Feeding You Lies Book Summary - Feeding You Lies Book explained in key points

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Feeding You Lies summary

Name: Feeding You Lies
Rating: 4.1 (74 reviews)
Author: Vani Hari

Vani Hari

How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health

4.1 (74 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

Feeding You Lies by Vani Hari exposes the deceptive practices of the food industry. It reveals how certain food brands lie about their products and how to avoid their harmful effects on health.

Topics

Diets

Table of Contents

Feeding You Lies
Summary of 5 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 5

What’s in it for me? An exposé of the American food industry.

The United States is sick. Compared to 16 other developed nations, it comes in last place for health outcomes. The kicker? It spends two and a half times more on healthcare than its peers. So what’s going wrong – why are Americans in worse health despite living in one of the world’s most affluent societies?

Nutrition expert and healthy eating advocate Vani Hari has an answer: Big Food, the conglomerate of huge, multinational corporations like Nestlé and Monsanto, that grow, produce, and market the food Americans eat every day.

Despite all the claims that they’re doing us a world of good, these products are packed with toxic additives, lethal doses of sugar, and an array of untested chemicals.

In these blinks, we’ll follow Hari as she blows the lid off the lies we’ve been fed about what we eat. Along the way, you’ll learn about the real nutritional value of everyday products, the science we base our food choices on, and the marketing tricks Big Food uses to smuggle poison onto our tables.

You’ll also find out

why “low-calorie” alternatives are often just as bad as full-calorie products;
how producers tricked Americans into buying sugary cereals for their kids; and
why you should consider switching to organic foods.

Soda is a key driver of obesity, but manufacturers manipulate public opinion and the law to evade responsibility.

According to the National Institute of Diabetics and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, over two-thirds of all Americans were obese in 2017. This number underscores something that’s been known to public health experts for a while now: America is in the grips of an obesity epidemic. But what’s driving this crisis? Well, there are multiple factors but one culprit is clear – soda.

Around two-thirds of American children consume at least one soda a day while a third drink at least two. This is bad news for their health; a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that drinking one can of soda per day increased the risk of heart attack by 20 percent. The Center for Disease Control, meanwhile, links heavy soda consumption with Type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, and asthma.

Despite all this evidence, the American Beverage Association – ABA for short – refuses to admit that its products pose a health risk. Instead, the trade association advocates exercise, which is demonstrably less effective as a weight-loss tool than a healthy diet. Coca-Cola, one of ABA’s members, has even introduced a calorie-counting app called “Work It Out,” designed to help the company sell its low-calorie ranges, including Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Ironically, so-called “diet sodas” are every bit as dangerous and fattening as regular sodas.

These measures are part of an all-out war on public health authorities’ efforts to change consumer behavior and warn them of the dangers of sugary drinks.

Another is the Sugar Association. Like its ally the ABA, it actively spreads food industry propaganda and attempts to manipulate politicians by making large donations to their campaigns. These efforts have a huge influence on government policy. Since 2009, for example, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the ABA have spent $67 million on efforts to prevent both the introduction of a sugar tax and health warnings being put on their products.

Even more worryingly, these associations are so influential that government agencies actually use them as policy consultants. The Departments of Health and Human Services, for instance, took advice from the ABA when it issued dietary guidelines!

Big Food pays for research to be manipulated.

Let’s start with two uncontroversial statements. First, everybody wants to be healthy. Second, the best way to increase your health is to pay attention to your diet. Why then is it so hard to figure out what a “healthy diet” actually looks like in practice?

Blame it on Big Food – the largest food-producing corporations in the United States. For decades, Big Food has been on a mission to deceive the public and hide the truth about its toxic bestsellers. The way it does this is by manipulating research.

Organic food is healthier than non-organic alternatives – that’s why Big Food hates it.

Around 5 percent of the food sold in the United States these days is organic, and that number is constantly rising. No wonder conventional food producers are worried: organic is an attack on the toxic food they’ve been selling for decades, a new front in the war for Americans’ wallets. But before we get to that, let’s take a closer look at organic food. Just how much healthier is it really?

Well, a 2014 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that, compared to conventional tomatoes, organic tomatoes contain more vitamin C, antioxidants, and flavonoids – plant chemicals that stimulate detoxification enzymes in the liver. Organic meat and dairy have meanwhile been shown to contain around 50 percent more omega-3 fatty acids than non-organic products.

Food labeling is often misleading and regulatory authorities are mostly toothless.

Trying to figure out what’s in the food you buy is like trying to read a language you don’t fully understand – you might catch the odd word here or there, but it’s mostly gobbledygook. That’s not accidental, either. All that unpronounceable jargon hides the fact that lots of products are packed with downright nasty ingredients.

Worse, the organization tasked with preventing this – the United States Food and Drug Administration, or FDA for short – is pretty much toothless. In fact, despite the FDA’s existence, the American food industry is still largely self-regulated.

Adding nutrients to unhealthy foods doesn’t make them any healthier.

The practice of adding nutrients to foods that naturally don’t contain them began in the United States in 1924, the year producers started adding iodine to salt to address a nationwide deficiency.

These days, however, what goes into the food we eat has less to do with public health concerns and more to do with marketing. Claims like “free from ingredient X” are often given pride of place on food packaging, but they’re rarely more than sleight of hand; in practice, leaving out actively harmful ingredients doesn’t make a product any healthier.

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What is Feeding You Lies about?

Feeding You Lies (2019) is an exposé of one of America’s shadiest industries – the food sector. Fed up with being lied to and sold junk rebranded as “health food,” blogger Vani Hari decided to find out what was really going on behind all the glitzy marketing. In Feeding You Lies, she details what she discovered. Along the way, she provides a wealth of tips and tricks to avoid being taken in and make healthier choices in the grocery store.

Best quote from Feeding You Lies

Food is medicine, plain and simple. If our food is sick, then we as a country are going to be sick as well.

—Vani Hari

Who should read Feeding You Lies?

Shoppers overwhelmed by marketing hype
Frustrated dieters wondering why they aren’t losing weight
Nutritionists and healthy eaters

About the Author

Vani Hari AKA “The Food Babe” is a food expert best known for her hugely popular blog about clean eating, a nutritional approach based on the avoidance of processed foods. Four years after launching her blog, she published The Food Babe Way, a 21-day guide to detoxifying your diet. Hari is also the mind behind Truvani, a company specializing in nutritional supplements.

Categories with Feeding You Lies

Health & Nutrition Society & Culture

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