Sweet friends, welcome to a very powerful episode of why isn't everyone doing this. The show where we reveal the most taboo modalities that just might be the medicine that your soul needs to feel free. So this show is brought to you by Ziva and every single person that is invested in our life-changing trainings. So at Ziva, we teach meditation and magic, and if you want to learn exactly what that means, you can learn all about our trainings at zivameditation.com.
So I am your host Emily Fletcher, Broadway performer, turned meditation teacher, turned magic maker, and I am so excited to share the show with you so that we can help solve the big challenges that we're facing as a species and have a great time doing it. And today's guest is a living example of that. Her name is Vani Hari, also known as the food babe.
and she has been on a mission to fight back against big food corporations and to transform the way we eat, not just on an individual level, but on a global scale. Now, I met Vani through our mutual coach, Lauren Zander, the founder of Handel Group, who has used her level of integrity and truth-telling to help both of us achieve huge success in our careers. Now, in this episode, we're gonna dive into how Vani became the food babe, her personal journey, and how, what we consume,
directly impacts our consciousness. Now oftentimes we think of food and meditation as separate, but Vani's work shows us that what we're eating is influencing not just our individual state of consciousness, but our consciousness as a country as well. I learned so much about how we can all become investigators on our food labels and how we can start to advocate for ourselves, our children, and the health of the country. I'm so excited for your new hair, how changing your diet can help us live more consciously and connected to our true selves. So please welcome to the show, Vani Hari.
Alright, so if you've ever heard my story, you know that I used to struggle with debilitating insomnia. I'm talking 18 months I could not sleep through the night, and y'all life is hard when you're not sleeping. It prematurely ages us, it prematurely makes you go grey. Honestly, lack of sleep can lead to degenerative diseases, it can lead to autoimmune issues, it can weaken your immune system,
So sleep is not something that you want to play around with. And I would say that better sleep is the number one gift that meditation gave to me. And if that's all it had done, it would be worth it. And yet I know that not everyone is ready to invest in a twice a day meditation practice. I know that not everyone is ready to enroll in Ziva Online.
So I wanted to let you know that we have a really powerful way for you to get started, a really powerful tool to help you fall asleep faster, get deeper, more rejuvenating sleep and wake up feeling and looking amazing. So this is a course called Manifesting Sleep and it is our most affordable, it's our most accessible course that we offer at Ziva.
And it's a powerful combination of a teaching video where I include tips from Ayurveda, integrated nutrition and supplement ideas, things that you can do with your light, with your circadian rhythm, with the time of your meals. And this is probably my favorite part of the course is something called the deep sleep download. So this is a guided visualization that I dare you to hear the end of. Every single person I know has fallen asleep before it ends.
So this is actually incorporating tools from the military. It's using tools that the Navy SEALs use to de-escalate and regulate their nervous systems so that they can wake up ready to perform at the top of their game. It also uses tools from Yoga Nidra, which is known as Sleep Yoga, which really helps your body to relax into this luxurious, restful, dreamy place.
And as a special bonus, I'm going to gift you the sleep chapter from my book. So my best-selling book is called Stress Less, Accomplish More, and there's an entire chapter on the science of sleep and the importance of getting really good sleep. So honestly, if you are sleeping well and meditating, you feel like a full-blown superhero.
But again, I know that not everyone is ready to bite the bullet and jump into Ziva online yet. So this is a great first step. This is a great way for you to join the Ziva family to improve your sleep starting tonight. And it's also our most affordable, it's our most accessible course at only $47.
So you can enroll right now at zivameditation.com slash better sleep. So that's z-i-v-a meditation.com slash better sleep. So I would head there right now and imagine waking up tomorrow morning feeling like the most amazing version of you. This woman named Devin, she's a parenting consultant. She said manifesting sleep is the single greatest tool in my life right now. No exaggeration. I am sleeping deeply for the first time in my life. This is the game changer.
So if you are ready to experience the game changing, honestly, life changing benefits of deeper, more restful sleep, go to zivameditation.com slash better sleep. All right, sweet dreams. I'm so excited to hear how it works for you and enjoy the podcast.
