With food allergies and recalls on the rise, it’s easy to worry about every bite your child takes.
Robyn O’Brien was cooking breakfast for her children in January 2006 when she fed her 9-month-old daughter eggs for the first time. An ordinary meal quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal: Tory’s face began to swell and turn bright red before her mother’s eyes. Soon after, Tory was diagnosed with food allergies, and O’Brien grew determined to understand how childhood staples like eggs, peanuts, and milk could have set off allergies in her baby — and in 3 million other kids in this country.
Her concerns aren’t unfounded: According to a 2008 report from the Centers for Disease Control, the prevalence of food allergies in children increased 18 percent between 1997 and 2007. Meanwhile, food recalls are more common now than ever before, as evidenced by all the scary headlines about contaminated tomatoes, peanut butter, and pistachios. O’Brien’s investigation into why this might be happening — detailed in her new book, The Unhealthy Truth — convinced her that she needed to reduce her kids’ exposure to potentially harmful chemicals in their food. That’s something we’d all like to do, but how’s a regular mom supposed to play part-time nutritionist? O’Brien spoke to REDBOOK about simple ways we can clean up kids’ diets without losing our perspective — or our minds.
How did you even start to tackle all this research, and what did you learn?
My background is in motherhood — I have four children between the ages of 4 and 9 — but also in finance. So I began to look into the numbers. I discovered that since the 1990s, this country has been adding genetically modified organisms [GMOs] to its food supply. That means some of our food has had foreign proteins inserted into it, for many different reasons. For the past 15 years, for instance, much of our milk has come from cows injected with a hormone called rBGH to increase their milk production. And 80 percent of our corn now contains an insecticide so we lose less crop to pests. I wonder whether a child with allergies might be reacting to those foreign proteins. As I learned in business school, correlation is not necessarily causation: We can’t know that food allergies are caused by GMOs just because they both rose at the same time. There’s a strong enough correlation, however, that I feel it merits investigation.
You mention a study in which 300 kids in England were put on a diet free of artificial coloring, sweeteners, and preservatives. Half were given a drink made of artificial colors and a preservative; the other half got a placebo drink. In the end, kids who got the first drink were far more hyperactive. What was the result?
After this study, there was a follow-up confirming it a few years later. The follow-up was so compelling that corporations in the U.K., including Kraft and Coca-Cola, said, “We’re going to voluntarily remove these chemicals from children’s products.” It gave me hope, because it means corporations are responding to the needs of mothers overseas. And once we’re informed the way the mothers in the U.K. were informed, then companies can bring those same products here to the United States if we want them.
Creating a chemical-free diet sounds time-consuming — and pricey.
I can totally relate. All I have time to do is stick chicken nuggets in the microwave and hit two-zero-zero-start. But I made really simple changes in super slow motion. I used to buy multicolored goldfish from Costco, so I thought, I’m just going to buy the ones that are all gold. That way, at least I’ve dumped the multicolored chemicals out. Once we got to gold, then we got to the plain ones, then switched to pretzels. It takes who knows how long to wean a kid off a sippy cup or to potty-train, and that’s how I approached it — it wasn’t going to be overnight.
So starting with just one change can make a big difference?
Yeah, that was critical. If I had to do one thing, what would it be? My boys were milk guzzlers. So I thought, I’m going to buy milk that’s rBGH-free. It’s available in Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger. It’s really, how do you reduce the load of chemicals your kids are getting? You can’t go cold-turkey. These are kids, and I live in the real world, where kids are picky eaters. But if cutting back on chemicals meant my boys got an extra 15 minutes of sleep each night because they settled down earlier, I was gonna try it. Those 15 minutes — that’s a gift!
What overall changes need to be made in this country to ensure that our food supply is safe?
Our food system is in dire shape. In 2007, the FDA stated that it is woefully underfunded and that “American lives are at risk.” They don’t have the money they need to investigate and protect us from potential toxins in the food supply. If we can bail out the banking system, then we need to prioritize funding the FDA. But to me, the most important thing is to believe in yourself and your ability to effect remarkable change for your family. We moms have incredible abilities, collectively. And we cannot be daunted. If the moms in other countries have spoken up and gotten corporations to make changes, we can too.
5 Quick and Healthy Lunches
O’Brien’s ideas for easy meals that are low in chemicals but high in kid appeal:
1. Fresh bread with tomato sauce for dipping, an rBGH-free cheese stick or string cheese, and applesauce.
2. Salami, a piece of fresh bread, carrots, and leftover dinner noodles with olive oil or grated cheese.
3. PB&J on fresh bread, color-free potato chips, and a smoothie.
4. An English muffin topped with tomato sauce, rBGH-free cheese, and deli meat, veggies, or whatever you can get away with. Then sandwich the “pizza pie” with the other half of the English muffin. Add a piece of fruit for dessert.
