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2010-01-22 Robyn O'Brien Food Allergies And Asthma ADHD Autism And Allergies

An Interview With Robyn O'Brien

KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our mission is simple: To provide you credible usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "Food And Its Role In The Four A's - Allergy, Asthma, ADHD Or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, And Autism. One Mother's Mission." Our guest today is Robyn O'Brien who was raised in Houston, Texas on the typical American diet. Robyn was trained in finance and earned her MBA from Rice University and graduated as the top woman in her class. Robyn went on to work in the investment world as an analyst on Wall Street and was part of a team responsible for managing twenty billion dollars in assets. When her first child was born she decided to become a full-time mother and presently is married and has four children. She is the founder of the Allergy Kids Foundation, an organization designed to help protect the one in three American children that now have either autism, ADHD, asthma or allergies. This organization funds research into a physician developed treatment program to heal children with the four A's using an integrative biomedical model. Robyn has appeared in the New York Times, on CNN, the Today Show and Good Morning America, and has been featured in People Magazine. She has been invited to attend round table discussions with members of Congress on healthcare reform, and to serve on the board of the Environmental Working Group based in Washington DC. She is the author of the best-selling book, "The Unhealthy Truth."

So welcome Robyn, and it's a great pleasure to have you on Staying Healthy Today, and thank you so much for taking time out of I know your schizophrenic schedule almost to be here.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: It's such an honor to join you today.

KIRK HAMILTON: So you're on your way to a spelling bee for your daughter?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: Absolutely. You know, juggling the tasks at hand between the four kids and the research and the advocacy. It's a pretty busy day.

KIRK HAMILTON: So are you on a book tour at all? Are you located where?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: I'm based in Colorado. I was on a book tour when the book came out in May of 2009 and I've actually just spent this last week down in Texas speaking down there. I spoke at SMU. I spoke to a few corporations, did a book signing, and then we taped a show for PBS.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well why don't we just jump right into it. Where did you get the title "The Unhealthy Truth: How Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It."

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know that's a great question because obviously as a first time author I was not familiar with how the publishing world works and when you come to the table I'm bringing the product which is the research and how they choose to package it is up to the publishing house. So Random House actually came up with that title. They were trying to get something that was attention-getting...you know in a store where you have millions of titles, and so my editor actually decided, given the content of the book, that here we were disclosing this incredible truth that really had not yet been revealed, and, at the same time as shocking as it was, and igniting as it is, throughout the story there was incredible inspiration because it really showed how each and every one of us can effect remarkable change.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well what is the ‘unhealthy truth'? Is there one unhealthy truth or are there many unhealthy truths?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know I think with my background being finance and a bit of a research wonk to me the unhealthy truth was the realization that the same value hadn't been placed on the lives of American eaters that had been placed on the lives of eaters around the world. Countries around the world, developed countries around the world, took a much more precautionary approach when it came to introducing foreign ingredients, foreign proteins, chemicals into their food supply, and they said, "You know these ingredients have not yet been proven safe and therefore we won't allow them into our food supply." Whereas here in the U.S. we took a different approach and we just said, "Well it hasn't been proven dangerous. We will allow it in, until we have something more conclusive."

KIRK HAMILTON: Well give an example of one of those.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: Well to me as I was really unearthing my story with the four children, it was my youngest child who one day had an allergic reaction, and when I stopped and started pulling the statistics I learned from '97 to 2002 there had been a doubling of peanut allergy, that'd one out of 17 kids under the age of 3 now had a food allergy and that according to the Centers for Disease Control there had been a 265% increase in the rate of hospitalizations related to food allergies. And so you know as I stepped back and learned that a food allergy is when your body sees food as foreign, and it launches an inflammatory response to drive out that foreign invader, my first question was is there something foreign in the food that wasn't there when we were kids. And that's when I was just stunned to learn that beginning in 1994, so only 15 years ago, beginning in 1994 we began to engineer these foreign proteins into our food supply to drive profitability for the food industry.