I love an interview and I love a life instance that starts with serendipity and synchronicity. And in the first 30 seconds of talking to you, we've had two really beautiful serendipities and synchronicities. And as I've gotten to know your work, as I've read your bio, as I've followed you on Instagram, I'm so inspired with the clarity of mission, the passion of your work
and how you've been able to change not only what people are doing individually, but also really create change on a global scale. And so thank you, thank you, thank you for taking time to be with me and have this conversation today. People know you as the food babe, but today I thought it would be interesting to dive into a little bit more of your personal journey of how you became the food babe and also
How what we put in our mouths is very much impacting our consciousness. And I think that oftentimes people separate that. They think that meditation is just something you do for your mind. Or food is something that you're just doing for your body. And I don't think people really understand just how much what we're consuming impacts our brains, our neurons, our neurochemistry, and therefore our consciousness. So I'd love to start there. Like, can you give us your interpretation of the connection between food and consciousness?
Yeah. You know, I grew up with two immigrant Indian parents that came to the United States and they really wanted to adopt the American lifestyle. So my dad who had an arranged marriage with my mother brought hurting the United States on their honeymoon and said, hey, if we're going to live in America, we're going to eat like Americans. And here's a McDonald's hamburger. And my mother had never had any meat to that point, right? In India, the cow was sacred. So you definitely didn't have beef.
And she's like, okay. And being naive and young, she just kind of took my dad's hand and was like, okay, this is how we're gonna eat. And she quickly realized that this diet wasn't for her. So she started to, you know, use her mother's recipes here in the United States and started to make, you know, from scratch Indian food for herself. But me and my brother
because we had this influence from my dad and he was kind of a strong patriarchal voice in our household. He was really of the mindset as long as we eat were fed and were healthy because they had grown up with so much poverty around India that getting a McDonald's hamburger for a dollar or the free meal that you would get on Mother's Day or Father's Day when you color the pictures of flowers
at McDonald's you get the free breakfast.
That was like the golden ticket in terms of like, wow, you can feed your kids for really cheap. And it was like fast food was carte blanche in our house. As much as fast food as we ever wanted. And so me and my brother, especially me, had several health issues. And not one single doctor asked me, you know, or asked my parents, what are they eating, right? Like, what are your children eating? And so they put me on so many different prescription drugs. And in my early 20s...
I mean, this is most of my life as a child. I mean, I just remember completely not feeling comfortable in my own skin to the point where I would wake up completely groggy out of it, not full of energy, not excited to go to school. And I just thought this was just the way I was supposed to be, right? This is just who I am. This is how I was born. And it wasn't until
my early 20s where I hit rock bottom where I had just gotten a really good job out of college. And because I had this, again, these Indian parents that are very focused on education and getting a job and academics, I did okay in school because I had that pressure. However, looking back now,
knowing how my brain actually functions on real food. And I think to myself, like, can I even imagine what I could have been in high school, in my middle school years, or even in college, or what I would have been able to develop earlier in my life had I had my mind on straight. And so when I hit rock bottom in my early 20s, I was overweight. I was working for this job that was like,
So crazy. It was like, you know, 70 to 80 to 90 hours a week, some weeks where they would, you know, work you to death. You're right out of college. So you don't, you know, you don't necessarily need that much sleep and in your young and, you know, they're putting you in this really fast paced environment. That's very exciting and everyone's on an expense account and you're traveling for work and they're bringing in breakfast, lunch and dinner again, outsourcing my diet to like this environment and
I just found myself like not taking care of myself, trying to excel at my career and then ending up in the hospital with appendicitis and almost dying to the point where it just was this huge wake-up call of like, wait a minute, I'm 22 years old. This isn't how I wanna conduct my life. When I got out and was able to recover from the actual, you know, abdominal incisions of them taking out an organ of my body
I was able to, again, use my logic and kind of think through what the doctors have told me and the doctors are like, listen, you don't need your appendix. It's something that we've grown to evolve out of and all these things. And I'm just like, something just doesn't make sense to me that all these doctors say you don't need your appendix, although the human body has it.
And it's like, why would it be there, right? And so I started to research it myself. And I found out that your appendix actually is there for a reason that all the new research and new science shows that there's, it populates your gut with good bacteria and helps you stave off certain kinds of cancers and other abdominal digestive issues and other things. So it's like, wait a minute, why are we removing this organ?
Is there some other thing that I could have done some intervention, right? You know, at that moment when I started to connect the dice, I started to use my skills that I learned in high school where I was a top tier debater. I was number one in state three years in a row. It was just something that I loved. And so the best thing that I learned from that period of my life was how to research.
