Vani Hari
speaker
539 appearances
8 recordings
7 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 26 Jun
Vani Hari’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, my parents came here as immigrants in the 1960s. And when they came to the United States, they were big on adopting the American culture. And so when my dad went back to have an arranged marriage to my mother in India, and they ended up coming here to live the rest of their life, the first thing he introduced her to was a McDonald's hamburger.
And that's how I was raised on an American standard diet. We were one of the only Indian families in Charlotte at that point, Charlotte, North Carolina, where I grew up and where I live now. So everything was kind of handed to us in terms of what we should be eating. And my parents were very trusting of the American food system. And As a result, I was really sick as a child. I had eczema.
I had asthma. I was in and out of doctor's offices for most of my life. I was on so many prescription drugs. When my parents would take me to the doctors, they never asked them, what is she eating? What are you feeding her? They never asked about my diet. They just put me on the next medication. And that is how I grew up.
In my early 20s, I hit rock bottom when I ended up in the hospital having to get my appendix taken out, one of my organs. At the time, they said, your appendix is something that you don't even need. It's an organ that just can come out. They made such a light situation out of it, but I started to question what the doctors were telling me, which is, why do we evolve and
having an appendix first of all, but I wanted to find answers of like what happened to my appendix of why it was about to burst. And so when I started to research really what was happening in my body, I found out that I had extreme inflammation and that was coming from my diet.
And when I started to make changes shortly after that scare and that situation, I remember getting this one big book and in it, there was a concept in it that hit me like a ton of bricks. And it was that the majority of foods on the grocery store shelf are dead. They're not alive.
And I was like, that's how I've felt for most of my life, like a zombie, not wanting to get up in the morning and go to school, not wanting to participate in activities and physical sport activities because I didn't have the energy because of my asthma.
And so when I started to take the concepts in that book and apply them to my life, and I started to eat as much real living food as possible, things like fruits and vegetables and things that I would find at the farmer's market, My whole life changes. I mean, it was dramatic to the point where I lost all of the weight that I had put on as a result of this lifestyle.
But I also started to realize a level of health that I never thought was possible. I got off nine prescription drugs. And the people around me that grew up with me, my relatives, my friends, they were like, whoa. You have made a dramatic transformation in your appearance. What are you doing? We want a piece of what you're doing.
And they begged me actually to start a blog to share this information, to share my recipes and what I was doing and why suddenly I refused to eat candy because it had artificial food dyes. And they wanted to know the green drink that I was drinking and what was in it and how they could make it at home. And this is before, you know, we even had a Whole Foods in Charlotte.
Back then, it was the little mom and pop natural food stores or the farmer's market. And so I had to really teach people people in my community and people around me on these new methodologies of how to take care of your health and actually look at the root cause of what's happening in your body.
And I started to realize that there were so many people out there beyond my friends and my family that didn't know the truth about what was happening in our food supply. And I wanted to investigate it for them. And I wanted to investigate it for my own personal reasons in that there are so many products that I thought were healthy but weren't actually healthy.
Things that I thought were good for me because of the fact that they only had 400 calories or this many fat grams or whatnot, or they had the marketing of, quote unquote, eat fresh at their fast food chain that I was eating fresh, but I found out I wasn't. And so I started to investigate these major fast food chains, major food companies, and the company started reaching out to me.
I think the first one that reached out was a yogurt chain who I was very upset with because they were really promoting the fact that they were using organic milk for their yogurt. And I was like, this is amazing. This is so awesome. I could go to the mall and I could have this treat and it's good for me.
But when you looked at the ingredients, they were coloring their products with artificial food dye. They were putting in preservatives and trans fats. Yes, they were starting with organic milk, but they were adding, you know, 30 more chemicals to the concoction that they put in the machines. And so I wrote about that and how duped I felt.
And it went so viral that the CEO of the company reached out to me, pulled the marketing off their stores and apologized. Wow. And that was my first taste of activism and my first taste of, oh my gosh, my voice can make a difference. And it was probably when Chick-fil-A invited me to their headquarters after I wrote an article called Chemical Filet or Chick-fil-A.
I showed the hundred ingredients that they have in their Chick-fil-A sandwich and how I thought they were healthier than going to McDonald's. But when I compared them to the McDonald's ingredients, they were virtually the same. And this really shocked people.
I mean, it went so viral that the executives at Chick-fil-A invited me to their headquarters to consult on their menu items on how to make their ingredients better. And when I was taking off work to go there to consult with them instead of consulting with banking institutions, I was like, okay, something got to give here. Like this is obviously way more impactful than what I'm doing at the banks.
And so I ended up deciding to quit my job. And when I quit my job, I was not making a dime doing Food Babe. It was literally there as a passion project. So it was something that I had to really figure out. The beautiful thing that happened after I quit my job was I was able to spend 100% of my time researching the food industry. And the first thing that I did was I was an avid traveler.
I love to travel. It's been a passion of mine since I was a little girl. And whenever I would go to Europe or another country, I'd always feel better. I felt I felt better. I liked the food better. It tasted better. And I was like, what's going on here? Like, why is it so different?
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