Vani Hari and Dave Asprey discuss how she pressured Subway to remove azodicarbonamide from its bread. They cover the chemical industry's influence on food safety standards and the backlash she faced for calling out additives in processed food.
When you go to a Subway sandwich shop, they wanted their bread to be super uniform. So it's the same thing every single time. That's what gets us hooked, by the way. And kids hook to processed foods. It's the exact same thing every time. Where when you're eating a fruit or a vegetable, it can be different every single time. It can be sweeter, it can be sour, it can be juicier, it can be. It's different. And that's one of the reasons why fast food manufacturers use these chemicals to create that uniformity. But this was definitely not a chemical that was necessary for our health. Right. And it was also problematic in the fact that when it was heated, it turned into semi carbazide, which is a carcinogen. And then also the factory workers that dealt with this chemical, if they inhaled it, they would get asthma. So this was a very hazardous chemical. And when I started a petition to get Subway to remove this chemical, and the reason I started a petition is because they were using this chemical here in the United States, but not in all the other subway chains all across the world. And they were the number one fast food chain at the time in the world. At that point in time. They dramatically dropped from that after this campaign because it went so viral so quick. I was on the front pages of Worldwide news and on every single TV station talking about this to the point where they made the decision to remove azodicarbonamide. But what it did is, is it forced, actually, every bread manufacturer in America to remove azo dicarbonamide. And so you can only imagine the company that sells this azo dicarbonamide, and all the people who are making bread, like the huge bakeries, there's a bakery called Bimbo that makes, like, the majority of bread here in America. And you might have seen their trucks.
But I'm sorry, is there a food Bimbo brand? Because that would just be so funny.
That would be funny. But so you can only imagine the amount of money and. And that was interchanged in that just one transaction of one campaign. And there's been several that, you know, we've led in terms of getting chemicals out of food. And so billions of dollars are in play. And so when you talk about all of the pushback that you've gotten for saying the things that you say, I resonate with that so much because I became a target and actually wrote an entire book about this. It's called Feeding youg Lies about how I was targeted by the chemical industry to make it look like I Didn't know what I was talking about. I was a bimbo, right? Actually, one of the top lobbyists in Washington who lobby for, like, the alcohol and tobacco industry. He wrote an article in the Washington Post and labeled me a food bimbo. I had my Wikipedia page taken over. I had talks.
Still has taken over. Yeah.
That's awesome. Yeah. So, like, the talks that I would give at these different universities when they would hire me to talk there, and they would literally be run down, like the websites with like, troll comments and like fake tickets and things like that. Like, people would just go and like, try to buy fake tickets so it would look like it was sold out so nobody could buy a ticket.
They played dirty. These big chemical companies, I mean, it was.
It's crazy to the point where I've had to have security at events because of the amount of trolls and people who are hired by the chemical industry to kind of track me and show up at all my talks.
I remember I was in counter protesters and stuff like that.
Yeah. And I remember I was. I was giving a talk at BlogHer, which is like a big blogger conference. I don't even know if they still have it. But it was back in the day and in the audience was like, Monsanto, like, what is Monsanto doing doing here at my doc? And, like, someone pointed it out to me before I spoke, and I pointed them out to everybody in the audience. I was like, look, Monsanto's here watching me here today. And in Monsanto, for those who are listening, is now owned by Bayer, and they're the main manufacturer of Roundup, which is. Is the main weed killer that's spread on all of our food, conventional food here in America. It's what's linked to cancer. The main ingredient is called glyphosate. You talk about it all the time, Dave. I hope people know what that is now because now there's been a million lawsuits, it feels like that have been in victory of showing that it causes non Hodgkin's lymphoma in people. And, you know, I just was at my local hardware store and you'll never guess this, Dave. I just posted this on my stories yesterday. I'm in my local hardware store and I asked the guy, I'm taking. I'm taking some background video for a reel I was making. I said, hey, where's the Roundup? So section, he goes, it's in the Aisle of Death. I go, what? He goes, yeah, it's labeled the aisle of Death. And I look up at the top where like, all of the, you know, the cryon, like, you know, uniform signs are. It says Aisle of Death, and I'm like, this. This couldn't be more accurate, right?
You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.