And so I applied that to my own health and went to the library and started to check out giant books on nutrition. And one of the first books that I came across had this concept in it that the majority of foods on the grocery store shelf are dead. They're completely dead. And I said, whoa, that's exactly how I feel, dead, zombie-like. And then slowly but surely started to research everything that I had been eating.
started to realize that the majority of foods that I'd been eating for most of my life were things I could not.
I didn't recognize they weren't real food. They were long chemical names that I didn't know what was the purpose of them. And so I wanted to find out. So I educated myself. I became so enthralled with it. It was like this insatiable curiosity that I had that I just could not quench. I had to know everything. And then around the same time is when my body started to change. I went off all nine prescription drugs.
realized a level of health that I never thought was possible. Like in terms of never dieting again, always feeling really great about myself, feeling full of energy, you know, having a face full of eczema and inflammation to a face that finally looked clear and I started to feel more confident about my looks. It was a point in time where everyone around me was like, okay, you've changed so much.
What are you doing? We want a piece of what you're doing. What's this green drink you're drinking? What is this? Why do you keep asking the server about MSG in the soup? Why are you so concerned about artificial food dyes now? You used to eat all of this candy, Bonnie. I was a candy queen. I knew every single kind of candy. I would eat a whole box of, if anybody remembers runs, I don't know if they still have them.
Oh yeah, I remember once. To this day, like my mom's like, I feel so bad that I didn't know, right? That this was so bad. I feel so bad about it. Because it seems inconceivable that they would just have that on the shelf. So you're just going to take your kid to the grocery store. You think you're doing something good by making a home cooked meal. Like, why would you think that they would be this poison and these chemicals in our food? Like, unless you do your research, like you're saying, like,
You know, we only know what we know. And we've been actively brainwashed to believe that this stuff is even healthy. And so I just feel for your mama that like, you know, she must have held like when you had this revelation and then she was cooking her food for herself, like that must have been heartbreaking for her. Yeah, she just thought she was feeding her children. And, you know, I mean, I guess, you know, there was some
intuition around like candy can't be all that good for you kind of situation, right? But it was never like there was no like my mom never said to me like you can't eat that. There was literally no boundaries when it came to food. All the Swiss cake rolls, the little Debbie's and all the things, right? A little Debbie, the old milk came pies every day to have them.
I think about the toaster pastry strudels that you would microwave and then the microwave icing and the plastic bag. It's just like, how on earth any of us are still alive is a good miracle. I remade that exact recipe in my latest cookbook, food-babe family because of the nostalgia of that. I want families to actually be able to make something fun but not be terrible for you.
And like microwaving sugar in plastic and then eating it. What did you think was going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just like, this is all sugar wrapped in plastic. This is chemicals wrapped in plastic and sugar wrapped in plastic. And we're all just killing ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.
We are. So you put your debate skills into researching and you had this huge health transformation. People are starting to ask you, what are you doing? And then you started your blog or what was next? Yeah. So I was never on social media. So like when I shared this information, it was like word of mouth. It was like the person sitting next to me in my cubicle or my best friend who I went out with on the weekends. And around this time is when I would say Gwyneth Paltrow came out with goop and
She had this column on there all to do with travel. And I'm really into travel. So I started reading it because I was like, oh, this is great. She's really on guard when it comes to travel. And like, you know, this is so cool. Oh, maybe I can create a blog like this, right? And so I started a blog and I wanted to call it eathealthyliveforever.com. And again, I'm still working in this rat race, fast pace, consulting environment. I did not.
take off from that. The only thing that I made, the biggest change that I made was I said, my job is not going to dictate what I eat. I'm going to be in control of that. So I started bringing in my lunch, started taking in my breakfast, started carving out 45 minutes to run to the gym for my break and coming back, doing those kind of things to take care of myself. And then I eventually started to travel on the road. And so
Now I'm in airports, now I'm in different strange cities that don't have access to like healthy stuff. And so I'm teaching myself on how to bring foods through the airport, how to pack them without getting stopped at security, you know, what travels well, what recipes don't, you know, I'm teaching myself all that stuff, you know, because it's at a necessity.
And then I'm figuring out how to order at restaurants so that I minimize my chemical exposure, you know, all of the things because if I'm traveling five days a week every week for two years, that's a lot of time to be away. So I realized that I had to give up something in order to find time to do this blog and I just gave up television. It was lent.
And I'm not Catholic, but I said, for lint, I'm going to give up television. And it was the best decision of my entire life was giving up television on so many different levels from the fact that television just programs use a thing, a certain thing, but in just all the commercials and all the... It's mostly advertising the food that's making us sick.