5. Rice and beans — add a side of salsa or guacamole to stir in, and a piece of fruit.
original link: www.health.msn.com/kids-health
Craig King eventually hopes to use the film to take food awareness beyond the walls of natural foods stores and the stalls of farmers’ markets to poorer neighborhoods where a fresh fruit or vegetable is as rare as a well-paying job.
“As a chef who’s enthused about nourishing people, I saw there was a huge gap in the underserved community,” King says. “Even if (residents) walked miles, there’s no clean, healthy food.”
Tags: Jim Turner
by Tom Philpott via www.grist.org
Why isn’t the federal government seriously investigating the possible CAFO-swine flu link?
I’ve posed that question several times recently, most recently here. Now let me venture an answer.
The USDA is the federal agency tasked with ensuring that practices on farms, including factory animal farms, are safe. But it’s also the agency that exists to promote U.S. agricultural interests. In other words, the USDA has an inherent conflict around overseeing conditions on factory-style farms. For example, training a cold eye on the systemic safety hazards of factory farming isn’t likely to do much to promote the pork industry.
from the start of the novel H1N1 outbreak, the USDA has tilted decidedly in the direction of promoting U.S. ag interests. Even though virologists and veterinary scientists have been warning for years that large hog farms create ideal conditions for the generation of dangerous new flu viruses—as this Environmental Health Perspectives article definitively shows—-the USDA still isn’t systematically testing swine herds for H1N1. It continues to rely on a voluntary—and little used—testing program.
Nor is it doing much, from what I can tell, on the problem of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistent staph infection that claims more lives every year than AIDS. MRSA has been pretty definitively linked to factory hog farms—specifically the dubious practice of dosing pigs daily with antibiotics.
If the USDA has been limp in its attempts to examine safety conditions on factory farms, it’s been downright zealous in its efforts to promote the pork industry.
The latest: The USDA spent a cool $50 million on pork last week, in an explicit attempt to “assist … struggling producers.” That brings total 2009 federal spending on pork—the “other white meat,” that is, not pet projects for cronies—to $105 million. The latest $50 million worth of pork will be shunted into the National School Lunch Program, playing its traditional role of sinkhole for unwanted ag commodities.
Tags: Swine Flu
By Jim Turner, Chairman, Citizens For Health
This Wednesday, November 18th, the U.S. Senate plans to consider a massive “food safety” bill entitled “The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act”.
This bill (S. 510) will strengthen the forces that for the past fifty years have led to unsafe, nutritionally compromised food and will undermine growing efforts working to thwart those forces. (To read the bill and view co-sponsors, go to www.thomas.loc.gov and enter “Food Safety Modernization Act” in the search field).
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial“. The Senate’s food safety initiative, though intended to be beneficial, follows the House version by leading food down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “modernization” path that Congress designed for drugs. (This House version, H.R. 2749, has the same drawbacks and originally failed; later in the same week it was passed under different rules).
Click here to send a letter to your Senators urging them to amend or oppose S. 510!
The FDA’s drug modernization approach places high-cost drugs at the heart of a dangerously costly health system, contributes to thousands of drug-related deaths, and leads to the approval of many unsafe drugs that end up being recalled. It also makes FDA drug regulation perilously dependent on the financial support the agency receives from drug company fees.
S. 510 – in keeping with this flawed drug modernization path – gives powerful incentives to large, concentrated food manufacturers (the sources of the most significant threats to our food so far) while undercutting producers that are smaller, safer, and often local.
Today Citizens for Health launches its food safety campaign and our first goal is to amend or defeat S 510. If the bill passes without any meaningful, substantive changes, we will seek a Presidential Veto. If the bill that is finally signed fails to address our concerns sufficiently we will work to establish and implement regulations to minimize the negative impact on food safety that will surely result, and we will redouble our efforts to maximize the food choices and food and health information available to all.
And, remember: we are not opposing food safety. We are working to advance it by opposing misguided attempts to build a flawed, drug-like bureaucratic structure on top of a crumbling food safety foundation that desperately needs to be shored up and repaired.
We need your help to win – click here and send your letter to your Senators now!
During this process we will regularly address key food safety issues and the food safety decisions we make – as a nation and as individuals – that shape our lives. It is essential that we all have the opportunity to understand how these issues and decisions affect our ability to trust our food supply. In a very real sense we, as a nation, are what we eat.
We welcome a robust discourse – here at Citizens.org, in your community, and in policy. And, ultimately, we all look forward to safer, healthier, more trustworthy food.
On a final note, consider this remark by Mark Twain: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Now is the time to act to minimize the damage that will result from passage of S. 510.
I thank you for staying involved in this discourse and look forward to hearing from you. Take a moment to share your comments at blogcomments@citizens.org, and don’t forget to click here now to send a letter to your Senators urging them to oppose or overhaul S. 510.
James S. Turner, Esq.
Board Chair
Citizens for Health