'If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it': Meet the food blogger influencing RFK Jr.

Yahoo

15-05-2025

Dressed in a purple jumpsuit and wearing her signature bright pink lipstick, Vani Hari walks through a grocery store aisle filled with Easter candy.
'Welcome to the holiday death aisle,' says the 46-year-old food activist and influencer, gesticulating dramatically. 'It's back, and it's in Easter form.'
Hari, who blogs as 'The Food Babe,' rattles off a list of ingredients, taking pains to emphasize how unpronounceable the chemical names in a pack of roll-up candy are: 'poly meanite… what?'
More: Robert F. Kennedy now heads Trump's MAHA commission: What to know
That's part of her shtick: 'If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it."
Last month, the White House invited her to the first Make America Healthy Again Moms' roundtable. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moderated the closed-door meeting with some of the most influential women in the new Republican administration including members of the Cabinet.
The typical response from her 2.3 million Instagram followers? 'You've helped me adjust my entire food thought process. I look at everything in the store with suspicion,' commented one user with the handle @idyllwild_history_bits_and_pc.
Hari's clout as a wellness influencer - Time Magazine in 2015 named her as one of 'The 30 Most Influential People on the Internet' - has given her sway over large companies and government officials, even as many scientists say that many of her claims aren't backed by science.
Now the food blogger from Charlotte, North Carolina, is getting top billing at the White House thanks to President Donald Trump and Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again agenda.
'For years, it felt like citizen activists like me were the only ones holding these food companies accountable,' Hari, who was listed on the agenda for the private roundtable session as a "MAHA Influencer," told USA TODAY. 'Finally, it was somebody in Washington willing to fix the issue that has allowed these companies to put chemicals in our food that they don't put in other countries.'
More: Looking to avoid toxic 'forever' chemicals? Here's your best chance of doing so.
Vani Hari wasn't always a healthy eater. As a child, she rejected her mom's Indian cooking to assimilate with her American friends who favored fast food.
But that path led to mounting health problems, and, by her mid-20s, she began investigating what she was consuming and advocating for transparency in food labeling and the removal of harmful chemicals from processed foods.
She'd spent hours researching and reading books on nutrition and studying food labels. On trips abroad, she'd often visit grocery stores comparing labels on food sold by American companies with what they offered stateside.
In 2011, armed with knowledge she had acquired through her self-styled research, she launched FoodBabe.com to document her healthy eating journey and to share what she was learning about the chemicals in her food. After writing a viral blogpost about the ingredients found in a Chick-fil-A sandwich including food coloring, MSG and refined grains, the company invited Hari to their headquarters to discuss her concerns. On her blog, she mentions the fact that two years later, the company responded by announcing they were removing artificial dyes - highlighting it as a big win for the activist community.
More: Girl Scouts hit back after Joe Rogan calls their cookies 'toxic' on his podcast
By 2014, her blog had millions of people reading it. Her career as a food activist took off. So did the blowback.
Yale neuroscientist Steve Novella dubbed Hari as the "Jenny McCarthy of Food" and dismissed her as a "scaremonger" who was sounding the alarm on completely safe ingredients. McCarthy, an actress, model and talk show host, has been excoriated by the scientific community for her belief that vaccines caused her son to develop autism.
Novella, the founder and executive editor of Science-Based Medicine, run by the nonprofit New England Skeptical Society, wrote in 2014 how he believed Hari had "marshaled her scientific illiteracy to pressure Subway" into removing an ingredient from their bread.
"She called azodicarbonamide, an ingredient to make bread fluffier, the' yoga mat chemical 'because it also has a variety of industrial uses, including making yoga mats," he wrote. "Soy also has a variety of uses, including making yoga mats."
In 2017, Hari said her activism took a back seat when she became a mom and launched Truvani, a food company which is billed as offering "real food without added chemicals." Among the organic products the company sells online and in stores are protein powders, snack bars and toothpaste.
'He took my voice on the campaign trail,' she said.
Hari said she ended her hiatus from activism last September to speak at a Senate roundtable on 'American health and nutrition: A second opinion' organized by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin. Kennedy, who had suspended his independent campaign for president weeks earlier and endorsed then-Republican candidate Donald Trump, came to the session on Capitol Hill. At a dinner afterward, Hari and Kennedy sat at the same table and talked at length about food additives.
More: 'You frighten people': 4 takeaways from RFK Jr's contentious confirmation hearing
Hari sat one row behind Kennedy's wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, during his Jan. 30 Senate confirmation hearing to oversee the nation's food and health care systems as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Wearing a fuchsia pantsuit, she nodded along as Kennedy spoke about the role of additives and what he said they were doing to America's waistline and its long-term health.
Hari doesn't have professional training in health or nutrition. Neither does Kennedy, 71, a longtime environmental lawyer with no background in medicine or health care, but who has long argued that chemical additives and food dyes are behind the 'chronic diseases epidemic' in the country. His vow to take on "Big Pharma" during his short-lived presidential run won the support of many, particularly mothers worried about what was in their kids' diets.
'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,' she said in an interview at the end of Kennedy's first of two confirmation hearings. 'It's because the FDA was allowing them to get away with it.'
Hari said it felt like a 'defining moment" because Kennedy had 'heard the call.'
More: Snapshot of RFK Jr.'s plan for changing the U.S. food and drug system
Hari said she didn't know what to expect when she went to the White House for the Make America Healthy Again Moms' roundtable.
That day, right before she entered the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building armed with charts for her presentation, she could see Trump on the South Lawn showcasing Tesla models with Elon Musk, the car company's CEO and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Looking around the room, Hari said she was "pleasantly surprised" to find that the majority of the women at the table had ties to the administration.
She took her seat next to two other MAHA Moms. Kennedy sat across from her flanked by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Also at the table: Then-White House Counselor Alina Habba, now the interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who had her infant son on her lap.
Drawing on her research during her foreign travels, Hari gave a seven-minute presentation showing the discrepancies between the ingredients listed in American versions of certain food versus its European counterparts.
Kennedy moderated the panel, where he weighed in on a West Virginia bill banning food dyes and preservatives. He urged people to call the state's Republican governor to back the legislation. The HHS secretary promised things would change.
"We're going to stop this from happening," Kennedy told the room, according to Hari, adding: "American companies can basically stop poisoning us with ingredients they don't use in other countries."
A few hours later, the White House posted a video on social media highlighting Kennedy, Cabinet members and the MAHA moms struggling to pronounce certain ingredients in common food items. Social media users were quick to point out that just because you can't pronounce certain items doesn't mean they are unsafe.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A seat at the MAHA Moms' table: Vani Hari on having RFK Jr.'s ear