The Food Babe Wants You To Eat Your Way To Better Skin

If you ask Vani Hari, known as the Food Babe, what her life looked like in her twenties, she would tell you about the eczema that painted itself over her skin and a face she would describe as inflamed. She would tell you about the nine prescription drugs she was taking, the two surgeries she had been through and a body fueled by the standard American diet.

“I felt awful. I felt like a zombie,” she says. “I was overweight. I felt depressed. I was not happy with my life.”

Today, this same person is a fervent food activist and New York Times bestselling author, was named one of Time‘s 30 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2015, and has grown her Instagram following to more than 2.2 million followers. It all traces back to the diet that unraveled her health.

In academic terms, the standard American diet (SAD), also called the Western pattern diet, describes more than bad eating habits. It’s a pattern built on foods that are rich in calories and poor in nutrients. Think processed and red meats, salt, refined grains and added sugars, with high-fructose corn syrup playing a major role.

But what’s missing matters just as much. Fiber, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts barely make an appearance. The result is a diet heavy in saturated fat and with far more omega-6s than omega-3s, a ratio researchers link to inflammation. And some research suggests that even swapping in whole-food versions of the same meals still leaves it short on fiber and key nutrients.

Hari’s own story is part of the American one. Her parents emigrated from India in the 1960s and trusted the US food supply completely. Both were teachers, processed food was cheap and everywhere, and they wanted their children to eat like Americans. “They just thought it was food,” she says.

So the surgeries acted as a wake-up call and led Hari to start looking at ingredient labels and educate herself about the SAD. Eventually, she rebuilt her diet around whole food and, over time, came off every prescription.

“My whole appearance changed,” she recalls of her post-surgical diet overhaul. “That in itself was proof to me that eating clean, eating real food, getting the chemicals out of your body can have an outstanding impact on beauty.” It was also this personal reckoning that became FoodBabe.com, forming a career in which she took on massive food companies and government policies.

Out today is her third cookbook, Food Babe Feast, a collection of her personal and family recipes tweaked to their cleanest versions, such as her mother’s gulab jamun recipe, but made organic.

Through the cookbook, and this interview, her message comes full circle: beauty starts from the inside out.

It’s an idea as old as medicine itself. Indeed, the connection between what you put in your body and how it shows up on your face is seen in millennia-old practices such as Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Somewhere between these ancient systems and now, beauty practices from the Greeks to the Elizabethans to the fads of the ’50s and ’80s were questionable. Both the Greeks and the Elizabethans used lead-based pigments on the face, while amphetamine diet pills were big in the ’50s and chemical perms in the ’80s. Beauty has a long history of trading health for looks.

Hari would argue (and has here) that we are still putting the same questionable chemicals on our faces, just disguised in clever packaging and sold to us through a web of confusing legislation.

She was a prophet of the dialogue that grew out of the 2000s, questioning the chemical practices of the food and beauty industries. Hari rose in an era shaped by the pioneering ethical brands of the late ’70s such as The Body Shop and Aveda, while Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, rocked the food narrative in the US. Then, Goop launched in 2008. Today, we’re in the era of SkinTok, plant-based retinol alternatives, and the Eat Your Skincare movement.

Her credentials come from activism, not a lab, and her methods have drawn plenty of debate over the years, but her influence is hard to dispute.

She gathered 350,000 signatures and led a seven-month campaign to remove artificial dyes from Kraft Mac & Cheese, and won, the win becoming a template for her fight against dyes in food. Ten years later, she spoke at the FDA’s April 2025 announcement of plans to remove petroleum-based dyes. She credited the move to a “massive grassroots campaign,” the kind of pressure she helped build. Her 2014 post on Starbucks’ lack of ingredient transparency drew more than 10 million views, and in 2015, Starbucks launched a reformulated Pumpkin Spice Latte made with real pumpkin and no caramel coloring.

For Hari, the real shift has been who gets to lead the conversation. Nutrition advice once came from experts on morning television, often next to paid product segments, she says. Social media changed that. “Now, because of social media, there’s a fairer playing field.”

Your Plate Shows Up On Your Face

Hari’s logic extends to what goes on the skin. On Food Babe she flags ingredients like parabens, formaldehyde releasers, talc and synthetic “fragrance,” and her shortcut for shoppers is simple: “Find a European product,” she says. “You’re going to have a lot less chemical toxins than you would if you buy an American product when it comes to cosmetics.”

