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Hi and welcome back to the Wellness Women Podcast where I provide simple answers for healthier families.

Today's interesting fact, did you know that an average person will consume 12 pubic hairs in their fast food intake each year, fast food products or more likely to have human hairs?

And you might never know about it. Think about the reported cases you hear of customers finding strands of hair in their fries, with all the hairs that possibly end up in your stomach at the end of the year you probably never even know about them.

Today's guest is actually famous for her work with exposing secrets of fast food restaurants and other restaurants. Bonnie Hari or the Food Babe has become very well known recent years for exposing things like azodicarbonamide and subway bread and artificial colors and flavors and chemicals in many food products around the world.

And I'm replaying an interview I did with her for the Wellness Family Summit which aired recently. If you'd like to see the rest of the presentations that aired during the Wellness Family Summit, you can go to wellnessfamily-submit.com and see the full line up there and enter your email to get some free bonuses.

But without further ado, here's Bonnie Hari and we chat about all things food and natural and her whole journey to health. So here we go.

Hi and welcome back to the Wellness Family Summit. I could not be more excited about today's guest. She is a personal friend and an incredibly inspiring human being. Bonnie Hari writes at the wildly popular blog FoodBabe.com and she has been on every major news outlet and has patitions successfully patitioned major companies to change the ingredients in their products with the help of her massive food babe army.

And what's even more amazing is that this all started as a personal journey for her and then now she's this amazing activist to help so many other people. So Bonnie, thank you so much for being here and welcome.

Hey, Katie, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me as part of the summit. It's amazing.

Awesome. So most of you will know that you are widely known as the food babe and you're doing some amazing things in spreading awareness of food ingredients.

But can we start at the beginning? Have you always been interested in health and real foods or was there a pivotal moment in your life that started this journey for you?

Well, I was actually more interested in candy and fast food from the majority of my life to tell you the truth. This healthy lifestyle has been minority in my lifetime if you can believe it or not.

But you know, I grew up as a typical American child, but I had two immigrant parents that didn't know how to cook American foods. So they relied heavily on processed packaged foods, fast foods and really wanted me and my brother to really fit in with everyone else around us and in Charlotte or Carolina where I grew up and where I live now.

And so they basically allowed us to eat whatever we wanted. And as a result, I had so many issues as a child. I had eggs in my asthma allergies, always had stomach aches, never felt well, never felt like I had a lot of energy.

I didn't really feel like I could even concentrate in school and didn't really understand that food was actually affecting my body negatively until I started to change my diet after a health scare in my early 20s where I was working for a big six consulting firm and working that rat race lifestyle and eating what everybody else around me was eating and trying to, you know,

continue to be successful in keeping up with all of my coworkers and getting into work before my boss got there and get leaving up on my boss left and trying to live in this very fast-paced culture.

And my health habits and everything just kind of went by the wayside. And so not only did I experience all these issues as I had as a child, but I started to experience more issues, which included weight gain and other stress-related issues.

And so when I had that health scare, when I had my appendix taken out, and I called it a health scare, appendicitis is like a lot of people think it's a really normal thing, it can happen to anybody.

It's a really minimal surgery, but you're getting an organ taken out of your body. And in my early 20s, having all these health issues, being on several prescription drugs and then having that happen to me, it was that breaking point that I said to myself,

you know, this is a life that I no longer want to live. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to look this way. And so I started to investigate what I had been doing with my body and investigate what I had been eating.

And I started to channel all this energy that I learned in high school when I was a top tiered ranked debater. And every year you get a topic. And one year's topic was health care. And every summer we would go away to debate camp where we learn how to research.

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