Vani Hari (The Food Babe) On Health, Myths & Conscious Eating - MUST Watch!
What this video covers
Vani Hari returns to The Skinny Confidential podcast with hosts Lauryn and Michael Bosstick, who first knew her as a fellow blogger 13 years earlier. In a wide-ranging August 2025 conversation, she reflects on speaking at HHS alongside Secretary Kennedy and the FDA commissioner, tells the story of her health collapse in her early 20s and the blog it produced, relives the Kellogg’s campaign and its path into federal policy, and runs a rapid-fire round of food swaps. She also previews her next cookbook and Truvani’s expansion into Target.
Key points
- Hari describes taking the stage at HHS with Secretary Kennedy and the head of the FDA and says she felt gratitude that “leadership that takes my voice and amplifies it to the highest level of government, all the way to President Trump” now exists — after more than a decade in which, she says, her message fell “largely on deaf ears” in Washington.
- She recounts being a very sick child on numerous prescription medications, an emergency surgery in her early 20s for an appendix about to burst, and a second surgery for endometriosis — the crisis she says led her to overhaul her diet, after which she says she came off every prescription drug.
- On the Kellogg’s campaign, Hari says the company refused even to sit down with the activists who traveled to its headquarters; she recalls tweeting that the refusal would become “the biggest PR mistake of the food industry,” and says Kennedy carried their message into the presidential campaign.
- Hari says that within the first weeks of the new administration, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced artificial food dyes would be phased out — an outcome she credits to the political will the Kellogg’s campaign built.
- She names “natural flavors” as the ingredient people wrongly assume is healthy, claiming the term appears in almost 80% of grocery products and can cover thousands of undisclosed chemicals; she says she no longer buys products that list it.
- In a rapid-fire swaps round, Hari offers Siete cookies for Chips Ahoy, a honey-sweetened Fresh Fizz soda for Sprite, homemade mac and cheese over Kraft, Masa chips, Love Bird cereal for Lucky Charms, and Peaceful Fruits for Fruit Roll-Ups.
- Asked to start a “Food Babe makeover” of a kitchen pantry, Hari says the first things to eliminate are corn, soy, and canola oil and natural flavors.
- Hari previews a new cookbook, “Food Babe Feast,” and says an investment from Aaron Rodgers’ RX3 fund helped Truvani expand into Target, with a three-ingredient grass-fed whey protein launching next.