TWEET THIS
By Mark Alsip and Kavin Senapathy
Dr. Mark Hyman at a New York City event in 2014 (Photo by D Dipasupil/Getty Images)
The media brims with hyped headlines about chemicals and food additives, implying that food will harm our children, medicine will make us sick, or our favorite cosmetics are toxic. With headlines making huge leaps from research to ruckus, like “Contaminating Our Bodies With Everyday Products,” a New York Times op-ed that wrongly advises pregnant women to eat organic to avoid “toxic chemicals,” or “Toast and Cancer: The Potentially Scary Link,” a Yahoo Health headline that implies we should run from our breakfasts, chemical catastrophes seem to lurk around every corner.
The mainstream media is not alone in fueling fear fires when it comes to products we use every day. The very peddlers of so-called alternatives to popular foods, medicines and beauty products use words like “dangerous” and “toxic” to describe the contents of our pantries and medicine cabinets.
Famous food activist and blogger Vani Hari, better known as “The Food Babe,” alternative medicine mogul Dr. Joseph Mercola, and celebrity doctor and author Mark Hyman, who has served as a long time Clinton family advisor, have more than quackery (the promotion of non evidence-based health advice) in common. They are all “chemical hypocrites,” promoting or selling products containing one or more ingredients they’ve publicly condemned.
Vani “The Food Babe” Hari hawks harmful aluminum?
In her FoodBabe.com blog post “Throw This Out Of Your Bathroom Cabinet Immediately,” the famous food activist and blogging “babe” known for the impossible statement that “there is no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest ever,” implicates aluminum-based deodorants in causing serious maladies.
“I researched the ingredient Aluminum, and found out it is linked to all sorts of diseases, including 2 that I sadly personally have witnessed in close friends and family members – Breast Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease.”
For this reason, Hari recommends that her followers run, not walk, to buy deodorant without aluminum. Ostensibly for convenience alone, Hari provides Food Babe readers with four alternatives, including Naturally Fresh deodorant.
Clicking on the URL for Naturally Fresh, which she reports is her favorite choice from her “preferred” list, leads to an affiliate link from which Ms. Hari pockets a cut of profits, and the customer gets a nice dose of none other than aluminum, the element the blogger considers so risky.
The aluminum zirconium in the Secret brand anti-perspirant Hari advises ditching and the aluminum potassium sulfate (aka “potassium alum”) in Naturally Fresh brand deodorant are both just different compounds containing the very same element: aluminum, and to be clear, neither have been indicted in causing breast cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.
We can, however, indict the Food Babe in selling a deodorant with a chemical she claims will harm her readers.
Though some studies have suggested links between aluminum and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, there is no evidence showing a causal relationship between exposure to normal levels of the element in cosmetics and food and the diseases.
Importantly, the aluminum compound in the product Vani Hari sells is no safer than the aluminum in the deodorant she tells followers to run from.
“There is very little evidence comparing the toxicity of these two forms of aluminum,” explains Dr. Alison Bernstein, neuroscientist and science communicator also known as “Mommy PhD.” “Thus, [Hari] cannot make any evidence-based claim about the relative safety or risk from aluminum in either of these products based on current evidence,” the scientist and mom of two says. “In yet another case of misguided activism, she is leading fans to believe they are making safer choices with no evidence to actually support that claim.”
Joseph Mercola markets “toxic” mercury?
Joseph Mercola, a popular alternative medicine advocate and vaccination opponent who sells homeopathic and organic supplements at Mercola.com, proclaimed the “#1 most visited natural health website,” has interviewed and praised Vani Hari in his writing, and is known for hyperbolic condemnation of even small amounts of several “toxins” he loves to hate.
With over a million subscribers to Mercola’s “eHealthy News You Can Use” newsletter, over a million followers on Facebook, and as the author of books like Dr. Mercola’s Total Health Program and New York Times best-seller,The No-Grain Diet, the Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) has built an alternative medicine empire.
He has also built a growing fear of “toxins,” encouraging followers to avoid everything from aspartame to fluoride, and even vaccines, offering what he deems safe alternative options.
