472: Anna Vocino—Eat Happy

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

History, Society & Culture

4.9 • 40.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 117 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike sits down with comedian, voiceover pro, cookbook author, and culinary entrepreneur, Anna Vocino. Anna shares how her Eat Happy journey—from her bestselling cookbooks Eat Happy, Eat Happy Too, and Eat Happy Italian to her podcast Fitness Confidential—grew out of personal health struggles and a lot of hustle. She also pulls back the curtain on her voiceover career and explains why getting a food product onto grocery store shelves is a lot harder than most people think. It's a candid conversation about creativity, rejection, persistence, and what it really takes to turn passion into product.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It is the way I heard it, and I'm still Mike Rowe, and my guest today is Anna Vocino.
0:11.2	And it's certainly possible that listeners Chuck have heard her name invoked in prior episodes.
0:18.3	Yes, 100%, probably with a fellow by the name of Vinnie Tortorich.
0:23.6	No sugar, no grain.
0:25.6	It is a drumbeat that I first heard on this podcast, I don't know, a few years back.
0:32.6	I've been aware that sugar's bad.
0:35.6	I know that grains are not great. I do believe that the food pyramid
0:40.9	was in fact among the great lies foisted upon the great unwashed. And I bought it and a lot of
0:49.0	people grew up with it. And it's just extraordinary to me how long it's going to take, how slowly perceptions and beliefs, how long it takes for them to unravel.
1:01.7	Yeah. But I think they're unraveling quicker and quicker nowadays. I think a lot of people are aware that seed oils are bad. I think a lot of people are getting the idea that, you know, that your cooking utensils
1:14.3	should not have a coating on it that's, that you can scrape off.
1:19.3	Stuff like that.
1:20.2	Stuff.
1:20.8	Yeah.
1:21.2	Well, you know, Vinnie spoke very highly of Anna because she's basically his co-host and she was his producer for a long time.
1:29.9	Right, right. And that's, what is that called?
1:33.0	Was it fitness confidential?
1:34.4	Fitness confidential, yes.
1:35.9	Yeah. And so I've been meaning to have her on for a long time because I got her cookbook.
1:41.8	And her cookbook is very popular in my little house. It's called
1:46.4	Eat Happy, which is what we're calling this episode as well. And I really like her
1:52.4	philosophy a lot. You know, it's not about counting carbs. It's not about weighing things. It's
	...

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