Super Eco

Photo credit: Random House

The peanut butter scare, the pistachio scare, the ground beef scare ... People seem awfully scared of food these days. Yet a potentially even more alarming food scare has been building for years, rarely reported and often dismissed as too "radical" to be true: Is there a link between the dramatic rise in childhood allergies and our increasingly "engineered" approach to food production?

Robyn O'Brien, a mother of four and food allergy crusader, thinks there is—and she exposes how and why in her new book, The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick—and What We Can Do About It. The Unhealthy Truth is both the personal story of how O'Brien learned to cope with life-threatening food allergies in her children and a larger exposé of the largely unregulated tie between Big Food and Big Money.

• What every American consumer needs to know about genetically modified foods (and what consumers around the world already know)
• The truth about so-called "government" and "university" studies on the effects of food production methods (largely unregulated studies that are often funded by the food industry itself)
• Substances (from artificial colorings to high fructose corn syrup) that are banned in Europe but rife in the American food supply

I first met O'Brien last year when I was researching an article on the effects of chemical exposures on children. Many might describe her as "savvy, "whip-smart" or a "firecracker"; I think those terms just might be a polite understatement. O'Brien began investigating the truth about what's in America's food supply after her youngest daughter nearly died from an allergic reaction to eggs. I found it telling that while she's been hailed in the media as "the Erin Brokovich of food," the real Erin Brokovich has actually weighed in: "You don't have to be a doctor or a scientist to look into whether our food supply is safe, and Robyn O'Brien's courageous pursuit of The Unhealthy Truth is an example of how we can all do our parts to protect the health of our families."

Read more about food allergies at O'Brien's web site, Allergy Kids. The Unhealthy Truth goes on sale May 5.