It’s important to note that in declaring certain additives or chemicals “toxic,” Mercola et. al ignore a central tenet of toxicology, “the dose makes the poison,” which dictates that all substances, from margaritas to magnesium, can be toxic at certain levels.
Mercola has written, for example, that mercury is “SO toxic” “that entire buildings have been evacuated for a mercury spill smaller than a standard dental filling.” Sounds pretty alarming, right? Funny then, that the Himalayan salt bearing Dr. Mercola’s name contains mercury, and other chemicals he declares are harmful in small amounts, like lead, aluminum and arsenic.
Regular old table salt, Mercola writes on his website, “is actually 97.5% sodium chloride and 2.5% chemicals such as moisture absorbents, and iodine.” He also warns that the “excessive heat” used to process table salt “alters the natural chemical structure of the salt.” Seems convincing enough to the average Mercola.com reader, who may not know that table salt is sodium chloride, an ionic compound with formula NaCl; the same formula of the fancier (read more expensive) rock salts and sea salts in specialty stores, which often also contain trace amounts of other elements when freshly mined.

Mercola doesn’t stop there with the mineral misinformation. “[T]he salt industry is successful in convincing you there are actually health advantages to adding potentially toxic iodine,” he laments. As a doctor, he must know that iodine is a crucial micronutrient in the human diet. First added to saltin the mid 1920s to mitigate the widespread incidence of goiter, an unsightly and life threatening enlargement of the thyroid, it also plays a crucial role in brain development.  
If Mercola is truly so opposed to iodine in salt, we wonder why iodine is one of the 84 elements he claims beneficial in his Himalayan salt, over a dozen of which he has declared unsafe or unsavory in some way, even in extremely minute amounts.  We requested the list of chemicals in the salt from Mercola.com, which among others lists iodine and aluminum, another element the salt’s advertising lambastes as a possible toxic element in “regular” table salt. (See the email from a Mercola.com representative here.)
Perhaps the naturopathic doc doesn’t expect Mercola.com visitors to check the composition of the products sold through his online store, and hopes the misleading rhetoric will convert readers into customers.  After a hefty helping of fear mongering, with claims that normal table salt causes everything from “unsightly cellulite” to arthritis, readers are taken to a link to order Dr. Mercola’s own “Healthy Chef” Himalayan Crystal Salt.
A 17.5 ounce container, which retails for $7.97 on Mercola.com and, according to the doctor, has “all its vibrational energy intact,” and “an amazing array of important trace minerals,” also delivers yet another so-called “toxic” element that the celebrity salesman doesn’t mention:  mercury.
To be clear, the listed mercury levels in Mercola’s Himalayan salt are low, as are levels of aluminum, fluoride, lead, antimony, thallium, arsenic, cadmium, polonium, and other allegedly toxic elements about which the good doctor has written verbose, alarmist essays in the past.
The question then becomes, is Dr. Mercola disingenuous in asserting that evacuation of an entire building over a tiny mercury spill is reasonable, or is he knowingly selling mercury, which he considers dangerous, in his salt? The final possibility is that he is unaware that his Himalayan vibrational salt contains mercury, in which case the doctor needs to more closely analyze the products he hawks for the toxins he hates.
Mercury is not dangerous below specific amounts, but can have deleterious effects on the brain, kidneys, and other organs at certain doses, which is why the US Environmental Protection Agency advises consuming no more than two meals of fish, the leading source of dietary mercury exposure, per week, especially for pregnant or nursing mothers. Though mercury toxicity is more nuanced than the “no known safe level of exposure for mercury” that Mercola parrots, there is no nuance to the Mercola.com mogul marketing salt with a dash of the neurotoxin he says must be avoided at all costs.
Mark Hyman cashes in on “controversial” carrageenan and caramel coloring?
So far, we’ve examined the chemical hypocrisy of Vani Hari, a self-proclaimed food activist, and Joseph Mercola, a medical doctor.  Now the activism and medical quackery worlds really collide: a medical doctor in cahoots with a fear mongering food activist.
Dr. Mark Hyman, a well-known alternative medicine proponent and number one New York Times bestselling author, who wrote the foreword to Vani Hari’s book, The Food Babe Way, congratulated her via Twitter in August of 2014 for her alleged role in a major company’s removal of the so-called “controversial” carrageenan, an ingredient derived from seaweed and used for its thickening properties, from their product line.
