Vani Hari, the Foodbabe, promises that if you follow her diet you will look pretty like she does - and to bolster her case she trots out the naturalistic fallacy and a healthy dose of chemical illiteracy, the most famous of which is 'if she can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it'.

As Josh Bloom has noted on Science 2.0, she is missing out on delicious chemical-laced treats like Tris-(9-octadecenoyl) trigyceryl mixed esters and  (2E)-3-phenylprop-2-enal. And no science at all would get done without 3,7-Dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dion. 

That's olive oil, cinnamon and caffeine, if you are not in the chemophobia business.


Vani Hari. If may surprise you to learn this but just because she can't pronounce it, does not make it unhealthy. Credit and link: FoodBabe

We're not the only ones criticizing her. Now, Dr. Steven Novella at Neurologica has had enough.

Why? She declared ingesting food with propylene glycol is the same as drinking car anti-freeze. That is the same sort of logic Jenny McCarthy used to make anti-vaccination hysteria the latest fashion for rich, liberal elites and their pretenders.


Vani Hari is missing out on this delicious 3,7-Dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dion. I bet she wishes she could pronounce more stuff now. Credit: Hank Campbell

OMG – The Chemicalz by Steven Novella, Neurologica
H/T Real Clear Science