Right. I mean, just all the things, right? Just so many ahas with that. But then it gave me the time to actually work on, hey, I can share this recipe or I can share this insight that I learned about this company or whatever, and I can share this information. And it became such a passion that while I was at work, I would be thinking about the next blog post I wanted to write.
And I would even sometimes like sit there and daydream and I would jot down kind of ideas, you know, on my notepad at work or whatever, like in meetings or whatever. And I would start to just, you know, just daydream about when I'd get home so that I could write and research. And it was the first time many of the things that I investigated were even talked about on the internet.
Because a lot of these companies didn't even post their ingredients online. It was research that I had to figure out. I had to call the companies. I had to write to the companies. I had to demand that they tell me the ingredients. And a lot of times they wouldn't give it to me. So I'd have to go down to different chains like for Chipotle. I had to convince a manager in the back of the store to show me the different packages and boxes that the food came in that I took pictures of.
and were able to reveal what was actually in Chipotle and called them out for the fact that they were using the phrase food with integrity, but serving GMOs. Eventually, they took out the GMOs and took out a lot of the chemicals that I wrote about, which was incredible. I started to build this community that I ended up calling the Food Babe Army because they were so
into what they were eating, but also they cared enough to like spread the word. They wanted to share the blog post. They wanted to sign a petition. They wanted to call the company and demand better. And they were activists. And it was so cool. And so anytime I would write about something, it would just take off. It was just this amazing thing. And so when a blog post that I wrote about Chick-fil-A, they used to have 100 ingredients in it.
And when that blog post went viral, they contacted me and wanted to meet with me. And I remember when I got the email and I was so nervous. And I was like, wow, they want to invite me to their headquarters. And they really want to make some changes. Like, this is big time. And I'm going to have to take off work to go there. And I realized me taking off work to go there.
was so silly, like I should be doing this full time. I should be helping companies full time get better. And so after I got back from that visit, I realized that I had to quit my corporate job. And it was so scary because I wasn't doing, I wasn't making any money doing food babe. It was completely just free time because it was a passion of mine and it opened up a Pandora's box. And that's when I launched
One of the biggest campaigns to date, which was on craft macaroni and cheese, when they were back then they were serving Americans one version of mac and cheese that had artificial food dyes in it and serving another version to citizens overseas that didn't have artificial food dyes in it because in Europe it requires a warning label if you use an artificial food dye that says may cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children.
And so I was able to get over 380,000 signatures on a petition and deliver those petitions to craft headquarters and demand that they remove these artificial food dies. They didn't do it right away. They, they definitely stuck their, their heels in the ground. Um, but because of the momentum of the campaign and because we were able to move so much market share, they had to do it by the end of the year. So, and they did. Wow.
Okay, so first of all, thank you, thank you, thank you for using your brilliance, your intelligence, your debate skills, your personal tragedy to not only transform the individual lives of people, but then mobilize those people, like you said, to be activists to really change the system for all of us.
So a couple of follow-up questions on this, and then I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into consciousness. But why should we care about food dice? What is the issue? Is it just attention? Because I know this is a big one for you. Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm quite educated on other things, but I don't know that much about food dice.
Yeah, so food dyes are something that is in several different children's products. It's in just about every cereal that's targeted towards children. That's a conventional cereal. It's there to make the child eat more than they should as well. Like they've done independent studies where they've looked at adding more colors to food. And as soon as they add more colors to food, it makes the child eat more.
of that product. Well, because yeah, we're supposed like genetically we're like meant to be eating the rainbow, but the rain was produced by nature and not by food diets. Right. Exactly. So you got to think about how sinister that is when it's a, it's a garbage sugar for you cereal, for example, like fruit loops, right? And a lot of these companies have already reformulated their product safer
versions overseas like Kelloggs and General Mills and right now I have an ongoing petition against Kelloggs to remove artificial food dyes and I'm working with a coalition of other activists to get this done and right now we have a
94,000 signatures on it. If you want to sign it, it would be amazing because we really want Kelloggs to change, but it's foodbabe.com slash baby shark. But the worst part about it is Kelloggs in 2015 decided they wanted to remove artificial food dice, gave themselves a date of 2018.
And they didn't do it. And what they did instead was create more cereals targeted towards infants and toddlers with artificial food diets, like baby shark. And that I felt was just a very unethical, hypocritical thing to do considering the statement they had made in 2015. So they're a company that's really, unfortunately, been just
I mean, I think the best word is just unethical because they understand the impacts they're making on children's health.
