7 Ways 'The Food Babe' Spectacularly Fails To Grasp Science

6. She Doesn’t Even Understand Food

Okay, so she hasn’t called herself the Science Babe (largely because that moniker is taken by a much more deserving figure), but she does call herself the Food Babe. The only problem is that she doesn’t understand food either.

You can tell that she doesn't understand food, because of that big red flag that goes up when a supposed "expert" starts waxing lyrical about detoxes. As the Food Babe's self-proclaimed arch enemy, Yvette d'Entremont or the SciBabe, points out in her Gawker article about some of her weirder food habits, Vani's claims that everything from fasting for twelve hours a day (something that we also call "night time") and drinking a mixture of lemon juice and cayenne pepper will help your body to "detoxify" itself, are nothing more or less that some A-grade, free-range bullsh*t.

Just say it with me: Detoxing. Is. Not. A. Thing.

Frankly, it's the fasting one that gets me, because it speaks of a much darker side of the "clean eating" world. It's the idea that eating food is an inherently "dirty" thing to do, and that the body has to be regularly "cleansed". This is also another thing picked up on by SciBabe, in a post in which she compares many of Vani's tips and tricks to advice from pro-anorexia websites. There's an argument to be made that the recent clean eating phenomenon is less concerned about health and nutrition, and more about presenting a socially acceptable face for disordered eating.

You'd think that someone who has little understanding of how the body process and interacts with the food that we eat would steer clear of doling out advice about it, but no.

She doesn't just stop there either, as the Food Babe has become infamous for her shrill campaigns of fear against food companies, demanding they remove certain ingredients that she deems "toxic". These are just a few highlights...