Food Allergies Stir a Mother to Action

[Guest guest]

Colleagues, the following is FYI and does not necessarily reflect my own

opinion. I have no further knowledge of the topic. If you do not wish to

receive these posts, set your email filter to filter out any messages

coming from @nutritionucanlivewith.com and the program will remove

anything coming from me.

---------------------------------------------------------

January 9, 2008

Food Allergies Stir a Mother to Action

By KIM SEVERSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/dining/09alle.html?ref=dining

Lafayette, Colo.

ROBYN O’BRIEN likes to joke that at least she hasn’t started checking

the rearview mirror to see if she’s being followed.

But some days, her imagination gets away from her and she wonders if

it’s only a matter of time before Big Food tries to stop her from

exposing what she sees as a profit-driven global conspiracy whose

collateral damage is an alarming increase in childhood food allergies.

Ms. O’Brien has presented her views, albeit in a less radical wrapper,

on CNN, CBS and in frequent print interviews. Frontier Airlines and Wild

Oats stores distribute the allergy-awareness gear she designed.

Her story is one of several in a new book, “Healthy Child, Healthy

World” (Dutton, March 2008), whose contributors include doctors, parents

and celebrities like Meryl Streep.

Sitting at the table in her suburban kitchen, with her four young

children tumbling in and out, Ms. O’Brien, 36, seems an unlikely

candidate to be food’s Brockovich (who, by the way, has taken Ms.

O’Brien under her wing).

She grew up in a staunchly Republican family in Houston where lunch at

the country club frequented by and Barbara Bush followed Sunday

church services. She was an honors student, earned a master’s degree in

business and, like her husband, Jeff, made a living as a financial analyst.

Ms. O’Brien was also the kind of mom who rolled her eyes when the kid

with a peanut allergy showed up at the birthday party. Then, about two

years ago, she fed her youngest child scrambled eggs. The baby’s face

quickly swelled into a grotesque mask. “What did you spray on her?” she

screamed at her other children. Little Tory had a severe food allergy,

and Ms. O’Brien’s journey had begun.

By late that night, she had designed a universal symbol to identify

children with food allergies. She now puts the icon, a green stop sign

with an exclamation point, on lunch bags, stickers and even the little

charms children use to dress up their Crocs. These products and others

are sold on her Web site, AllergyKids.com, which she unveiled,

strategically, on Mother’s Day in 2006.

The $30,000 Ms. O’Brien made from the products last year is incidental,

she said. Working largely from a laptop on her dining room table, she

has looked deep into the perplexing world of childhood food allergies

and seen a conspiracy that threatens the health of America’s children.

And, she profoundly believes, it is up to her and parents everywhere to

stop it.

Her theory — that the food supply is being manipulated with additives,

genetic modification, hormones and herbicides, causing increases in

allergies, autism and other disorders in children — is not supported by

leading researchers or the largest allergy advocacy groups.

That only feeds Ms. O’Brien’s conviction that the influence of what she

sees as the profit-hungry food industry runs deep. In just a few

dizzying steps, she can take you from a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese

to Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds to H. Rumsfeld, who once

ran the company that created the sweetener aspartame.

Through creative use of e-mail, relentless inquiry and a persona

carefully crafted around the protective mother archetype, Ms. O’Brien

has emerged as a populist hero among parents who troll the Internet for

any hint about why their children have food allergies.

“You have changed my life ... my diet ... my health ... my spirit ...

and I thank YOU,” a father who had lost his teenage daughter to

anaphylactic shock told her by e-mail.

Ms. O’Brien encourages people to do what she did: throw out as much

nonorganic processed food as you can afford to. Avoid anything

genetically modified, artificially created or raised with hormones.

Don’t eat food with ingredients you can’t pronounce.

Once she cleaned out her cupboards, she said, her four children started

behaving better. Their health problems, which her doctor attributed to

allergies to milk and other foods, cleared up.

“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over

lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have

an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are

making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this

has actually happened.”

But has it?

Record numbers of parents are heading to doctors concerned that their

children are allergic to a long list of foods. States are passing laws

requiring schools to have policies protecting children with food

allergies. But no one knows why the number of allergies seems to be on

the rise, or even if they are rising as fast as some believe.

Ms. O’Brien and leading allergy researchers agree that few reliable

studies on food allergies exist. The best estimates suggest that 4 to 8

percent of young children suffer from them, though the reactions tend to

grow less serious and less frequent as children grow older.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of deaths

linked to food allergies at 12 in 2004, the most recent year for which

data are available. However, its statisticians point out that such

figures are drawn only from doctors’ notations on death certificates.

“It’s a soft number, and it might well be an understatement,” said

Arialdi Miniño, a statistician at the agency’s National Center for

Health Statistics.

Dr. Gleghorn is the director of pediatric gastroenterology at

the Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland, Calif. She has

been in practice for 20 years, and has noticed a recent increase in

eczema, which can indicate food allergies. But she doesn’t think food

allergies are increasing dramatically.