Food dyes have been implicated in causing attention deficit disorder. Autism can affect asthma, skin issues can affect their immune system. So if you look, there's like 92 different papers that have been published on the effects of artificial food dyes and the detrimental effects. And so this is something that other countries have already taken out of their foods. And the companies have willingly done it because of these warning labels.
And we're the ones with the American companies that know this has been happening and they refuse to do it. And it's because the FDA is asleep at the wheel and they are unfortunately being lobbied by these big companies and there's a lot of control when it comes to what the FDA decisions are because of the lobbying money.
And it feels like the same pattern we see with the oil companies lobbying our politicians, and then the pharmaceutical companies lobbying the politicians. And so this really is this systemic issue. But I really love that it does feel like a bit David and Goliath.
Because here's this one person who's mobilizing people that are getting these behemoth organizations to shift their behavior. And so that is inspiring to me because if we can get one big food company, see what could we also do it with petroleum? Could we also do it with a pharmaceutical company?
And I think once people are educated and they realize like, oh, the thing that I thought was supposed to make me healthy is actually making me sick. Oh, this medicine that I'm taking, I actually have to take because of the food that I'm eating. And now here's these like three companies getting richer on each other's backs. Wait a minute, I can take charge of this for myself. So it's really inspiring.
It is not a secret that I am low-key obsessed with meditation. I've spent the last 16 years of my life meditating every day twice a day. I have spent the last 14 years of my life shouting from the rooftops to anyone that will listen about the life-changing benefits of regulating your nervous system, of getting rid of adrenaline and cortisol.
flooding your brain and body with dopamine and serotonin so that you can overcome anxiety, reduce your stress and improve your sleep in just 15 days or less. So if you have been listening to this podcast and hearing so many of my world changing, world expert guests talk about how meditation has changed their life, but you're like, I don't get it. I've tried to clear my mind and I can't or I always fall asleep when I sit down to meditate or I think I'm doing something wrong or I downloaded that free app and it didn't work for me.
Then I want to invite you to join me for a free masterclass. And you're going to get to go on a deep dive of what makes Ziva different from all the free apps out there. What makes Ziva online different from the guided visualizations that you might do on YouTube.
So the Cliffs notes here is that most apps and YouTube videos are giving you a version of what I would call mindfulness, right? Anytime someone's guiding you through something, it's going to keep you in your left brain. It's going to keep you in your waking state. So it's really powerful to do guided visualizations and they can be good at a state change. But what Ziva does is it is creating a trait change. It is giving your body rest that is five times deeper than sleep. And you give your body the rest that it needs. It knows how to heal itself.
And the cool thing about Ziva is that it's healing the stress not only from today, but it is healing the backlog of accumulated stresses in your nervous system. This is why Ziva specifically really up levels your performance capabilities, up levels your cognition, reverses your body age, improves your sleep, and
helps you to enjoy life a whole lot more. So if you are kind of a nerd like me and you want to dive into the neuroscience, if you really want to understand why is this a 15-day training and not just a free app that I could just hit play and have someone guide me through something, if you are ready to develop the skill of meditation so that you can drop into infinite bliss and flood your own brain and body with bliss chemistry on an airplane, on a subway with your kids in the next room yelling,
If you're ready for a tool that is going to improve your sleep and truly help you to leave stress and anxiety in the past, then I invite you to join me at zivameditation.com slash learn. So that's zivameditation.com slash learn. And this is going to give you access to a free masterclass called three secrets to overcome anxiety, reduce your stress and improve your sleep in just 15 days or less. So this is my gift to you. You can head to zivameditation.com slash learn.
And there's a really special offer. If you enroll in Ziva Online from the Masterclass, you're going to see we have two really valuable gifts for you inside. One is called Time Billionaire and the other is a very special rate on the course. So I would go to zivameditation.com slash learn right now and check it out. And you'll see why so many people think of their life as pre and post Ziva.
why so many of the world's highest performers, people like Dr. Mark Hyman, Aubrey Marcus, Regina Thomas-Shower, Layla Martin, Barrett Fola, these people swear by Ziva meditation and they say that this is the thing that finally got them to commit, that Ziva is this style of meditation that they actually look forward to because they know how much better they feel, how much better they sleep, and how much better they perform on the other side.
