Unhealthy truth: Is our food making us sick?

Think you know all there is to know about what you put in your mouth? In the new book “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It,” author Robyn O’Brien — known as the “Erin Brockovich of the food industry” — exposes hidden dangers in the seemingly safe ingredients we feed our children and families. O'Brien reveals the shocking manipulation of food and how it affects all consumers. Read an excerpt:

Chapter 2
Becoming the allergy detective
It was a relief to get Tory home from the doctor that first day, but my re­lief was short-lived. Since my baby had three lively older siblings ages three through five, I knew that I couldn’t completely control her food in­take, however much I wanted to. I was desperate to protect her from her brothers and sister, especially from three-year-old John. But I could see after our first little talk that John remained oblivious, and so my desper­ation grew.

The more I thought about it, the more anxious I became. Sure, Tory was just a year old, so other than an occasional babysitter, Jeff and I were pretty much the only ones who fed her. But what would happen when she got even a little older? I had been totally clueless about allergies just a week ago, so how could I send her out into a world of adults and chil­dren who might be offering her food, at an age when she was barely able to say her name, let alone to explain that there were foods she couldn’t eat? What if one day she didn’t remember that she wasn’t allowed to have eggs, or didn’t realize that hidden eggs were lurking inside, say, an Eggo waffle or a slice of birthday cake?

I didn’t want my daughter to grow up fearful, the need to explain her allergies foremost in her mind. But I hated the thought of her being so vulnerable. And the Mama Bear in me simply would not accept that there were limits to my ability to safeguard my child. There had to be some way to warn her and her siblings away from “danger foods,” some way to eventually carry that message out to her preschool, the church nursery, her friends’ birthday parties ...

I wondered if there might be some kind of universal symbol that other parents used to protect their kids, something I could use to protect my daughter from her siblings. Once again, Mama Bear provided the impe­tus and Research Wonk provided the means as I jumped onto the computer, searching for ways that other parents had handled this problem. Obviously, I was hoping for a magic bullet, but a universal symbol would have to do.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t one. No matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find any hint of a sign or symbol used to indicate that a food might be dangerous to a kid who had allergies. There wasn’t even any symbol for “allergies” in general — no equivalent of, say, the pink ribbon for breast cancer.

I had to wait three weeks for an appointment with the allergist, and that was just more inaction than I could bear. At least creating a warn­ing sign was something I could do, some way I could at least tell myself that I was protecting my daughter. So I began to sketch my own.

Almost immediately, I thought of a stop sign, a symbol that would cue people to STOP before feeding Tory so they could find out what she could and couldn’t eat. Wouldn’t that be a good idea? We could put a  stop-sign sticker on foods in our house that Tory couldn’t eat, and that would help my other kids know what might be safe to give her. Or I could slap a sticker on a brown paper bag when I sent Tory to school with her lunch, to remind her classmates to stop and think before they offered her food. If I couldn’t be there to talk for her, then maybe the stop sign could.

With a pile of scratch paper and a jar full of crayons, I eventually came up with a green stop sign bearing an exclamation point. The bright-green octagon seemed like an easy,  kid-friendly way to get children to stop and pay attention, something that would grab their interest but wouldn’t be scary or make Tory feel bad. I had grown up with fluorescent green “Mr. Yuck!” stickers denoting poisons under the kitchen sink, so the color seemed like something everybody could recognize and understand. It had been a roller coaster of a day, but as I fell into bed that night, I some­how felt better. Finally, something I could do to protect Tory.

The next morning, when Jeff came in to breakfast, he thought the symbol was terrific. Then I shared with him a thought that had been slowly nudging its way into my brain.

“You know, Jeff, it’s been unbelievably difficult finding information about allergies — there are several Web sites out there, sure, but they all seem to have the same three paragraphs, sometimes even word for word. It’s driving me crazy. What if —”

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I took a deep breath to give myself courage. After all, we had just had four kids in five years. Wasn’t this sweet man due for a break?

“What if I started a Web site to provide free information about food al­lergies?”

In retrospect, I can’t even remember how long we talked about this idea or how long it took me to develop a plan. I only knew that the idea seemed to take shape with dizzying speed. A few years earlier, I’d helped Jeff start his own financial services company, so I already knew how to register a business name and a domain name and to file the paperwork with the state. After a few days of research, I decided that my new Web site would be called AllergyKids.

As Jeff and I talked through the details, I realized once again what a remarkable man I had married. He had supported my compulsive devo­tion to business school and had encouraged me to save every dime I had earned as an equity analyst. Now he suggested that I take those savings and use them to launch AllergyKids.

I loved the idea of giving parents a quick and easy way to get the free information they so desperately needed. But Jeff and I could only fund this project for so long; then, somehow, the idea would have to be  self-supporting. I was committed to providing free information to any parent who wanted it. But how could I make this operation self-funding?

My second idea dawned as I stared at the stop-sign symbol: I could make stickers. I couldn’t be the only mom who wanted to label  allergy­safe food for her kids. In fact, maybe we could sell other products that parents needed, like tags for kids’ backpacks and special lunch boxes.

