerated a little bit about the 100 TV shows, but it felt like that at the time. Yeah. And, and they just kept saying no, and no, and no, and now, and I just wouldn’t let up. And that’s, I think, my personality, and I don’t know what, how I got that. I have no idea but I probably think my dad had something to do with that because he came here with nothing as an immigrant and had to build everything and when people when he was like one of the only people in our group of neighbors and people politically and he was always on the other side politically and like standing up for what he believed in and, and really feeling pride around that like that. Just I remember those moments. And I feel like it’s just like, don’t let anybody ever tell you no, is what I learned growing up. And and so hearing those notes, I just always try to wait until it Yes, so yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

anyway, yeah, it’s funny. I was gonna say I was thinking I was trying to think of what you would say your superpower was and I’m like, if she doesn’t say it, I’m gonna say to NASA and because I feel like that’s one of my superpower is to and you know what? I

Vani Hari  

love you. Right?

Dr. Mindy  

You and I need to go do something together because yeah, I’m the whole food system. So I want to be your Robin to your Batman, how

Vani Hari  

about I love

Dr. Mindy  

but you know what it is, is it’s injustice. The thing that will get me up out of bed and put my superhuman cape on is injustice, and everything we’ve been talking about today is not right for human life. And I am again I just have to thank you because the world is a much better place with you in it. You have saved already so many people from cancer by your tenacity. So I just I I’m a super fan so thank you so much Bonnie, I just I adore you so thank you for what you’re doing. Oh,

Vani Hari  

thank you so much.

Dr. Mindy  

And how before I actually I should just throw this out how do people find you? How do they know where to go grab everything that you’ve got

Vani Hari  

yet. You can just come over to food babe.com All the information is there we’ve got a beautiful page set up for this new book food babe family.com and you can come follow on social media the food babe Yeah, that’s it beautiful and Oh check out true Vani as well true. Barney is my company that I started and makes some of the world’s best supplements protein powders bars without ingredients that you don’t need in your body all the unnecessary ingredients have been eliminated. So yeah, the

Dr. Mindy  

powder is off the hook. So are the bars but I’ve been experimenting since we got you gave us some at the Hay House event. So yeah, I can say they’re amazing. So thank you. Thank you, Barney. So so grateful for you. Grateful for you too. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.