Vani Hari Uncovers the Truth About the Food Industry
TRANSCENDENCE – Live Life Beyond the Ordinary, an FMTV original 5-part docu-series, is all about learning from the personal experiences of those who have been in the darkest trenches, healed from trauma, and recovered from great adversity, to lead us in finding our true potential. Food activist Vani Hari shares her powerful story of doing exactly that. In Episode 1, titled ‘What’s In Our Food?’, Vani shares how a lack of education lead her to illness after illness, and in that feeling of defeat, she finally found her passion to fight.
Vani Hari grew up with two Indian immigrant parents. Being new to America, they naturally trusted the American food system and fully immersed themselves into the culture by taking on the standard American diet; McDonald’s, Wendy’s, whatever they wanted to eat, they did.
These eating habits, mostly caused by a lack of nutrition education, lead to a plethora of different health issues for Vani – asthma, eczema, endometriosis, appendicitis, & allergies – resulting in a life lived in and out of the hospital.
Discouraged and feeling like her body was letting her down, she finally had the passion and drive she needed to really take back control of her health, leading her to question all that she knew about food.
Comparing the standard diet to a healthy diet, her mind was blown, realizing that the majority of the food she had been eating was in fact, not food but heavily processed, dead food created in a laboratory. She quickly changed her diet and eating habits, turning her life, and ultimately her health, around.
This great change became the catalyst for her to begin a journey of justice in the food industry. Through her blog Food Babe, Vani investigates what really goes into our food and holds big corporations accountable. From food dyes known to cause ADHD, to sports drinks chock full of sugar, she’s tackling the monster that the money-hungry food industry has become, one product at a time. Lack of education is what leads to a life of sickness for her, but she is doing all she can to make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else. It’s time we all start asking, what’s really in our food?
You can hear all of Vani’s story, along with many other inspiring experts, including Novak Djokovic, Jon Gabriel, Dr. Libby Weaver, Marie Forleo, Vishen Lakhiani, Bruce Lipton, Dr. Mark Hyman, and more in TRANSCENDENCE
About the Author
Tualang Honey; A Gift From the Jungle
What is Tualang Honey?
A honey from the Malaysian jungles is attracting attention from researchers who are finding it has unexpected health properties beyond those of the famous Manuka honey of Australia and New Zealand.
While it has been used as medicine and food for thousands of years, researchers are confirming the therapeutic value of honey — accelerated wound healing, infection fighting, anti-tumor, and anti-diabetic properties, to name a few.
When a pollen-producing plant species has health or curative properties, those characteristics transfer to honey via the pollen harvested by bees. Until recently, Manuka honey from New Zealand has been the gold standard, with higher levels of methylglyoxal, a natural antibacterial, than other types of raw honey. By placing hives into Manuka groves, beekeepers produce and harvest this “monofloral” honey, meaning the hive worker bees have harvested pollen only from the Manuka tree blossoms, which gives the honey it’s unusual therapeutic properties.
Tualang honey is produced by the rock bee (Apis dorsata), a type of honeybee, that builds its colonies in one of the tallest trees in the world, the Tualang tree of Southeast Asia, and in particular, the Malaysian peninsula. Specimens as high as 260 ft. (80m) have been recorded. The species is found in lowland forests — indigenous people believe the giant trees are inhabited by spirits. This belief has spared the trees from the logging industry. Tualang honey is only found in these jungle giants — the tree’s smooth bark makes climbing difficult for honey loving predators like the sun bear.
The honey-loving Malaysian Sun Bear
Honey can be monofloral or polyfloral. Manuka is monofloral, with the Manuka tree species as the pollen source. Polyfloral Tualang honey differs in that the rock bees pollinate diverse Malaysian jungle plants and flowers, and those plant properties find their way in to the honey. The therapeutic potential of multiple rainforest plant species are captured in Tualang honey.