I conducted the first of what would be many online focus groups by sending out a quick e-mail query to a few trusted friends. Within a few hours, I’d gotten the “go for it” response I had been hoping for. Over the next few weeks, after hearing from a dad who hated having to carry his kids’ allergy meds in his wife’s cosmetic bag, we came up with a little medical case for carrying EpiPens, the  single-dose injectors of epineph­rine that many children used as an emergency treatment for an anaphy­lactic reaction. And for parents who were traveling with their kids, we designed a computerized wristband that could be used anytime, any­where, to access their children’s medical records. The project seemed to fill a real need, helping both Tory and the thousands of “allergy kids” who shared her condition.

But my biggest interest was in promoting the green stop sign as a uni­versal allergy symbol. I hoped the symbol could maybe bring about a truce in what I’d come to think of as the “ peanut- butter battle.”

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably seen it, too. The parents with al­lergic kids want to protect their children by banning certain foods from the lunchrooms. The parents of “regular” kids don’t see why they and their children should have to suffer just because some children have spe­cial needs. I’d been firmly in the second camp, rolling my eyes at the al­lergy parents and mindful of the fact that two of my kids ate only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I sure wasn’t interested in having “food fights” with my kids or in broadening my culinary repertoire.

But now my doctor had told me to protect Tory from a potential peanut allergy by not exposing her to peanuts in any form. Those PB&Js that Lexy and John adored now seemed like loaded weapons, pointing straight at Tory.

With the new battle lines drawn at my own kitchen table, I could fi­nally see both sides. Of course the “food-allergy” parents were terrified that their kids might be offered peanut butter, egg salad, milk — foods that could make their children sick or even kill them. Of course the “ non­allergy” parents were frustrated by the various restrictions imposed on their kids’ diets or by learning to make new foods. Wasn’t it hard enough packing lunches every day without accommodating other people’s chil­dren?

Maybe my new symbol could help bring both groups together. Maybe it could enable non- allergy kids to bring in whatever lunches they wanted while the green stop sign on the allergy kids’ lunch boxes reminded every­one to stop and think before they shared food. Maybe my new symbol could help educate children, teachers, and even parents, creating a safer, friendlier environment for everybody. If we could find a common solu­tion, I thought, then we could all have our cake and eat it, too.

But I wasn’t just thinking about parents and children. With my MBA background, I was also wondering how I could engage the business com­munity. After all, in our society, it’s the corporations who have the money. To create a national awareness of this problem, we would need to have them on our side. What incentive could I provide to engage them?

I had learned on the trading floor that corporations tend to pay atten­tion and are a lot easier to engage if there is money to be made. Though some nonprofits do a fabulous job of fund- raising, I didn’t want to com­pete with them — business was my area of expertise, not nonprofits. What if I designed a business model whose mission was to fund a cure for food allergies?

Inspired by the way Paul Newman had started Newman’s Own to sup­port environmental and other causes, I decided to operate AllergyKids along the same lines, with my own profits funding research and educa­tion on food allergies. I also thought that a for-profit model would engage the business community not just as donors but as partners, with forward-thinking food companies and grocery stores licensing my symbol and maybe even developing new allergy- safe food lines targeting this growing segment of the population.

As my idea took shape, I realized that plenty of businesses were al­ready capitalizing on what I now saw as a — sadly — growing market. I’d heard of parents who had started allergen- free cupcake and cookie com­panies, and I would soon come to know women who had published chil­dren’s books and cookbooks, or whose companies made EpiPens and similar products for allergic kids. I was happy to think that I, too, could help raise money for the cause, with every extra nickel going back to fund research and the spread of information.

Providing information was especially important to me, since the largest and most respected of the food- allergy nonprofits, the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), wouldn’t provide more than the most basic information until you paid its $75 membership fee. I joined, of course, and I respected the good work that FAAN was doing. But I didn’t understand how they could insist that parents pay for information.

The way I saw it, if my kids were at risk, anybody’s kids could be at risk. And if something could help my kids, maybe it could help other children, too. Weren’t we all working for the same goal?

When I first broached the idea with Jeff in our kitchen, I had no idea where founding AllergyKids was going to lead me. But I guess I knew, even then, that there was no way I was going on this journey all by my­self. Somehow, some way, a lot of other folks were going to be part of it.

Becoming “The Allergy Detective”

I’ll be honest: one of the scariest experiences of my life was finding out that Tory had a food allergy. I understood — intellectually, at least — that what she had was probably not life-threatening. And when the allergist finally confirmed that she was allergic to eggs, I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least now I knew what to protect her from.

But along with the relief, I was terribly frightened. During that first visit, the specialist had also told me that Tory’s allergic reaction meant that she was at an increased risk for other food allergies and maybe for asthma as well. As I listened to the confusing, contradictory advice that the allergist laid out for me, I felt as though my head was going to ex­plode. Raising four kids was hard enough. Was I really up to these new demands?