Often, a child might have intolerance to a food and not a true allergy.

But the Internet has afforded more ways for parents to inform themselves

and do their own diagnosing, which could add to the popular impression

that food allergies are rising at alarming rates, Dr. Gleghorn said.

Many health professionals, though, agree that something is changing.

Among the amalgam of theories that weigh the effects of genetics and

environment, the hygiene hypothesis intrigues many researchers. It holds

that children are being exposed to fewer micro-organisms and, as a

result, have weaker immune systems.

“But this alone cannot account for the massive relative increase in food

allergy compared with other allergic disease such as asthma,” said Dr.

Marc E. Rothenberg, the director of allergy and immunology at Cincinnati

Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the second-largest pediatric

research facility in the country.

Could it be that a toxic food environment has made children’s immune

systems go haywire? It’s hard to find an expert in the field who

supports Ms. O’Brien’s theory. “I don’t think it can be proven, so I

can’t say scientifically one way or the other,” Dr. Gleghorn said.

Mix the lack of hard data with an increasingly complex food landscape,

and you’ve got Robyn O’Brien.

“Food allergies just become a focus for a broader fear about the food

system,” said the author Pollan, a contributor to The New York

Times Magazine.

Mr. Pollan, in both “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and his new book, “In

Defense of Food” (January, Penguin), shares many of Ms. O’Brien’s views

about industrialized agriculture. He also has a niece with a peanut

allergy. So Ms. O’Brien sent him an e-mail message, and a correspondence

began.

Ms. O’Brien took his responses as an endorsement of her work, and then

mentioned his support in messages to other people. Mr. Pollan, who said

he has no idea if her theories are accurate, asked her to stop telling

people he was working with her.

Leveraging brief e-mail exchanges with notable people is an important

method that Ms. O’Brien uses to build her universe. The unlikely mix

includes members of F. Kennedy Jr.’s staff; Alice

son, a host of “America’s Most Smartest Model”; and, recently,

Dr. Mehmet Oz, a regular on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

“The fact that people like him and Malcolm Gladwell, presidential

campaigns, celebs take the time to reply means a lot as it gives me hope

that people are still engaged,” she said in an e-mail message to this

reporter.

While some of her contacts, like Mr. Gladwell, an author and a writer

for The New Yorker, don’t remember her, the strategy has worked. Nell

Newman, who runs the organic arm of Newman’s Own products, spoke up on

her behalf on the national news. Deborah Koons , the widow of

Jerry and director of the documentary “The Future of Food,”

invited her to lunch.

But her biggest asset might be a relentless drive to wind together

obscure health theories, blog postings and corporate financial

statements. She then posts her analyses on her Web site.

She chides top allergy doctors who are connected to Monsanto, the

producer of herbicides and genetically modified seeds. She asserts that

the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, the nation’s leading food

allergy advocacy group, is tainted by the money it receives from food

manufacturers and peanut growers.

Anne Muñoz-Furlong founded the network in 1991 after her daughter was

found to have milk and egg allergies. She said the group now has 30,000

members and a $5.6 million budget.

Although Kraft did help the organization start its Web site and other

food manufacturing companies and trade groups sponsor some of its

programs, that support has amounted to about $100,000. Mrs.

Muñoz-Furlong said that she and doctors on her medical board do not

believe that genetically modified foods cause food allergies because

most children with allergies react to specific foods, like eggs or milk.

And, she said, communicating regularly with industry can help get the

word to parents about potential allergens in products, and supporting

research to identify causes of allergies helps consumers more than

companies.

She also cautioned against taking the advice of people who have no

medical training or run Web sites not certified to have reliable medical

information. “She’s a dot-com,” Mrs. Muñoz-Furlong said of Ms. O’Brien.

“It’s completely different than a dot-org. From the very beginning our

intent was education.”

(Ms. O’Brien did recently start a nonprofit foundation to support

research that is not tied to the food industry.)

On the days when Ms. O’Brien grows discouraged at being against

the Goliath of Big Food, she turns to the people who believe her.

Brockovich, whose brother died of a food allergy years ago, was a

legal file clerk who helped land a record judgment against the Pacific

Gas and Electric Company for contaminating drinking water. She is an

environmental consultant who is popular on the inspirational lecture

circuit.

Ms. Brockovich said her new friend does a great job of arming everyday

people with facts, so they can take a stand.

“You don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to look into whether our

food supply is safe,” she said. “Being obsessed doesn’t mean she’s

crazy. ly, I think it takes a little bit of being crazy to make a

difference in this world.”

--

ne Holden, MS, RD < fivestar@... >

" Ask the Parkinson Dietitian " http://www.parkinson.org/

" Eat well, stay well with Parkinson's disease "

" Parkinson's disease: Guidelines for Medical Nutrition Therapy "

http://www.nutritionucanlivewith.com/