When Vani Hari lay in a hospital bed, having just had her appendix surgically removed, it dawned on her: food can be both fuel and poison.

At 23, she was no stranger to health problems, having lived with asthma, depression, weight struggles, allergies, and eczema. This, she told the Daily Mail, was her rock bottom, and she needed to change.

‘When I finally figured out that the food I had been eating was full of chemicals – industrialized chemicals made in the laboratory – and that those chemicals were invented to improve the bottom line of the food industry and not provide a nutritional benefit to the human body, I decided to opt out,’ Hari, now 46, said.

‘My whole life changed.’

She stopped eating frozen meals, packed full of sodium and preservatives, and cut out fast food, instead eating as many single-ingredient foods as possible.

‘My skin cleared up. All of my eczema went away. My asthma went away. My allergies improved. I lost weight to the point where I never had to diet again,’ she said.

‘I gained energy that I never thought was available.’

Her health scare occurred in 2002, seven years before a landmark study on food processing would popularize the term ‘ultra-processed foods,’ now primary targets of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.  

At 23, plagued by asthma, depression, weight struggles, and eczema, Vani Hari hit rock bottom—years before ‘ultra-processed foods’ became a health buzzword. Now, those very foods are in the crosshairs of Trump’s MAHA movement

Vani Hari’s advocacy for transparency from the the food industry has aligned her closely with Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr

The MAHA movement is spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr, the long-time vaccine skeptic and crusader against food dyes and additives. 

Hari has rocketed to stardom as a citizen watchdog of the food industry, leveraging her clout as a wellness influencer (she currently has 2.3M Instagram followers) to get close to RFK Jr, whose positions on the food industry, which he says has cozied up to FDA regulators to get risky products through for years, closely align with hers. 

Through her activism, she’s become known as ‘The Food Babe.’ 

With the backing of RFK Jr, she led a successful campaign against Kraft, exposing the artificial dyes in its US macaroni and cheese and pushing the company to reformulate the product after consumer backlash.

Beyond Kraft, Hari has pressured major brands like Subway, Panera, and General Mills to remove harmful additives from ultra-processed foods.

UPFs are industrially manufactured products packed with lab-made flavors, artificial colors, and preservatives that would never be found in a home kitchen. They tend to be super sweet or very salty and have a long shelf-life. 

A diet full of UPFs has been tied to skin problems, respiratory trouble, higher rates of depression, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and certain types of cancers.   

Hari has made it her mission to avoid these sinister snacks. 

She mostly shops the perimeter of the grocery store in her hometown on Charlotte, North Carolina, avoiding the central aisles dotted with ultra-processed cereals, breakfast bars, cookies, and breads. 

She starts with a wide range of veggies – never having the same two days in a row, so that her two kids, four and eight, don’t get bored.

‘I went from a very processed food diet, fast food several times a week, the Lean Cuisines that you would put in the microwave, all of that, and I decided to go to real whole one ingredient foods,’ she said. 

‘I made specific changes and started to take control of what I was eating and stopped outsourcing that to the food industry. I was so floored by the changes in my own body.’

Processed foods with more than a few ingredients are not welcome in Hari’s home.

Hari avoids ultra-processed foods by sticking to the perimeter of the grocery store—steering clear of aisles packed with ultra-processed cereals, bars, and cookies

‘I give the kids all fruits and vegetables, all varieties,’ she said. ‘I grow a lot of them at my home as well. And then I eat nuts, beans, seeds.’

Introducing children to whole, unprocessed foods at a young age pays off in terms of their health and nutritional knowledge and makes them more adventurous eaters.

Dr Sophie Nicklaus, Research Director at French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, said in the journal Appetite that the key to life-long healthy eating is to ‘provide infants and young children with a variety of healthy foods, especially vegetables consumption of which is particularly difficult to promote further on in life, and to limit variety of unhealthy choices such as high energy density snacks.’   

In the mornings, Hari will have steel-cut oats that have been cooking in the crockpot all night, and add cinnamon and berries on top.

‘I used to get the little packets of oatmeal filled with artificially dyed Apple bits to make strawberry flavor,’ she said.

Those little packets of oatmeal were the first to go when she purged her life of preservatives, dyes, and artificial flavors.

Like many other ultra-processed foods, pre-packed oatmeal packets are loaded with sugar, preservatives to extend shelf life, and ‘those artificially dyed Apple bits’ meant to mimic real fruit.    

She said: ‘It’s no longer this way, but it was back then – Quaker Oats, here in the United States, the strawberry version had artificially dyed red 40 made from petroleum and coal tar dyed apple bits to make their strawberry oatmeal.’

Red 40 is one of several dyes containing benzidine, a human and animal carcinogen permitted in low, ‘safe’ levels in dyes. 

The FDA calculated in 1985 that ingestion of benzidine raises the cancer risk to just under the ‘concern’ threshold, which equates to 1 cancer in 1 million people. 

Benzadine is made from petroleum and has been linked to hyperactivity in some children with and without ADHD. Studies have also suggested that eating the dye can exacerbate symptoms of the disorder, or trigger behavioral changes.  

