Sunday, June 23, 2013

Healthy food advocate Robyn O'Brien talks food, allergies, chemicals, cancer - and music at Red Rocks - The Denver Post

Healthy food advocate Robyn O'Brien talks food, allergies, chemicals, cancer - and music at Red Rocks - The Denver Post:

Robyn O'Brien's journey from stay-at-home Boulder mom feeding her kids blue yogurt and fluorescent-orange cheese to prominent health activist began with an egg.

One Sunday in 2006 her daughter finished breakfast — scrambled eggs, that blue yogurt, Eggo waffles — and her face began to puff up. The family took off for the hospital.

She was having an allergic reaction to the eggs. The doctor began rattling off statistics about food allergies, and O'Brien thought: Since when did so many foods become so problematic, for so many people?

The former financial analyst for the food industry, and mother of four, began digging, and found that between 1997 and 2002, the incidence of peanut allergies doubled. She learned that there had been a 265 percent increase in food-allergy-related visits to emergency rooms. She discovered quite a bit more, which led her to a new career.

Now, she runs theAllergy Kids Foundation, an increasingly influential nonprofit organization that she started. The nonprofit revolves around what has become her mission: to educate people about the chemicals and additives in our food supply. She writes about these topics, in a book —"The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It"— and articles, including a column in Prevention magazine. She travels the country giving speeches and lectures — including twoTED lectures, in Austin, Texas,. and Denver — and she routinely appears on national television.

We sat down with O'Brien in a Boulder coffee shop, where she drank black coffee and talked about food, chemicals, music and teachers.


Read more:Healthy food advocate Robyn O'Brien talks food, allergies, chemicals, cancer - and music at Red Rocks - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_21691103/robyn-obrien-talks-food-allergies-chemicals-cancer-and#ixzz2X5p04cCQ
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