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Big Food targets young consumers in the U.S. to get them addicted to unhealthy products — which frequently contain ingredients banned by other countries — according to two food safety and nutrition advocates interviewed on SiriusXM’s “Megyn Kelly Show.”
Vani Hari, an author and blogger known as the “Food Babe,” and Grace Price, an investigative journalist and filmmaker who produced “Cancer: A Food-Borne Illness,” are calling on U.S. food manufacturers to change their practices and produce foods with the same healthier ingredients the companies use in identical products they sell in other countries.
Last month, Hari and Price participated in a Senate roundtable on nutrition and the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S.
“We have an opportunity right now to let the American public know” about unsafe ingredients in foods sold in the U.S., Hari said during the interview. “We are under a massive experiment. If any other country was doing this to us, it would be considered an act of war … We’ve got to do something about it.”
Price, who is 18 years old, said American food manufacturers are using tactics that Big Tobacco pioneered to market harmful products to youth. “My generation is so clearly being targeted by these Big Food companies,” she said.
U.S. food companies ‘using toxic ingredients’ that are banned overseas
Hari told Kelly that American food manufacturers use thousands of ingredients they don’t include in identical products sold in other countries.
“Right now, American food companies are using toxic ingredients that [in other countries] are either banned or regulated differently, in the same exact products that they serve American citizens,” Hari said.
Hari cited McDonald’s French fries, which she said contain 11 ingredients in the U.S., but only three in other countries, and Skittles, “which uses 10 different artificial food dyes” in the U.S. — and titanium dioxide, which is “banned in Europe because it can cause DNA damage.”
Hari also singled out Kellogg’s for “targeting little children,” after pledging in 2015 to remove artificial food dyes from its cereal products by 2018.
“But they never did,” she said. They “lied about it and they started to create new cereals that were targeting the smallest of children, using the most popular toddler songs, like ‘Baby Shark’ and Disney’s ‘Little Mermaid.’”
Hari blamed lax food regulations in the U.S. “Almost every single major American food company is doing this because they’re using the lack of regulation in our U.S. food system to their advantage.” In 1958, there were only 800 food additives approved for use in the U.S., but today that number exceeds 10,000, she said.
By comparison, the number of approved food additives in the European Union is 400, Hari said.
“There are thousands of chemicals that have not even been reviewed by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] at all,” Hari said. “They’ve been literally just slid right into the food system without anybody knowing what the risks are, what the safety data looks like.”
Hari said the “skyrocketing rates of disease,” including cancer, are related to a lot of these additives. She cited the neon food coloring in Froot Loops cereal, used as “a marketing tool” to make the cereal more attractive to U.S. children — but which is “contributing to obesity.”
Hari also cited the dangers of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup produced by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, which has been linked to human health risks.
“It’s pervasive, and unfortunately, it’s making its way into every single thing we eat,” Hari said. “It’s in wheat, it’s in oats, you’re finding it in all major products, like Cheerios.”
“Glyphosate has now been implicated to cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma, bladder cancer, autoimmune disorders, leaky gut, fertility issues,” Hari said. “There’s so many things that can be linked back to the uses of glyphosate in our environment. And it’s literally ending up in breast milk and sperm and the tissues in our body,” Hari said.
‘We’ve been lied to’
Price addressed the effect harmful food products have on younger generations of Americans — harms which led her to become an advocate for safer and healthier ingredients in foods.
“I’m no smarter than your other average teenager,” she said. “I just know how to use Google. I was searching up these things, learning that … Twinkies have the same chemical that’s in Clorox, or [the] amount of sugar in orange juice is actually equivalent to just drinking a bottle of Coke.”
Kelly played an excerpt from Price’s documentary:
“Did you know that the chemical we use to bleach the flour inside of Twinkies is the exact same chemical utilized to create our most common disinfectant, Clorox? The chemical is chlorine gas, and this is just one out of the 37 total ingredients inside of a Twinkie. This is standard for ultra-processed foods.”
Price said her research helped her “realize we’ve been lied to” — and to discover that food manufacturers borrowed strategies from the tobacco industry playbook to market harmful products to children.
“We now have research showing that the Big Tobacco industry actually bought Big Food companies,” Price said, citing General Mills and Kraft Foods. “They used the same kinds of tactics that they had deployed with all of their tobacco industry product development for these foods.”
Price said tobacco companies “would target kids by putting these signs, saying, ‘go smoke a cigarette’ at children’s eye level.” Today, “they’re just paying off dieticians on TikTok to promote cereal.”
But even before children are old enough to be targeted with advertising, harmful ingredients in foods adversely affect childhood development, Price said.
Price said baby formula contains “highly reactive, easily oxidized, polyunsaturated fatty acids” derived from seed oils. These fats “get stored in our cell membranes, they wreak all sorts of havoc [when] we’re literally not even a year old.”
“The worst part is, your brain is only 90% developed once you hit kindergarten. So, this entire time period, their brains are barely even developed, and they’re being given these foods,” Price added.
Big Food companies ‘want to keep the public in the dark’
Hari and Price said it’s possible to successfully campaign for safer ingredients in foods.
Hari launched a petition asking Kellogg’s to “remove artificial food dyes” that she will deliver to the company on Oct. 15.
Citing claims that calling for safer ingredients in food amounts to “nanny-state” regulation of food manufacturers, Hari said that those arguments are a result of corporate blackwashing by the Big Food industry itself.
“I think a lot of lobbying behind the scenes, and a lot of front groups behind the scenes, were doing that work,” Hari said. “This is not the nanny state. This isn’t asking for more regulations. This is, ‘You’re already doing this across the pond. Do it for us.’”
“Why are you poisoning American children and giving other countries’ children better, safer ingredients? This is a rigged system. This is not about creating more regulations. This is about doing what’s right as an American company,” Hari said.
Price suggested that parents resist the temptation to buy highly marketed foods targeting children.
“You’ve got to start by giving them something real, because kids — if they’ve been fed all of these crappy ultra-processed foods their whole lives — they don’t actually really desire anything real because that’s what they think food is,” Price said.
“The first thing you need to start with is real food,” Hari said. “Food that comes from the earth … that has been unadulterated by the food industry.” Citing her recovery from chronic illness, Hari said that by following such a diet, “you will be tremendously so much healthier.”
Price said there is an “ideological dogma” that chronic diseases “are genetic and random and out of our control.” That line of thinking “is sending a message that your health is out of your control, but is in your doctor’s hands.”
“There is an alternative for almost every single person’s craving,” Hari said.
Watch Megyn Kelly’s interview with Vani Hari and Grace Price here:
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