KIRK HAMILTON: Give me an example of a foreign protein.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: It began in 1994 actually with dairy, and we began to inject cows with a synthetic protein that is called rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone. It's a growth hormone. We inject it into cows, it's synthetically created in a lab, and it's designed to increase their lactating capability. That makes sense you know as a Wall Street analyst. I could see the profit-driven motive in that. However, at the same time, it was fully disclosed that it also caused ovarian cysts, mastitis and a list of conditions in these animals that was going to require an increased antibiotic use. And it was for that reason alone that governments around the world from Canada, the U.K., Australia, Japan, all across Europe, they said we don't want this in our food supply. And then further studies began to show that elevated hormone levels linked to breast, prostate and colon cancer were also prevalent in cows that had been injected with this growth hormone, so again you know when you step back and you say, the U.S. was one of the only, if not the only developed country, to allow this into the food supply, what are our rates of cancer compared to the countries that didn't allow it? And according to the American Cancer Society, the U.S. has the highest rate of cancer of any country in the world, and migration studies show that if you were to move here from somewhere like Japan your likelihood of developing cancer increases fourfold.

KIRK HAMILTON: So there's not just one, there's multiple food additives. That's the issue that we're getting things put in our food supply that we don't know about. Now that's one issue. What was the life-changing experience that drove you to quit being a Wall Street analyst and then ,well obviously take care of your children, but what drove you to do this?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know when my youngest child was diagnosed with food allergies I really had not been particularly sensitive to the whole food allergy thing. You know I had a couple of kids that ate PB&Js. And at the same time you know I had trusted that if something was on the grocery store shelves it was fine and that it was safe. And I think to me the most stunning revelation was realizing that Kraft and Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart formulate their products differently for eaters overseas. So if they're making a box of ‘mac and cheese' for their eaters overseas, it doesn't contain these synthetic proteins, these growth hormones, it doesn't contain Yellow No. 5, which is linked to hyperactivity in little boys. And when I first learned that, I thought we have not had the same value placed on our lives that have been placed on the lives of people around the world and I couldn't unlearn that information. And I looked out at these four kids of mine playing in the back yard and I thought I have to do everything I can to try to convey this information because as a mother you would do everything you could to protect the health of your kids. And so if it meant making slight tweaks in our family's diet, you bet I was going to try to do that. And so with that I realized that there were going to be people that were ready to hear this information and then there were also going to be people where food is just an incredibly intimate issue and so I just began to reach out to those that were ready for the message.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know there's nothing obviously like the internal drive of a mother trying to protect their children in any shape or form, so I understand where the desires comes from. But you've brought up a point here. You brought up statistics of food allergy, and those statistics if you got them from a traditional governmental agency are going to really just account for traditional allergy, the way it's diagnosed, IgE mediated allergy which is immediate onset, and most people know about it. But there's a slew of other food reactions that you've thrown in here in the mesh, and it's all kind of lumped under food allergies, and a traditional physician or an allergist for example wouldn't maybe acknowledge. Is that correct?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You bring up such a great point and only in the United States do we define traditional food allergy as the immediate life threatening reaction that we hear about where the girl kisses her boyfriend who has had a PB&J. That's an immediate food allergic reaction. There are also delayed food allergic reactions. And those symptoms can present up to 36 hours after you ingest that food. And those symptoms include things like asthma, eczema, chronic ear infections. And so once you start to recognize it as a spectrum with an immediate food allergic reaction, and then the delayed onset of the food allergic reaction, it really does open up your eyes to a lot of the symptoms that we just traditionally treat in this country. We just prescribe and prescribe and prescribe! While at the same time if you make these very slight diet modifications, dairy being one of the most common food allergies according to CNN, if you were to modify a diet over a two week period and then simply eliminate perhaps dairy or one of the offending foods you can see such a dramatic change in the health of your family.

KIRK HAMILTON: Well the problem I see is in the definition and I'm very curious because I've been doing this 26 years and a reaction to a food is a reaction to food, whether I can measure IgE, IgG, lectins, immune complexes, whatever. But how do you as a mother, a lay mother, think that your child has a food reaction because if you went to that allergist and you got a scratch screen that milk might not show up or that wheat might not show up and you might be color dye no. 6 or whatever, MSG and getting reactions. And so the problem I see is how do you alert the mother to start looking for these food sensitivities in their children?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: That's a great question and I do actually give a detailed answer in "The Unhealthy Truth" because one of the things that I say is you can read the skin. The skin is the largest organ, and when that skin is inflamed and that skin is reacting, that's the largest organ, you can't even see what's going on in the organs inside. And so eczema is a very typical symptom of an underlying food allergy that may not have been diagnosed. Another thing that I suggest to mothers, and you know mothers can appreciate this, is to read the toilet bowl because you can tell by how a child is able to, you know process foods, if it stays intact, if it's whole, if it's a process or if it's just destroying their digestive system. And so you know there are really simple steps that any mom can take. The chronic ear infections, that is often indicative of an underlying dairy allergy and like you say, the tests are woefully inadequate. I went to the national allergists and I said "Is my child with a milk allergy allergic to milk that we all drank growing up, or is he allergic to this new synthetic protein rBGH that was introduced in 1994?" And they said "We don't know. There are no tests, we just don't know."