Beneath the fear, of course, was guilt — an overflowing, super-sized portion of what I now think of as Mama Guilt, the feeling that perhaps without even realizing it, you’ve done something that has damaged the life of your child. That guilt had kicked in six months into motherhood, when Lexy, my oldest, got her first fever. Suddenly I realized that another human being was completely dependent on what I chose to do. How had I let her get sick? Had I fed her something that was bad for her? Let her teethe on something dirty? Taken her to the wrong park? Put her in the church nursery when other sick kids were there?

If you’ve got kids, you know exactly what I’m talking about, realizing that every choice you make could profoundly affect your child’s life. Al­though it was tough to shake the feeling that I was somehow responsi­ble for Tory’s illness, a larger part of me kept wondering: What is behind the new allergy epidemic? That was the question that plagued me. And when I finally started finding answers, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t too happy with them. It began to seem that this new epidemic was the sign of deeper problems with our health and our food supply — and, ultimately, with our political and economic system.

The environmental hypothesis
The first thing I discovered is that many experts have simply thrown up their hands in despair. In “Food Allergies for Dummies,” for example, au­thor and respected pediatric allergist Robert Wood, MD, admits that “No one really knows ... what’s causing this apparent sudden rise in food allergies.”

There is some evidence that food allergies have a genetic basis. Ac­cording to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, if one parent has an allergy, his or her child has a one in three chance of also being al­lergic, while if two parents have allergies, their children’s chance of being allergic are as high as 70 percent.

However, the children and parents don’t necessarily share the same al­lergies. For example, a parent might have hay fever, while the child de­velops a peanut allergy. According to Dr. Andrew Saxon, chief of clinical immunology at UCLA, “The human race hasn’t changed that much ge­netically in the last 200 years.”

So if our genes haven’t changed, then the epidemic must be caused by our environment. What has changed there?

One possibility is that such environmental pollutants as diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke are contributing to the rise of allergies. According to the research conducted by Saxon and his colleague David Diaz-Sanchez, environmental pollution is closely linked to the allergy epidemic.

Another possibility is suggested by Dr. Kenneth Bock. In his book Healing the New Childhood Epidemics, he argues that children are ex­posed to increasing levels of toxins, heavy metals, and pollutants. When I spoke with him, he added that the increased levels of environmental toxins are almost certainly throwing our immune systems out of balance.

As Dr. Bock explains it, our immune systems include powerful com­ponents known as T helper cells. I think of these T helper cells as the Terminator Team, including both the friendly, helpful “good cops” and the stern, get-the-job-done “tough cops.”

T helper cell 1, or TH1, is the good cop. Only instead of helping lit­tle old ladies across the street, it focuses on the health of our other cells, protecting them against viruses, fungi, and cancer.

T helper cell 2, or TH2, is the tough cop, the one that gets angry and beats up on any substance that the body considers a toxic invader. As we saw in chapter 1, these toxic invaders include bacteria as well as other­wise harmless allergens, such as dust (in the case of asthma sufferers), pollen (for those with hay fever), and certain types of food (for people with food allergies).

In Dr. Bock’s opinion, the surge in environmental pollution has led to a severe imbalance in our immune systems, skewing them too far in the direction of the “tough cop” TH2 function. Instead of accurately reading the potential dangers in the environment, these “skewed” immune sys­tems are far too quick to overreact, just like a jumpy tough cop who pulls out his weapon and shoots at a backfiring car or a falling box.

“An allergic reaction is your body overreacting to something that it shouldn’t react to,” Dr. Bock explains. “These extra toxins create an im­mune environment that is more prone to that overreactivity.” Or, as I saw it, too many tough cops on the beat, too much outrage and inflammation in the streets.

Although Dr. Bock’s explanation of immune function is pretty stan­dard, he’s one of the few scientists to link the immune system to the al­lergy epidemic in that particular way. But he does go along with the most commonly offered explanation for the allergy epidemic, which is known — misleadingly, in my opinion — as the hygiene hypothesis.

Understanding the Hygiene Hypothesis, or “Is My House Really Too Clean?”

The hygiene hypothesis was first proposed by researcher David P. Stra­chan in a 1989 article published in the British Medical Journal. Since this was years before the food allergy epidemic, Strachan wasn’t looking specifically at food allergies but rather at the common allergic conditions of hay fever and eczema. He noticed that these diseases were more com­mon in smaller families than in big ones, even though you’d think it would be the opposite: the more kids per family, the more chances a child has to be exposed to an infection. Why, then, were the kids with fewer exposures getting sick more often?

Strachan thought that perhaps the exposure itself was helpful. The kids from the bigger families, he reasoned, were indeed exposed to more infections — and so had more chances to build up their immune systems.

Since 1989, scientists have used the hygiene hypothesis to explain why allergies became far more prevalent after industrialization, and why they’re currently more common in industrialized countries than in rural ones. They claim that our kids simply aren’t being exposed to enough dirt, animals, and good old- fashioned germs.

Excerpted from “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It” by Robyn O’Brien. Copyright (c) 2009, reprinted with permission from Random House.