It’s no big news that the food we eat does not fall off a tree and ship straight to our local grocery stores untouched by processing chemicals and dyes. What may be less known is the detrimental impact that many food and drinks we consume have on our health.

Author Robyn O’Brien spoke Thursday night at DeGolyer Library about her book, “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It” and her passion in taking action against what food corporations are putting in our food.

But O’Brien explained that she never grew up as a “foodie.” 

“I am a very unlikely crusader for cleaning up food supply,” she said. “I was born and raised in Houston, Texas on Twinkies and Po’ Boys.”

However, when one of her four children developed a food allergy, that all changed. Curious, she decided to research food allergies: what she came across was not only astonishing to her, it compelled her to take big steps to alert people in the nation about what they were putting in their bodies.

The information she found led her to write a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
sAs a result, she landed a spot on his radio show, gained media coverage across the country, and successfully published her book. 

According to her research, the Centers for Disease Control reports that between 1997 and 2002, there was a 265 percent increase in hospitalizations related to food allergies. 
This begged her to ask the question, “Is there something foreign in our food that wasn’t there when we were kids?”

O’Brien found her answer when she learned that in 1994, corporations introduced a new synthetic protein, RBGH, that they were inserting into dairy cows in order to increase their lactating profitability.

Even more suspicious to her—many top world governments never allowed the introduction of RBGH into their cows because of its toxicity potential.

“There were nights…where I thought, ‘How many sippy cups of this stuff have I filled? And how many bowls of cereal have I poured this on, not knowing that this was not allowed in children’s food around the world?'” O’Brien said. 

As a result of the introduction of this protein, milk is now the most common food allergy in the U.S.

So how does O’Brien suggest ridding these chemicals out of one’s diet? Aside from avoiding corn syrup and sticking to organics, she suggests considering three simple questions.

“Ask yourself, ‘Would grandmother have had this on her kitchen counter? Can my eight-year-old read the ingredients on the side of the box?” And finally, “is it pronounceable?”
O’Brien has an MBA in finance from Rice University. She is the founder of the AllergyKids Foundation, an organization that funds research to advance and practice techniques to heal children with autism, ADHD, asthma or allergies.