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. Well let's get to a little more controversy here. I can see as a clinician that things added onto what you said. Snotty nose, the allergic salute, allergic shiners, those kinds of things. Ears getting red, rapid heart beats, etc. But let's get into the more difficult things. Food and behavior. Food and autism. Let's open up a Pandora's box here.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know it's really not as difficult as people are led to believe because one of the things that I realized is that a studies in the U.K. and Australia presented the link between hyperactivity and artificial colors in children, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart moved voluntarily ahead of any legislation to pull those synthetic colors from the products that they were selling in the U.K. And so there's quote after quote of Kraft and Coca-Cola talking about ‘Lunchables,' talking about ‘Skittles,' how they were not using these synthetic ingredients, these artificially chemically engineered ingredients because of their link to hyperactivity. And so as a mom with two little boys and two little girls you bet I was going to try to reduce my kid's exposure to Yellow No. 5.. And so those were some really basic steps that we took. Another ingredient that is often removed from children's products overseas is aspartame. Aspartame is a chemical sweetener, NutraSweet or Equal is how we know it. I grew up on those diet cokes. I never thought twice about it because was on the shelves. As I began to pull the research I realized that aspartame was probably the most controversial chemical additive ever approved at the FDA. And it was actually rejected multiple times until the FDA directors began to put people onto that board so that the tipping point came where it actually was voted in, in favor. And with that, I stepped back and I thought who was the corporation, who was the CEO that oversaw the regulatory approval of such a controversial chemical additive into our food supply, an additive that's not allowed to be used in children's food around the world because of concerns over health risks? And I was stunned to learn, because I come from a very conservative Texas family, that Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of the corporation that oversaw the regulatory approval of this controversial chemical. And so as I stepped back I thought, okay, if children around the world are not being exposed to these chemicals because of health concerns I can start to take some baby steps in my kitchen to help protect my kids. And it was incredibly fulfilling. It felt so good and then as I began to share my story people were asking, "Well what are you doing?" You know you don't have to be radical. You don't have to change grocery stores. What are steps that I can take and there it really began to be more than just in my own kitchen.

KIRK HAMILTON: Alright. So let's do some practical things. I mean to me what comes up in my mind if you just shop in the periphery of a grocery store and buy whole foods, number one you're going to be better off things you can see. Two is if you can, but you don't have to, but go organic and if you are going to eat animal foods if you get pesticides-free, free-range animals and hormone-free animals that would be reasonable.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: Those are great places. But you know for a lot of families that's just, that's way out from kind of where they need to start. And so some of the things that we started with were, could my 8-year-old actually pronounce the ingredients on the side of this box? If she couldn't read it we probably shouldn't be eating it. Would my grandmother have had a jar of this on her kitchen counter? Yellow No. 5? Probably not. So we probably shouldn't be eating it. And we kind of have this grandmother's theory. You know would it have been in her kitchen? If it would have been in her kitchen, then it's probably okay to have in ours. You know the pronouncability of something is a really great indicator. The other thing that was really important for me to remember was not to make the perfect enemy of the good and to really just take baby steps. And my kids were hooked on that fluorescent mac and cheese and so we literally weaned them like you wean a kid from a sippee cup or potty train them. We used three-quarters of the packet of the powder, then half the packet, then a quarter of the packet, until the finally got used to the color of noodles being noodles. And we did it in those baby steps and it was a way that we could make these changes without it being overwhelming and without paralyzing. Another really important rule that we have is the 80/20 rule where you try to do a really good job 80% of the time and the other 20% of the time we recognize that these children go to birthday parties at Chuck E.Cheese, they're going to get a blue cupcake at school, and to really allow that flexibility because then it becomes something you really can move towards. It's fulfilling and it's not paralyzing.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let me put you on the spot here. Food and autism. What do you think? Any role?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know I think what's fascinating is that no studies were ever done when these neurotoxins were introduced into our food supply. The correlation between the introduction of these neurological toxins into the food supply and autism is tremendously strong. Correlation is not causation, however. I think we need to step back and we need to say there are environmental insults that are so prevalent in our children's world today that were not there 15 years ago. There are some in the vaccines. There are some in the food and we simply don't know when that tipping point might hit. And so as a mother because we don't know, my approach is I will engage that precautionary principle that governments around the world do, and I will reduce my children's exposure to these environmental insults. If it means that we can delay the vaccine schedule as Dr. Sears, one of my advisors suggests, that's a smart thing to do. If it means that you delay exposure to some of these toxins in the food supply, that's probably a smart thing to do too. And one of the things that I say when people ask about the diet is, if diet doesn't contribute to autism then why does diet modification do such a tremendous job in relieving those symptom? I think unfortunately we've been given a lot of unquestioned answers and that it's really time that we start asking these very important questions that you're asking.

