Robyn O’Brien: Fighting for Allergy Children

Although in quite a dif­fer­ent man­ner, Robyn O’Brien is just as improb­a­ble a hero­ine. “I am an unlikely cru­sader,” she told Organic Connections. “I wasn’t a foodie. I was born and raised in Houston on Twinkies and Po’ Boys. I trusted that if it was on gro­cery store shelves it was safe.”

This is the same woman who, just a few short years later, after being threat­ened with a cease-and-desist let­ter from a vested inter­est, said to her chil­dren one morn­ing, “Mommy is going to have to fight for this. I have learned that kids around the world don’t have the same chem­i­cals in their foods that you guys have been eat­ing, and I want to help pro­tect the health of the children.”

How she got there is quite an amaz­ing story.

From Mom to Crusader

A major achiever, Robyn grad­u­ated from busi­ness school with an MBA, the top woman in her class. She received a Fulbright grant to study in France. With all that behind her, she went to work as a Wall Street ana­lyst on a team that man­aged bil­lions in assets dur­ing the dot-com craze.

Living what would seem to most a charmed life, Robyn and her hus­band decided to relo­cate to Colorado after the birth of their first child, when her hus­band accepted a posi­tion with a tech firm there. “We set­tled into par­ent­hood with kind of the same energy that I’d always thrown at life,” Robyn related. “We had four kids in five years.”

Then came the morn­ing that was to be the cat­a­lyst that changed the rest of her life. “We had kids who liked peanut but­ter and jelly, and I didn’t really want any­one telling me what to feed my kids,” Robyn said. “Then one morn­ing over break­fast, my fourth child had an aller­gic reac­tion. I was so flat-footed, I had no idea what was going on; I hon­estly thought maybe the older three had put some­thing in her face. I raced her to the pedi­a­tri­cian and she asked what I had served my daugh­ter for break­fast. I told her, but she said, ‘The aller­gens are eggs, dairy, wheat, soy, peanuts and nuts, so she could have been aller­gic to any of those things. We don’t know what she’s aller­gic to.’”

Robyn jumped in and began study­ing the sub­ject of aller­gies in earnest. She hadn’t known any chil­dren her­self who had food aller­gies, so she began exam­in­ing sta­tis­tics. She learned that from 1997 to 2002 there had been a dou­bling of the peanut allergy, that one out of sev­en­teen chil­dren under the age of three now had a food allergy, and that accord­ing to the Centers for Disease Control there had been a 265 per­cent increase in the rate of hos­pi­tal­iza­tions related to food aller­gies. “Those are just jaw-dropping sta­tis­tics,” said Robyn. “With a back­ground in finance and sta­tis­tics, I couldn’t under­stand what was going on.”

She began reach­ing out to var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions to help cre­ate aware­ness on these issues. She didn’t get much response, so she talked her hus­band into tak­ing some of their kids’ col­lege money and invest­ing it into an orga­ni­za­tion that could help iden­tify and pro­tect these chil­dren. On Mother’s Day 2006 AllergyKids was launched, and it was met with great ini­tial recep­tion and press cov­er­age. A month after launch, Robyn appeared on CNN. It looked like things were going well—but almost imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the broad­cast she started get­ting neg­a­tive reac­tions from orga­ni­za­tions that should have been her allies.

“As I started to get national recog­ni­tion, some of the larger food allergy non-profits sort of had an aller­gic reac­tion to me,” Robyn recounted. “I thought that per­haps I wasn’t con­vey­ing the mis­sion right; that they just needed to under­stand that I was try­ing to sup­port, fund and advance their research. But they got pretty aggres­sive in their dis­mis­sive­ness of me, and one of them actu­ally ended up send­ing me a cease-and-desist let­ter. I took it to my attor­ney, and he said that it was an intim­i­da­tion tac­tic and told me I should do cer­tain things. I told him no, that I needed him to back off because I first wanted to know why they were try­ing to intim­i­date or push out a mother of four who’s try­ing to pro­tect children.

“With that, I decided to pull their finan­cial state­ments. I learned that this food allergy non-profit based in Washington, DC, was actu­ally funded by Kraft and Monsanto.”

Shades of Erin Brockovich indeed.

Researching the Truth

At the time, Robyn had never heard of Monsanto, and Kraft was the com­pany that made the mac­a­roni and cheese her chil­dren were so fond of. So, she con­tin­ued her research into aller­gies and their explo­sive growth.