So go to zivameditation.com slash learn and I'm so excited to share this masterclass with you and I hope to see you inside of Ziva online. So while we're talking about food guys, can you tell us a little bit about glyphosate? Like, what is it? What is it due to us? What is it due to our food? Where is it? Because I know this is a big one for me and I would just love for people to hear from you. Like, why should we be avoiding it?
Yeah, yeah. So glyphosate is the main chemical that's in Roundup. And Roundup is a product that was created by Monsanto, Bayer now owns Monsanto, and it's now Bayer. And Roundup is being sprayed on the majority, I would say 80% of crops here in the United States. All crops, not just wheat.
Correct. So like, a lot of people think that it's just the genetically engineered crops, which yes, the genetically engineered seeds are created to withstand heavy doses of this roundup, the seeds that were also proprietary owned by Monsanto, right? The corn, the soy, the canola. I'm trying to think of, you know, sugar beets.
All of that would be genetically engineered cottonseed. A lot of people don't realize that cottonseed oil, which is an industrial byproduct of the cotton industry, has made its way into our food. It's one of the most toxic oils. It's in a lot of different food, food, including cereals that are given to children. It's in a lot of oils that you would get french fries fried in. It's really very detrimental oil because not only does it have high levels of glyphosate in it, but it's also extracted with hexane.
and all these other chemical solvents that the FDA doesn't test for that remain in the oil. And that's one of the reasons why seed oils, you'll hear a lot about seed oils and why they're so detrimental to your health. It's because of that. They actually turn on cancer cells as well as the glyphosate also being implicated to cause cancer. There are several court cases across the United States right now that plaintiffs are being awarded billions of dollars
because of the fact that glyphosate causes cancer in people that have been handling Roundup, like whether you're there a gardener or there's someone working in the field.
Yes, when you come in the contact. Are they paying out? Are they actually paying the money that people are winning? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So that goes well because I have a friend who won a case against Chevron and he was the first civil rights attorney to win a case against a petroleum company. He won $11 billion for the Ecuadorian people because of the cancer that was being caused from the drilling in the rainforest in Ecuador.
They instead of paying those indigenous people in Ecuador, they put him in jail, disbarred him, took his passport, and vacuumed his bank accounts. For me, it feels like if the petroleum company set a precedent of paying out for the harm that they have caused, they will go bankrupt because we could all charge against climate change. But I am glad to see that they are paying out for these individual cases because then
If it gets rampant enough, it becomes so expensive for them that it's more cost effective for them to actually change course, it feels. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So now at the minute level, in terms of like what's happening to the human body when we eat this food, it's causing a lot of tiny holes in our guts. And that's causing all kinds of like leaky gut issues, other things that are happening in terms of
how that can cause autoimmune disorders and other things that would happen as a result of being exposed to this kind of food in these chemicals. So this is something we just don't want to eat. And so the best way to avoid glyphosate is to buy organic food. Buy USDA certified organic food.
It's one of the reasons why when I started my company TrueVani that that would be that's the highest tenant of our our brand that we will always choose organic over any other supply because of the fact that we want to Avoid glyphosate we test for glyphosate in our products as well So it's something that I find is one of the most important standards to protect human health in this day and age in terms of how things are grown but
Not only is it found in genetically engineered ingredients, but it's also found in non, just in conventional crops, like for example, before wheat is harvested, even though wheat is in genetically engineered per se, before it's harvested, they desiccate the land with Roundup.
And so it's getting into our food and when you look at tests of Cheerios, big major brands, Doritos, Goldfish, they're finding high levels of glyphosate in these companies because the wheat is actually saturated with glyphosate.
My friend Zach Bush, I don't know if he knows Zach Bush, but he was saying that the glyphosate is actually like changing our DNA and it's changing our gender expression. And I was like, whoa, this feels like a fascinating hot button topic because, you know, I am all for. Yeah, they're studies on fraud. I mean, I'm sure there's studies on all kinds of animals, but particularly frogs when they're exposed to this chemical, it changes their sex. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Wow. This is mind-voggling. And so I know you've done, I know you have an amazing cookbook. Your new cookbook is the Foodbabe family, which I want to ask you some personal questions about that because I have a five-year-old son that, like I was saying earlier, like, can I get him to eat a vegetable to save my life? And I thought that this is going to be the hell I was going to die on. I want to dive deep into this. Like, what do you mean he won't eat a vegetable? Like, he just won't eat one or?