Canadian researchers have found Red 40, also known as Allura red, can hamper the gut’s ability to absorb nutrients, water, and electrolytes, increasing a person’s risk of developing an inflammatory bowel disease.

They say this wearing down of the body’s defenses could make people more susceptible to ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.

Nutritionists split food into three groups based on the amount of processing they have gone through. Minimally processed foods, like apples, are usually exactly how they appear in nature. Processed foods, like apple sauce, have gone through at least one level of processing that has changed their original form. In contrast, ultra-processed foods like apple jelly babies, have gone through multiple levels of processing and are usually full of extra fats, colors and preservatives

For lunch, Hari prepares a smoothie with a five-ingredient protein powder she created herself, along with celery, lemon, ginger, usually apples, some type of kale or cilantro, and occasionally avocado.

‘Then, at dinner time, we sit together as a family every day. We’ll do some vegetables we haven’t had the day before. 

‘Then we’ll have some type of starch, whether it’s some kind of roasted potatoes or rice or this spaghetti that I buy that is from an ancient wheat variety that hasn’t been sprayed with glyphosate [a popular herbicide linked to cancer].

‘And then we’ll do some kind of different meat almost every night. We’ll eat pork chops, and we’ll have salmon at least once a week. 

‘We’ll have chicken wings, or some kind of fish, like halibut, or we’ll have barbecue where I’ll roast a pork butt in the crock pot for, like, eight hours while their kids are at school, and it’ll be ready when they get home.’

Food manufacturing behemoths can get away with using what some food activists see as poison, from preservatives such as propylparaben to food dyes like red dye 3.

Many questionable ingredients which have been strictly regulated or outright banned in the EU and the UK are common in American grocery stores, something Hari has called ‘unethical.’

Unlike European regulators, who proactively review ingredient lists and formulations before products reach store shelves, US regulators tend to take a more reactive approach.

In the US, the FDA has a special category for food additives known as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). This means that products like red 40 is safe to eat based on expert consensus about its toxicity, scientific evidence, and a history showing it’s safe use. 

Additives with GRAS can hit the market without going through the FDA’s formal approval process. The FDA usually only steps in to ban or recall a product if people report health problems tied to the product, like food dyes, after it has been on the market for months or even years. 

Hari has risen to fame as a self-styled food industry watchdog, using her wellness platform to ally with RFK Jr.—a fellow critic of Big Food and the FDA

RFK Jr has pledged to upend this system as part of his crusade against food dyes and additives. 

He announced a gradual phasing out of eight petroleum-based food dyes on Tuesday. 

The Trump administration will set a plan for food companies to follow in order to adequately and gradually the use of Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, and Green 3 by the end of 2026 and start using natural alternatives, which the FDA will approve or deny first. 

RFK Jr suggested more additives could be next , telling the crowd: ‘We’re going to get rid of the dyes and we’re going to to get rid of every ingredient and additive in food that we can legally address.

‘And for those ingredients we can’t ban legally, we’re going to start informing Americans about what they’re eating.’

Hari, meanwhile, said at the event: ‘The FDA is no longer asleep at the wheel.

‘As a mother who has fought tirelessly to remove harmful chemicals from our food supply, especially as the food companies have already done so in many other countries, this action by the FDA is so meaningful to me. 

‘This is the first step at reducing the amount of toxic ingredients in our food supply and safeguarding American children.’ 

During RFK Jr’s January 30th Senate confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services position, Hari was seated directly behind his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, as he testified about overseeing America’s healthcare and food systems. 

At the end of the hearing, Hari said, ‘I lost faith in my government and my regulatory agencies because I had to go and directly petition food companies to change because they weren’t doing the right thing.

‘It’s because the FDA was allowing them to get away with it.’ 

She later attended the White House’s Make America Healthy Again Moms’ roundtable. 

Armed with charts for a presentation on the importance of removing artificial dyes and preservatives, Hari detailed to Kennedy and fellow moms – most of them in the Administration – the discrepancies between the ingredients listed in American versions of certain food versus their European counterparts.

Hari brought data to the White House MAHA roundtable, showing Kennedy and officials how US foods contain more additives than European versions—pushing for stricter bans on dyes and preservatives

A few hours after the roundtable, the White House posted a video on its official account showing Kennedy, administration officials, and mothers attempting to pronounce complex, lengthy chemical names in common grocery products. 

Social media commenters were quick to point out that complex scientific nomenclature doesn’t automatically indicate health risks. 

Hari, who does not have any professional training in health or nutrition, is not universally loved. Many physicians and scientists have criticized her for disguising fearmongering – vilifying scary sounding chemical names – as advocacy. 

Dr Steven Novella, a Yale University neuroscientist, called her ‘the Jenny McCarthy of food,’ likening her to the anti-vax activist, and dubbed her advocacy as ‘a campaign to scaremonger about completely safe ingredients in food.’ 

Hari promotes the idea that all synthetic additives are harmful, ignoring dose-dependent toxicity levels. For instance, her campaign against azodicarbonamide in Subway’s bread, dubbed the ‘yoga mat chemical,’ was widely criticized for exaggerating risks. 

‘Soy also has a variety of uses, including making yoga mats,’ Novella said.