BOOK REVIEW: The Unhealthy Truth

This mom’s fight for clean food motivates action to break the hold of Big Food.

By Betsy McCann

www.robynobrien.com Click here to buy the book.

This book is scary, infuriating, heartwarming, empowering and inspirational. Part expose, part memoir, O'Brien's journey to becoming a crusader for quality food began when her daughter experienced an allergic reaction to eggs. O’Brien soon learned that “90 percent of all food allergies are triggered by proteins in eight foods: eggs, cow’s milk, wheat, soy, fish, shellfish, peanuts, and tree nuts.” Flummoxed by the news of her daughter’s egg allergy, she began researching to find answers about allergies that would help her protect her family.

She discovered alarming rates of childhood food allergies in the United States, which has seen a 400 percent increase in the past 20 years. Diagnosis of peanut allergies in the U.S. doubled between 1997 and 2002; no other country in the world experienced anything similar.

O’Brien calls allergies “The New Childhood Epidemic,” likening children’s bodies to “canaries in coalmines.” This knowledge prompted O’Brien to found AllergyKids (www.allergykids.com), an organization providing parents with information and research about allergies.

Her dedication to advancing understanding of parents through AllergyKids led to her learning about practices, structures and regulations contributing to the astonishing rise in childhood food allergies in the United States. Primarily, she discovered the reported increases in health concerns in the years following the introduction of genetically-modified (GM) crops used in food and food ingredients into the U.S. food supply.

Pre-cautionary proposal

Thinking we in the States wouldn't able to buy mainstream food that was bad for us, she checked into the regulations on GM crop-based food around the world; what she found was that other countries (pretty much everyone BUT us) uses the precautionary principle—“as long as you don’t know how it’s going to affect us, don’t put it in our food” (p. 138). Her argument rests on the fact that while other countries have determined reliable food safety assessments for food from GM crops, no GM crop in the United States has ever been thoroughly studied for safety. Yikes, right?

Her tenacity as a researcher and teacher comes through in the sections where she explains how DNA is spliced into GM plant genetic material, as well as the agricultural, economic, medical and physiological risks posed by including genetically-modified food in our diets. She makes complex scientific concepts approachable and uses examples throughout her explanations, making it easy for readers to understand and identify why we should all be waging this battle with her.

Wrestling with the implications of what she learns about food, food reactions and food regulations, O’Brien documents her personal reactions and conversations with her husband, family, and doctors. She describes herself initially as someone who rolled her eyes at people who ate all organic and thought she couldn’t afford to buy organic food. The book traces her struggle to dismantle her “good little girl” belief system and question the dominant power structures crippling needed improvements to our food systems.

In a poignant section describing conversations with her father about her disturbing new food awareness, she addresses the personal anguish involved in making hard choices. She encourages readers to keep moving forward no matter how powerful the opposition.

Accessible activism

This could have easily been just another gloom and doom “Soylent Green is people” expose of a corrupt system. Instead, O’Brien makes educating yourself and changing your food habits accessible and digestible (pun intended!). Recognizing that cost and time factors are the biggest barriers between most folks in the U.S. and clean eating, she offers common-sense tips and suggestions to promote her own “80-20 Rule,” stating:

If 80 percent of what we give our kids is healthy—free of additives, preservatives, artificial color, aspartame, MSG—then for the other 20 percent we, and they, get a free pass (p.232).

Her solutions are as practical as substituting snacks with less food coloring, and providing simple and affordable ways in which you can reduce your family’s exposure to and intake of unwanted ingredients now found in the American food supply. She offers an entire chapter to meal planning, shopping, and decoding the language of conscious food consumption.

O'Brien says the United States is a nation of 300 million eaters, all of whom are affected by the “ticking time bomb” our food system has become, but that together we can affect remarkable change in our food system and protect the health of our families.

Betsy McCann is a third year doctoral student in agricultural communications at Texas A&M University, serving this summer as a communications intern at the Rodale Institute.