Activist Food Babe shames Anheuser-Busch to disclose beer ingredients in search for GMOs

Vani Hari, the blogger known as Food Babe, is an internet food activist who recently achieved one of her most high profile coups to date. She got international brewing titans Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors to list the ingredients of their most popular beers online. (Spoiler alert: It’s mostly water, barley malt, corn, yeast, and hops).

What’s amazing is the speed at which she extracted a response from two of the biggest beer manufacturers in the world—Anheuser-Busch responded directly to the Food Babe within two days of her launching an online petition, which currently has more than 55,800 signatures.

The petition follows one of Hari’s blog post from last year, clickbaitingly-titled The Shocking Ingredients in Beer, in which she points out that brewers are not required to list their ingredients on labels and investigates some of the constituent elements used in certain brands. She points to the use of GMO corn, natural and artificial coloring, preservatives, and animal derived products like gelatin.

Her populist crusading has drawn strong criticism, however. In a thorough and factual takedown of both her original beer post and recent petition, surgical oncologist and academic David Gorski calls Hari the Jenny McCarthy of food, alluding to McCarthy’s public but scientifically questionable assertions that vaccines can cause autism. In a piece for Science Based Medicine, he condemns the Food Babe for “peddling pseudoscience” as well as using “scary chemical names” as propaganda, especially in her petition video. He writes:

“Her strategy is very transparent, but unfortunately it’s also very effective: Name a bunch of chemicals and count on the chemical illiteracy of your audience to result in fear at hearing their very names.”

Read the full, original article: How a food blogger got the top beer titans to list their ingredients

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