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
You could say it happened by accident because I was so... wounded by the truth about the food industry when I was finding it out. As a child, I grew up with two immigrant Indian parents who came to the United States and they were so trusting of the American food supply and the American way of life that my dad introduced my mom to a McDonald's hamburger.
It was the first thing he introduced her to when they had an arranged marriage and came back to the United States and said, if we're gonna live in America, we're gonna eat like Americans. And they lived in a very poverty-struck environment in India where it was hard to get food and hard for people to eat.
And so it suddenly became so easy and it was cheap and it was readily available to the point where, you know, my parents thought it was great that you could go and get fast food very quick. Hey. And they would give a free meal to you if you colored a drawing on Mother's Day and Father's Day. I mean, I was there at McDonald's doing that every holiday so I could get the free meal.
And as a result, I had such terrible health issues, me and my brother. I mean, in and out of doctor's offices on – Prescription drugs nonstop throughout my childhood. Can I ask you what those were? Sure, yeah. Everything from three different medications to control my asthma, Singulair, Advair, Aburol.
Asthma was one of them. Then to just control the situation when it would flare up, I'd be on prednisone. I'd be on antibiotics three or four times a year. Then there was the eczema medications, the costochorderoid, the cream, then there was shots in my ass. I mean, all of the things that they had to deploy to just make me feel normal, right? And I look back at my childhood,
And I was walking around like a zombie. I mean, I didn't feel motivated to go to school. I didn't feel motivated to read, even though I had these two immigrant Indian parents that took, put a lot of emphasis on my academics because of where they were. You know, my dad's a PhD, my mom's a master. So it was, they put a lot of emphasis on that. So I think that's where I ended up going, where I went.
But I know I could have done so much better in my early career, in my early life as a student, as a young person, if I had not been subjected to that food.
In my early 20s, I hit rock bottom. I was working for a big six consulting firm called Accenture. They put me on the road on an expense account. I was in this situation again where I'm outsourcing my food to the corporation this time instead of to America, right? And it's nonstop. wine and dine dinners, five-course meals. I've never done anything like that before. It was so exciting.
They would bring in droves of food, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so that you would bill more hours to the client at these big banks I was working. And I hit rock bottom. I became depressed. I became overweight. And I had appendicitis. And when I went to the doctor the first time, the doctor said, oh, there's nothing wrong with you. You can go back and take some Advil.
And thankfully, my parents said, you know, something doesn't seem right. You need to probably go see your regular doctor in the morning. And when I did, he was like, you have appendicitis. You need to have an emergency appendectomy right now. It's going to burst. And at that point, I went to see the surgeon, had my organ taken out of my body.
And this whole time, the doctors are saying to me, nobody needs their appendix. Don't worry. This is something routine. You'll be fine. You're going to survive. They're trying to ease my parents' worries. And something doesn't seem right, that God would give you an organ that you don't need, first of all. Second of all, I started to question,
first of all, why a young 22-year-old is in the hospital with this type of surgery.
Probably 30 or 40 pounds.
And it was that moment that I decided to take my health Seriously, and the first thing I did was research why you get appendicitis. And I found out the reason you get appendicitis is because your body's inflamed and your digestive system has become inflamed. And actually your appendix is there for a reason. It actually populates your gut with good bacteria.
Yeah, it's a reservoir, right? Yeah, and so I started to discover all these things about my body and about the human body that I couldn't stop learning about. And I started to channel this.
So I was a—I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
But in high school, I was a top-tier debater. I got recruited to college to be in debate. I was number one in state three years in a row.
It is. It is very hard. But I think my debate skills are probably what allowed me to do that because I interview well. Yeah, yeah. But back then we didn't have Google. We had to go to the library and we had to look at the microfiche and carry these big tubs of evidence around and photocopy evidence to take. And you'd have to learn both sides of the argument, affirmative and negative.
So you learned to see the world in a whole view through these topics and debate. And so one year's topic happened to be healthcare when I was in high school. I never applied anything I learned to it to my own body, but then it suddenly came rushing back. And so I started to check out these big books on nutrition. And one of these early books that I read was called Conscious Eating.
And in there, he talked about how the majority of foods in the grocery store shelves are dead. And I was like, that's how I felt most of my life is dead.
Showing 281–300 of 539 · page 15 of 27
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