Yesterday Gawker tapped analytical chemist and science writer Yvette d'Entremont to write a takedown of popular food blogging activist Vani Hari, who goes by the moniker Food Babe. D'Entremont writes under the name Science Babe, so if that isn't enough to give you an idea of the flavor of the article, perhaps the headline will: "The 'Food Babe' Blogger is Full of Shit." To say I clicked on it with glee is an understatement.

Yes, I'm a Food Babe hate reader. Some background: I'm a former nurse practitioner with bachelor's and master's degrees. To get those degrees, I took multiple biology, chemistry, statistics, pharmacology, anatomy, and physiology classes. For my whole 15-year career, I worked in academic teaching hospitals where I either used research protocols or participated in research, or at the very, very least, read research to guide my practice. No one is going to be giving me a Nobel Prize for science anytime soon, but I'm confident that I have a pretty good appreciation of science, its methods, and its limitations. So when I read the Food Babe or, say, the rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement (OMG please don't even get me started here), it makes me see red.

To clarify, I am definitely for any sort of activism that improves the world and the people living in it, and I don't believe that corporations, including those that make food, always have the health and best interests of their customers at heart. I don't think anyone would dispute that whole grain toast is better for you than a Pop Tart, and I do believe that doctors and other health care professionals could benefit from more nutritional education. What I do object to is the way Food Babe delivers her message to the masses.

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• She's manipulative: D'Entremont and other writers have already called Hari out for this, but it bears repeating. Hari will identify a compound, such as her infamous "beaver butt chemical," (called castoreum) that flavors some foods, and try to either gross you out or give an example of something else the chemical is in that you would never want to eat. While castoreum is classified as GRAS by the FDA (GRAS stands for "generally recognized as safe,") and has been used for thousands of years, there's a gross-out factor that she capitalizes on here.

In another egregious example, she tried to call out a beer ingredient, propylene glycol, which is found in antifreeze, but scientists later pointed out that the ingredient actually found in beer is propylene glycol alginate, which is a completely different chemical, derived from kelp, and perfectly safe.

Hari is charismatic and likable, so when she states something as a fact to a reader who is worried, has no science background, and just wants to feed their babies or their own body the right things, she hooks them. I get how this happens. I've spent a lot of time interviewing seemingly well-educated holistic doctors and nutritionists about so-called toxins (again, don't get me started) that had me doubting everything I ever knew about how the liver functions, even though all their evidence was anecdotal rather than data-driven. It's easy to get sucked in and scared.

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• She's sneaky: Again, the Gawker article called this out beautifully, as does this one on Slate, but it's the thing that irritates me the most about her methods. She has written some embarrassingly, shockingly ignorant posts, like the famously deleted airplane and microwave articles, and then never wrote any sort of mea culpa or retraction. (In the airplane article, she attacked airlines for pumping nitrogen into the plane; commenters quickly pointed out the air we breathe is actually mostly nitrogen anyway. In the microwave article, she said microwaves were like nuclear reactors and made a very bizarre comparison that saying "Hitler" to water will cause the same reaction as microwaving the water.)

The fact that she tried to disappear these stories makes me distrust and discredit anything else she has to say, and it's mindboggling that others still take her seriously. She told The New York Times in an article published last month that she was going to start noting and clarifying on posts when things are wrong, and I hope that happens. When I find out that my red Starburst habit is ACTUALLY killing me, I will be the first to admit that I am wrong.

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• She's polarizing rather than productive: Look no further than our current Congress to understand what is happening. The Food Babe seems to be willfully obtuse. She refuses to engage with the many food scientists who have tried to have a dialogue with her over the years, and instead bans them and disregards them. To me, these are not really the actions of a person who wants to learn and be productive – it just seems narcissistic. It gets people on both sides pissed off and that leads to a stalemate, with both sides seething and no action being taken.

Hari likes to demonize the FDA, but the truth is that that organization is woefully understaffed and underfunded. I've gone down this road several times while researching safe cosmetics ingredients. We need so much more research in both food and beauty product safety because the data is just not there. Sadly, neither are the resources. With Hari's popular reach and the knowledge and know-how of the various scientists who critique her, together they could be a powerful lobby to get some real, actionable change and research happening, rather than just angry blog posts about eating "beaver butt" chemicals.

Let's take her recent battle against Subway: After Food Babe's insistence, the chain removed azodicarbonamide from its bread, even though it's been deemed safe by the FDA as a dough conditioner and is used in hundreds of other food products sold at McDonald's, Starbucks, and supermarkets. Food Babe called azodicarbonamide a "yoga mat" chemical because it can be found in yoga mats, but that doesn't mean it's by any means inedible, any more the fact that there's fresh water in toilet bowls means that ALL fresh water is undrinkable.

Presumably, Subway removed the FDA-approved chemical from its bread in order to make the bad publicity go away. But playing devil's advocate here, what if it really IS very dangerous, as Food Babe claims? One chain removing the substance isn't going to make a difference. If there were a more concentrated and organized effort to study these things, rather than randomly calling out one chain, it might make a bigger difference for mankind. Here, it just makes Hari look powerful, while doing very little to actually help anyone.

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