7 Ways 'The Food Babe' Spectacularly Fails To Grasp Science
5. Picking Food Wars
One of Hari's greatest "successes", is probably her campaign to get Subway to take the azodicarbonamide out of their bread. Now gosh darn if that doesn't sound like a big, scary, cancer-causing chemical, surely she did the right thing?
Hari's main issue with azodicarbonamide is that it's also used in yoga mats, because it helps to create the nice, foam like texture that makes your mat comfortable and your bread bouncy. It is not only deemed safe to eat by the FDA but it's also found in 500 other foods, not to mention that it actually converts into gas during the cooking process (creating those bubbles) and isn't found in the finished product in any kind of significant quantities.
What she has failed to grasp here is that, just because a substance occurs in a food and a non-food item, it doesn't mean that the former isn't food. Water occurs in both orange juice and shampoo, yet you would still consider orange juice as food. This is the kind of faulty syllogism that you so often find in woo.
A similar campaign was led against Starbucks, and it wasn't for their god awful coffee. Hari was shocked and appalled to discover that the well loved Pumpkin Spiced Latte contains "toxic" levels of sugar (it definitely doesn't or there would be a lot of dead white girls around) and a class 2b carcinogen in the form of caramel food colouring. She missed a trick though because, as d'Entremont points out, there are in fact two class 2b carcinogens in the Pumpkin Spiced Latte, and even worse, in most of Starbucks' menu, because it also contains coffee. Class 2b just means that every single effect hasn't been ruled out, not that it's going to strike you down with cancer as soon as look at you.
Both companies have since changed their ingredients, in a victory of hysteria over sense.
It's not even her inability to tell the difference between bread and a yoga mat that gets people's backs up, it's her knee jerk mistrust of anything she doesn't understand. Aside from bullying corporations into making needless changes to their recipes, this can also lead her to spout b*llocks and mislead people on subject that really do matter.