“I learned that a food allergy is when your body sees food as a for­eign pro­tein,” Robyn explained. “Your body launches an inflam­ma­tory response to drive out that for­eign invader. I went down the list of aller­gens and found that milk allergy, accord­ing to CNN and the Wall Street Journal, is the top allergy in the United States. I won­dered if there was some­thing for­eign in the milk that hadn’t been there years ear­lier. And I was absolutely stunned when I learned that in 1994, in order to enhance prof­itabil­ity for the dairy indus­try, they began to inject cows with a growth hor­mone called rBGH to make the cows pro­duce more milk.

“As an ana­lyst, I under­stood that such a move would drive profit and enhance rev­enue. But, at the same time, I was learn­ing that gov­ern­ments around the world were point­ing out that rBGH had never been proven safe. Canada, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand had decided not to allow it into their cheese or into their milk because of con­cerns of how it made ani­mals sick, result­ing in increased use of antibi­otics in the ani­mals. Additionally, a 1996 med­ical jour­nal arti­cle reported that milk with rBGH has up to ten times the amount of a hor­mone known as IGF-1 that reg­u­lar milk has (more recent stud­ies put the fig­ure even higher). Relatively small increases of this hor­mone were reported in a 1998 arti­cle in the pres­ti­gious British med­ical jour­nal the Lancet to make breast can­cer seven times more likely in pre­menopausal women. Despite the mount­ing con­tro­versy, the US still allows rBGH to be injected into cows. I then won­dered if the US had higher rates of can­cer than other devel­oped coun­tries. I went to the American Cancer Society and learned that the US has the high­est rate of can­cer of any coun­try in the world, and that migra­tion stud­ies showed that if you were to move here from some­where like Japan, your like­li­hood of devel­op­ing can­cer would increase fourfold.

“At that point there were nights when I was putting my kids to bed and I thought, ‘How many sippy cups have I filled with this stuff? And how many bowls of cereal have I poured?’ And I wasn’t told what moms around the world, in coun­tries other than the US, had already been told.

“I then con­tin­ued on down the list of aller­gies and came to soy: had we done some­thing to soy? I dis­cov­ered that in the 1990s, again in order to drive prof­itabil­ity for the live­stock indus­try (soy is one of the feeds used to fat­ten cat­tle), it was engi­neered to have a high sugar content.”

Next on the list: allergy to corn, which Robyn had also seen many con­cerns about. She learned that, due to grow­ing con­cern on the spray­ing of insec­ti­cide in corn­fields, sci­en­tists had genet­i­cally engi­neered an insec­ti­ci­dal pro­tein into the DNA of a corn seed so that as the plant grew it could release its own insec­ti­cide. As a result it was no longer reg­u­lated under the FDA but, as an insec­ti­cide, was now under the EPA. Robyn found that other coun­tries had either not allowed genet­i­cally mod­i­fied corn into the food sup­ply or, at the very least, insisted on it being labeled so that con­sumers could make an informed choice.

Building a Team

While her research con­tin­ued, Robyn went look­ing for friends, allies and team mem­bers other than her own fam­ily, as she knew she’d need them. When she checked into who had pub­licly expressed seri­ous con­cern regard­ing genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops, the first per­son Robyn came upon was Nell Newman, daugh­ter of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and founder of Newman’s Own Organics. She reached out to Nell, who responded and even­tu­ally became an advi­sor, friend and mem­ber of Robyn’s “Inspiration Team.”

As she had already been com­pared to Erin Brockovich, it was rec­om­mended that she also reach out to Ms. Brockovich. “I don’t know if I expected to really hear back from Erin, but like Nell she replied, and it was so inspir­ing. This is such an enor­mous story—the scope of the prob­lem, the lack of trans­parency, the lack of full dis­clo­sure, and the fact that we sim­ply hadn’t been told what many eaters around the world had already been told. We weren’t given the oppor­tu­nity to make an informed choice. So to then have peo­ple like Nell and Erin get in my cor­ner was just amazing.”

It didn’t stop there. She received the sup­port of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., plus sev­eral other notable names. And she now has an exec­u­tive direc­tor in Seleyn DeYarus, for­mer Development Director for The Organic Center, a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to fur­ther­ing sci­en­tific research on the health ben­e­fits of reduc­ing our expo­sure to the chem­i­cals and syn­thetic ingre­di­ents in our food supply.