“BREAKING: Major Company Removing Controversial Ingredient Carrageenan Because Of You!”, the alternative medicine man tweeted, with a link to the Food Babe article of the same name. The irony is thicker than the dense, creamy ice creams that contain the ingredient, since carrageenan is clearly listed as an ingredient in Pure Encapsulations Neuromins, a dietary supplement claiming to assist in the development of mental and visual functions, featured in the Dr. Hyman online store.
Perhaps Dr. Hyman should follow his own advice from his Food Babe Wayforeword, where he praises Vani Hari for encouraging consumers to “read labels like an expert,” lauding her “stunning detective work” uncovering “toxins,” including none other than carrageenan, in our food system. What’s stunning here isn’t Vani Hari’s so-called detective work, or the carrageenan in the supplement Hyman sells, but his apparent disregard for the so-called harms of an additive he hates when it helps line his pockets.
The Neuromins supplement, which the drhyman.com store highly recommends for pregnant and lactating women, also contains another Hyman-condemned ingredient:  caramel coloring.  In February 2015, Hyman tweeted to more than a hundred thousand followers about the alleged cancer risk caramel color poses. The tweet linked to an article titled, “Popular soda ingredient, caramel color, poses cancer risk to consumers.” For only $114 per bottle, Hyman’s followers can purchase a product clearly labeled with two ingredients he has linked to cancer.

Despite Dr. Mark Hyman’s condemnation of the ingredients in the product he himself sells, there’s really no reason to fear Neuromins, besides the astronomical cost for a glorified bottle of DHA, a fatty acid found in fish and certain plant-based dietary components essential for nervous system development in babies. DHA supplements, which are sometimes recommended for pregnant and lactating women, or those with deficiencies in their diets, can be purchased for around $20 or less at most drug stores.  
The caramel coloring scare arises from hype over 4-Methylimidazole, a compound the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies as a Group 2B “possible carcinogen.”
It isn’t as frightening as it sounds: this group has not been shown to cause cancer in humans; there may be evidence it has caused cancer in animals in lab studies. Essentially, studies show that items in Group 2B may be theoretically capable of causing cancer, not that anyone exposed to these items may get cancer because of them. In the same category are pickled vegetables, coffee, talc body powder, and the carpentry profession. The story is similar for carrageenan: the hype over this polysaccharide, extracted from red seaweed, is over a degraded form not used in food grade products.
All of this begs the question: while caramel coloring and carrageenan in Neuromins pose no risk to the consumer, Dr. Mark Hyman has insisted they are harmful toxins. So why is he selling this product?
Take fear mongering from the “Tricky Trinity” with a grain of salt
To be clear, the only danger these products and the ingredients therein pose is to your wallet. In fact, aluminum, mercury, carrageenan, caramel coloring, and the vast majority of the chemicals, additives, and foods these alternative health and natural food moguls demonize have been evaluated by experts and shown to be safe at recommended consumption levels.  
Indeed, it might sound like we’re nitpicking ingredients from the products examined in this article.  Not so. We’re playing by their rules, evaluating their wares in the same manner that Hari, Mercola and Hyman scrutinize products they deem dangerous. And these are just a few examples of “chemical hypocrisy” from these salespeople; we’ve only provided a handful of several such instances for the sake of brevity.
Hari, Mercola, and Hyman have all claimed to fight the Big Bad Food Industry. Referring to “Big Food,” “Big Farming” and “Big Pharma” as the “Toxic Triad,” Hyman writes:
“[T]here is a way to turn the Toxic Triad into a Health Trinity. Through innovation and creativity we can create a new economy based on products and services that make people thin and healthy instead of sick and fat.”
But behind the caring facade; of protecting the public from so-called “toxins” lies a “Tricky Trinity,” namely the pair of natural medicine doctors and their blogging buddy, selling nothing more than a good feeling one alternative product at a time, many of which contain the very chemicals they hate. Make no mistake, the trio is slick at convincing readers to swap mainstream products for so-called healthy alternatives. It appears that either these fear mongers are cunningly disingenuous, or they fail miserably at due diligence.