Well, so he's five now. And when he was like pre-verbal, I could just put vegetables and chicken and have like roast chicken and vegetables and he would eat it like crazy. His first food was an avocado. And I just thought, I was so proud of myself. I was like, look at me, you know, like looking at me and such a good mom, feeding my son so many vegetables.
And then I think it's like once he understood and like the sweetest thing he ever had to leave his three was like a blueberry. But then when he started to have more agency in the world and was like tasting things in other places and I don't know if I was too restrictive. And he was just like, oh, I've tasted the promised land and I'm never going back. But like I will, I mean, every meal I still serve in vegetables and it becomes a negotiation. And I find that I'm like negotiating dessert for him to eat vegetables. And now I'm like deifying dessert. But also I'm like anything to get a carrot in his mouth.
And so I'm very open to your advice here, and I feel like I'm not alone. I feel like I hear a lot of parents struggling with this. Yeah, my son has been on a similar path. He's much different than my daughter. My daughter has not met a vegetable she doesn't like, right? She's all about vegetables. But my son, he is
I don't know if he's just a little bit wiser to it or what's going on, but he does push back a little bit when it comes to vegetables. And we have so many vegetables every single day, every single meal. I try to change it up. We do a different vegetable every single day. It's like my life, right?
It is their job to push back, like literally their job is children to push the boundaries. And it's up to us parents to have those boundaries. And so it's okay, I think, and this is based on my pediatrician's advice too.
It's okay to say, hey, listen, we fill our bodies with these good foods, and then these fun 4U foods later on, we can't have them, but we have to fill our bodies with good foods. Or saying things like, we fill our body with a rainbow. We have to have something of each color. And he loves that, right? And making it a fun game, that kind of thing has really helped him enjoy and
taste other things that he may not want to taste or looks different or whatever, right? And be less picky. But I will tell you this, when kids are inundated with products that have a certain chemical in them called natural flavor,
They are going to have a hard time enjoying real food because the reason natural flavor is in these products is to hijack their little brains and make them believe that the only way they're going to get their nutrition and the way that they're going to like food is by eating that said product.
because what it does is it creates the 1 millionth best part of a taste in a chemical. I mean, there's, there are food scientists that used to work in tobacco that created that were the leading scientists who made tobacco addictive that now have come over to food or in our using the same technology and the same research to create addiction in food products so that we can't stop at eating just one.
And when it comes to remembering a flavor, remembering a taste, making your body actually react like your mouth start watering when you think of a certain food.
The fact that you know the difference between a McDonald's hamburger and a Burger King hamburger and a Wendy's hamburger, it's because they're engineering that flavor for you to really take a hold of your memory. And so they're doing the same thing with any kind of processed food product, and they're using that same technology. And so when kids are eating an abundance of processed foods, and I would say 99% of processed foods have natural flavor in them,
It is causing natural flavor. Yeah, it's just called natural flavor. It sounds so innocuous, right? And it's just like, it's like, oh, natural flavor. This is great. It's natural, but it's not. It can mean up to a thousand different chemicals. And it's the one thing that food manufacturers add to their food so that it gives it that irresistible quality.
When you think of sugar, okay, if somebody were to give you a cup of sugar, just plain old cane sugar, how exciting would that be to eat? Are we really addicted to sugar? Or are we addicted to the flavor that they add to the sugar?
Oh, wow, this feels revolutionary because we just, that's all we hear. Sugar, sugar, sugar. But yeah, you're right. Like I maybe do maybe like a half a teaspoon and then I'd be like, gross. But then, but you're right, I wouldn't eat a whole cup of sugar. So it's like the flavor that we're adding to it. That is fascinating.
Yes. And so this is what's happening to our kids. And so for my kids, what I have done is I have tried to eliminate as many processed foods as possible. And at every snack time, every meal time we're eating as many real foods as possible. And the things that we eat
That are more fun for you things, maybe like a homemade pizza or whatever is always served last in terms of the course. And there's a lot of data that suggests that when you eat vegetables first, it's actually really great for your your. Glycos levels for all kinds of reasons for for yeah glucose sorry glucose levels. It's good for your digestive system. It's good for.
Populating your gut with good fiber to signal to the body when to feel full, all of those things. You don't overeat on other types of foods. So at my house, my kids know we serve it in courses. So we're eating vegetables first, every single time. And our fruits always last, actually. The sweet things always last.