KIRK HAMILTON: We're talking to Robyn O'Brien, the author of "The Unhealthy Truth." Tell me a little about your Allergy Kids Foundation and how that started and what that does.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: Well you know that's a great question because it actually started completely out of necessity. As I began to unearth the research in the pediatric allergy space and the introduction of these foreign proteins and these new allergens that don't even have names yet, I went to the largest food allergy nonprofit and I began to ask questions. And they really got pretty aggressive in their dismissal of me, and they actually sent a cease and desist letter. And so with that, I pulled their financial statements and I learned that Kraft and Monsanto, and some of these food industry corporations had been funding their research since 1998. And with that, they were the organization that I had wanted to raise money towards, you know to raise money to help fund these doctors. And I realized that there was a need to fund doctors who were independently funded who had the integrity to fully disclose who was funding their research and to bring the ethical component back into the research. Because as I learned these doctors not only were they serving on the spokes-bureaus of different pharmaceutical corporations and food corporations but they also actually had invented proteins, insecticidal proteins that were designed for these chemical corporations that were engineering the crops. And so with that the Allergy Kids Foundation was born, and today we are really in the process of growing it. We are engagingly founding families. We are about to announce an incredible board of individuals from around the world who are doing everything they can to help protect the health of our kids, and it's really not just the little kids. I mean it's all of the big kids at the table too.

KIRK HAMILTON: So you mentioned you want to fund or help fund a physician directed treatment program for the four A's. The asthma, the autism, the allergies and the ADHD. Where do those physicians come from and how did you pick them out and what are some of their top projects?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: Dr. Kenneth Bock is one of my absolute touchstone advisors and he wrote a book called "Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Allergies, Autism, ADHD or Asthma." I am also so humbled to share that he wrote the foreword to my own book. And he has developed an incredible approach where he really basically detoxes these children. And as he detoxes them he restores their health by restoring the nutrition that has been stripped, restoring the vitamins and minerals. And he works on a lot of different levels. His approach is incredible and it's had incredible success rates, but as most people know, when you have a child with autism you really are a prisoner in your own home because of the incredible focus that has to be brought to diet, behavior, everything else that you are managing as a parent in that house. And so my goal is to basically enable a platform so that Dr. Bock and his organization are able to teach doctors, where they come in maybe four times a year to an integrative healing foundation, where they go in there, they learn and then they can go back to their communities and back to these families and teach what Dr. Bock knows because his work is absolutely remarkable.

KIRK HAMILTON: So is this separate from the Defeat Autism Now group, DAN?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: He is part of Defeat Autism Now and I think at one point he was the chairman of it. I'm not sure. He's been very, very closely involved with that group.

KIRK HAMILTON: And they're a great group in my opinion. And I must say that as a clinician the parents of children of autistic kids, my heart reaches out to them because it is something that takes so much. It is such a labor intensive process. I mean just for me to see them is - you almost have to have a practice set up to see autistic kids because it's so labor intensive. I am big fan of DAN and I know Dr. Bock. And so that's great. You have someone really wonderful there to help you with guidance.