AllergyKids also has a highly qual­i­fied med­ical advi­sory team, which includes Dr. Bob Sears, noted author and one of the most trusted names in pedi­atrics; pedi­atric neu­ro­tox­i­col­o­gist Dr. Kenneth Bock, who has con­ducted crit­i­cal and highly rec­og­nized research into asthma, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), autism and aller­gies; Dr. Joel Fuhrman, whose research on diet and health is relied upon by cor­po­ra­tions around the coun­try; and Dr. Roy Steinbock, a fam­ily pedi­a­tri­cian who focuses on the root cause of prob­lems and aims to sup­port his patients’ nat­ural abil­ity to heal.

AllergyKids Today

Today, AllergyKids Foundation is mov­ing full steam ahead and much of their plen­ti­ful research can be found on their excel­lent web­site. There, par­ents can learn the lat­est news on aller­gies, vac­ci­na­tions and much more. Last year Robyn pub­lished a book enti­tled The Unhealthy Truth, in which she details the alarm­ing rela­tion­ship between the manip­u­la­tion of our food and the increase in dan­ger­ous aller­gies in our chil­dren and can­cers in our fam­i­lies, and offers a straight­for­ward road map to healthy living.

Through her book and her research Robyn con­tin­ues to doc­u­ment the star­tling rise in aller­gies, which par­al­lels tox­ins intro­duced into our food and envi­ron­ment. But it goes beyond allergies—she has dis­cov­ered that one in three chil­dren has either aller­gies, asthma, autism or symp­toms of ADHD.

“There is too much evi­dence in sup­port of the coin­ci­dence of these fac­tors,” Robyn said. “We’re sur­rounded by these envi­ron­men­tal insults that weren’t part of the envi­ron­ment 30 years ago, and the debate’s still out. Is it the vac­cines? Is it the food? Is it the envi­ron­ment? There are so many the­o­ries, I feel to dis­miss any of them is irresponsible—particularly to not address the tox­ins that are in the food sup­ply here in the US, given that the World Cancer Report recently stated that 85 per­cent of can­cers are envi­ron­men­tally triggered.”

One inter­est­ing fac­tor that has turned up in her research deals with ADHD—the sub­ject of much con­tro­versy and ques­tion­able drug treat­ments. “There’s a study out of the UK called the Southampton Study, first con­ducted about eight years ago,” Robyn explained. “It was very con­clu­sive. It was a double-blind study show­ing how syn­thetic ingredients—artificial col­ors like yel­low num­ber 5, sodium ben­zoate and some other ingredients—contribute to hyper­ac­tiv­ity in kids. They did a follow-on study seven years later that was so com­pelling that Kraft, Walmart and Coca-Cola decided to vol­un­tar­ily remove the ingre­di­ents that were cited in that study from the prod­ucts that they sold over­seas. Kraft and Coca-Cola made dif­fer­ent prod­ucts for eaters over­seas, and in my own research I high­light how the Kraft spokesman in the UK said that Kraft UK does not have a lunch­able prod­uct line that con­tains any of these ingre­di­ents.

“What’s stun­ning to me is to see these cor­po­ra­tions move vol­un­tar­ily ahead of any leg­is­la­tion on the over­whelm­ing strength of these stud­ies and the response that con­sumers had to them. It’s kind of depress­ing that our American cor­po­ra­tions are refor­mu­lat­ing their prod­ucts over­seas and not here. But at the same time, it’s really an edu­ca­tion cam­paign so that they can know that we know.

“We dereg­u­lated our finan­cial sys­tem and we ended up with toxic assets,” Robyn con­cluded. “We dereg­u­lated the food sys­tem and we’ve ended up with toxic assets. It’s time to set it straight. If gov­ern­ments around the world are actu­ally doing a bet­ter job, using this pre­cau­tion­ary approach to try to pre­vent ill­ness, to try to pre­vent onset of dis­eases in their coun­tries, we don’t have to wait to imple­ment that here in the US; we can do the same thing. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to start with the pub­lic them­selves get­ting edu­cated. You can learn about the haz­ardous ele­ments, wean your kids off them, and before you know it you’ll have really started to clear a lot of these chem­i­cals out of your family’s diet.”

To tap into Robyn’s research and learn more, visit the AllergyKids web­site at www.allergykids.com.

You can order Robyn’s book, The Unhealthy Truth, from the Organic Connections book­store.