Yeah, I love that. And because that's a little bit different than like the school of Instagram, because like the parenting school of Instagram, where they're like, there's a new philosophy where it's like, just put everything on the plate all at once. It's like, here's your chicken, here's your M&Ms, here's your potatoes. And no, of course, they're going directly for the M&Ms. I don't agree with that. Yeah, I just don't agree with that philosophy. You know, and I like to eat my vegetables first too. You know, it's like, I'm getting it. I know I'm getting my abundance of nutrition in that way too. And then
When I get to the rest of my meal, it's like, okay, and then we end with the roasted potatoes. I don't overdo it with the carbohydrates, right? It's a healthy thing for me. It's a healthy thing for my husband. It's a healthy thing for my kids. And they have also, because of this, do great at restaurants when there's long meals because they know they're sitting there for different courses.
And they know other things. No, because now they practice doing courses. Yeah. So the show is called why isn't everyone doing this? And I want to know from your journey, from your research, like, has there been a thing that you found a solution or even something that you want people to avoid where you're like, Oh my gosh, why isn't everyone doing this? Yeah. Um, I mean, I think it has to do with reading the ingredients, reading the ingredients on
packaging and knowing the ingredients of what you're eating. If you don't know the ingredients, you have to put the package back down. You have to find out what those ingredients are and if you don't recognize them or can't pronounce them or don't understand why they're there, why are you putting that garbage in your body? There's no sense in putting
you know, toxic chemicals in your body. Like, what's the purpose of it being there? Like, why do you want to be part of that experiment when you could have the best health imaginable by just eating real food?
just eating food from the earth and increasing your state of consciousness. Because I think it doesn't matter how much you meditate. If you're eating chemicals all day every day and surrounded by chemicals, it's going to be very hard to feel comfortable in your body, to feel connected to source. And like you said in your story, in the beginning, like when you were eating all this, you just felt uncomfortable in your body.
And so I really want people to take that connection of what we are eating is 100% impacting not only our physical health, but also our spiritual, mental and psychological health. And can I just add one thing to that? I think it's so important for people to listen to is that I don't think
that you can find your calling in life. The reason why you're here on earth until your brain is actually functioning at its optimal level. I don't think you're able to achieve that until it's functioning at an optimal level because I know I wouldn't have been able to do any of the work that I've been able to do in the world had I not gotten my health right first.
Oh, amen. And once your brain is clear, then you can connect a source. You can hear your intuition. You can hear how nature wants to use you to make change in the world. So I know we didn't even talk about how much to shout out to Lauren Zander of Handel Group for connecting us to someone we both coached with and worked with.
I'm so grateful for. So I know, so people can find you at foodbabe.com. Where else can people find you? Because I know people are going to dive into your work under your Instagram is amazing. Thank you for making this so simple and so actionable. Like swap this for this. So where can people find you? You can just come over to Foodbabe and you can also check out truebony.com for all of the amazing products that I've created that, you know, we have a serious
ingredient standard, we use the least amount of unnecessary chemicals as possible in our products. And we're actually the number one plant-based protein powder on the market right now because of that. And it's been this amazing journey to see what we've created. We just created a bar a few years ago that was
ingredients that you would find in your own kitchen, like, you know, something that you would just go and you would make and put together. And we were able to mass produce this bar. And now we're going to have 12 flavors this year. And it's just taking off. And it's just this cool thing where
We're disrupting the food industry in a way that I wanted to see change happen because for many years, I was coming out from the outside in and now I'm going in from the inside out, which is so exciting because I'm able to inspire other companies to increase their standards in terms of how they source ingredients.
Bravo. And then modeling what is possible. I call this the Reese Witherspoon Effect, where it's like rather than going in and trying to change the Hollywood system, she's like, oh, I'm just going to make my own production company. And it's going to be wildly more successful than everything you are doing. So prayers up that Travani just ends up being the gold standard of what is possible with our food creation in the world. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Not only for today and this conversation, but truly the work that you're doing in the world and helping to create a safer food environment for each of us and for our children.
So sweet friends, thank you for joining us for today's episode of why isn't everyone doing this. I hope that you've learned as much as I have. I hope you feel inspired to start reading those ingredients, to start being mindful and conscientious about what you're putting in your body, not only for the health of your body, but also for the shift in your consciousness. So if you've learned something, if you feel like joining this beautiful food babe army, if you feel like taking action to change our food system, you can go to foodbabe.com.
And if you've enjoyed this podcast, you can screenshot it and tag us. I'm at Ziba meditation and at the food babe. And we will see you next week on why isn't everyone doing this?