Still, Hari’s beauty message is really a food message, and, for her, there are five main routes by which cutting additives and ultra-processed food changes how you look.

1. Calmer skin. “The preservatives in food can trigger dermatitis, they can trigger redness, they can trigger acne,” she says. In her experience, once preservatives are removed, skin irritation and inflammation may recede with them.

2. Antioxidants that protect collagen. Whole food delivers vitamins and minerals your body can actually absorb. She credits that nutrition with protecting collagen and slowing premature aging. “Literally, beauty is coming from the inside out.”

3. Hormones, hair and breakouts. This is the piece she thinks gets talked about least. Hari points to phthalates, BPA and the preservatives BHA and BHT as endocrine disruptors. Getting them out of your system, she argues, supports hormonal health, “which has a huge benefit to your hair,” to how skin ages, and to hormonal acne.

4. Hydration and glow. Ultra-processed food strips out natural fiber and water. The fiber added back in, she says, doesn’t behave like the fiber in an apple, which comes with its own juice. A diet heavy in whole and raw foods “can have a tremendous impact on the way your skin glows,” and on how supple and hydrated it looks.

5. Less sugar. “Sugar ages you,” she says flatly, and it is added to almost everything, including foods marketed as healthy. It sneaks in even in her own house: her husband recently brought home a ketchup lightly sweetened with organic honey. At three grams a tablespoon, and six tablespoons per child, she did the math. That is 18 extra grams of sugar at a meal where her kids would normally have none.

“Find a European product. You’re going to have a lot less chemical toxins than you would if you buy an American product when it comes to cosmetics.”

– Vani Hari, the Food Babe

Underpinning all five, in Hari’s opinion, is satiety. Whole food, full of minerals, nutrients and water, will naturally fill you up. On the other hand, ultra-processed food is engineered to make you eat more. After gaining 50 pounds during pregnancy, Hari says she never dieted and instead focused on eating whole food, allowing her weight to settle on its own. “The most simple thing that people can do is just eat real food. And it will solve a lot of these issues,” she says.

The calendar makes things worse, she says. Hari calls the seasonal display at the front of every supermarket “the holiday death aisle,” which now changes almost monthly –team colors for the Super Bowl, red and pink for Valentine’s Day, red, white and blue Oreos for the Fourth of July. “It’s constantly being marketed to you to take over your nostalgia and your sense of fun,” she says.

Food Babe Feast is Hari’s answer to the aisle. It follows her two other cookbooks, Food Babe Kitchen and Food Babe Family, and this time the focus is celebration–birthdays, school parties, game days and every holiday in between.

The point is not abstinence. The book has cut-out cookies, soft pretzels, pies, cakes and mini pizza bites, all made with whole ingredients. “You can still celebrate through food, but it can be healthy,” she says.

The woman who once felt like a zombie now hands out her prescription in recipe form. “Instead of buying something from that aisle,” she says, “open up my book instead.”

To start, here’s one of her favorites from Food Babe Feast: a creamy roasted butternut squash soup rich in antioxidants and vitamin A, the kind of nutrients she credits for skin that glows from the inside out.

CREAMY ROASTED BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP

This is one of those soups that makes the whole kitchen smell amazing and feels a little fancy without any effort. Butternut squash is loaded with antioxidants, fiber, and vitamin A—and when you roast it until it’s caramelized, it turns into the most silky, comforting base for a soup (so much better than anything out of a carton or can!). Serve it in small bowls or little mugs as a beautiful opener to any special meal.

Makes 4 servings
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 59 to 75 minutes
Total Time: 74 to 90 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

• ½ medium yellow onion, diced

• ½ teaspoon ground ginger

• 2 cups chicken bone broth

• ½ teaspoon sea salt, plus more to taste

• ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Cut the butternut squash in half lengthwise, and place face down on a baking sheet. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until fork tender. Discard the seeds; scoop out the insides and set aside.

3. Heat the oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add the carrots, celery, onion, and garlic and cook for 4 to 5 minutes.

4. Stir in the butternut squash, sage, thyme, ginger, chicken broth, salt, pepper, and coconut milk.

5. Bring to a boil. Then reduce heat and simmer until the flavors have combined, roughly 20 to 25 minutes.

6. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup. Alternatively, let the soup cool slightly and carefully puree in batches in a blender. Serve warm.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com