I want to move to some of my favorite controversies and one is soy okay. I am a natural basic soy food supporter. What I mean by that is if you eat it like the traditional Asians did, I support it. But I realize also that soy has been put in everything and we consume more soy and food additives and isolated soy proteins... and stuffed in hamburgers than anything. Do you find a lot of soy protein allergy, and also just your own two cents on soy.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: You know soy is one of the top eight allergens and so as I began to look into are there foreign proteins in the milk, are there foreign proteins in the soy and these top eight allergens, there's something new that wasn't there when we were kids. And I did learn that in the late 1990s soy is primarily used to fatten the livestock in this country. It's not a product that's used as pervasively around the world. And it wasn't fattening the livestock fast enough for market weight, to slaughter weight fast enough, which again the analyst in me I have appreciation for that. And so soy was reengineered to be high sugar soy beans so that the animals could eat it faster, it wouldn't bloat them and then they could be slaughtered faster. It's more profitability for the livestock industry. But because no studies were ever done to show what that high sugar soy bean might do to rates of obesity or rates of diabetes, governments around the world again said we don't want to introduce that into our food supply. And so again I went to research around the world. I went to The Economist, an international publication, and I learned that ‘diabesity' is often referred to as an American epidemic. And that according to the CDC, one in two minority kids and one in three Caucasian kids born in the year 2000, which is my daughter's fourth grade class, one in two and one in three of those kids are expected to be insulin-dependent by the time they reach adulthood. And so I stepped back and thought, "You know why is soy so pervasive in the U.S. diet?" I ate plenty of it during my pregnancies. What have I not been told? And the American Heart Association came out endorsing soy with all these benefits. What was amazing is that a few years later it actually withdrew that endorsement and it was never covered in the press. And so again as I started to recognize, as you mention, how pervasive soy is in the American diet, I was stunned to learn that in the U.K. it's advised that children under the age of 12 months have no exposure to soy, and that in France the food agency is actually advising that children under the age of 3 not have any exposure to soy. And then out of the U.K. came a study saying that soy exposure in infancy had an incredible correlation to the onset of the peanut allergy, and as I began to pull that research there was a cross-reactivity, and a similarity in the protein structure of the soybean to the peanut protein. And so with that you know there was incredible advocacy to reduce, especially infant and children's exposure to soy. You mentioned the Asian diet. You know Asians grow up, they don't have the same problems, and a lot of the studies on that show how the Asians prepare the soy is entirely different than how we use it in the processed food here in the U.S.

KIRK HAMILTON: So let me ask you then. If you're going to walk up to a mother ‘cold turkey' and said eliminate these six foods, which would you pick?

ROBYN O'BRIEN: The very first thing that I eliminated was that growth hormone in the dairy because when I learned the cancer rates and the concern around cancer with rBGH in the milk, that was absolutely my first step because kids guzzle milk. As I began to learn about the milk then the next step that we took were to cut the colors. We went from blue yogurt to white yogurt with sprinkles. We really emphasized not making the perfect the enemy of the good. The next step was to reduce our exposure to soy and corn, to just be mindful, to be aware. And a simple way to do that was to cut the processed foods out of our diet. It was a big mental hurdle because I had to trust that I could do more than hit two-zero-zero-start on that microwave, and it was a big adventure that we began in our family. But again it was just getting back to pronounceable things, things that my grandmother would have had. Yellow No. 5 on the kitchen counter, she wouldn't have had it. If moms around the world aren't feeding it to their kids because of its link to hyperactivity, I was going to try to reduce my exposure. And so there were just some really simple basic steps that didn't require us changing grocery stores. But then as we began to learn about these changes it was so fulfilling that you did want to do more. And we did see such incredible health improvements in the children that what we did end up spending a little bit more at the grocery store we saved so tremendously on healthcare costs.

KIRK HAMILTON: This is Robyn O'Brien, author of "The Unhealthy Truth." Look up the Allergy Kids Foundation if you want to do something really healthy for your child, then read the book. Robyn, I can't thank you enough for driving off the side of the road or whatever you did to do the interview, and go listen to your daughter's spelling bee.

ROBYN O'BRIEN: On thank you so much for having me.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank not only Robyn, but I want to thank all of you for listening to this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And until next time, Stay and Be Well.

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