Robyn O'Brien on Life Changes With Filippo

Our guest tonight on Life Changes With Filippo was Robyn O'Brien.

Robyn O’Brien

"Robyn O'Brien's fervent message describes the toxic tangle of American food, government, and culture. THE UNHEALTHY TRUTH is a healthy dose of medicine that we all need to swallow, and I say this as an advocate for the environment, but more importantly, as a father of five." -Graydon Carter, Editor-in-chief, Vanity Fair—Graydon Carter, Editor-in-chief, Vanity Fair

Robyn O’Brien

Says Robyn of herself, her life and her mission,

"I was raised in Houston, Texas on meat and potatoes with a fair share of Doritos and Ding Dongs thrown in.

I was not a foodie.

My background is motherhood and finance. I earned an MBA from Rice University on a full scholarship and graduated as the top woman in my class. I went on to work in the investment world, jockeying with the gang on Wall Street, as an analyst on a team that managed about $20 billion in assets. During those years, I learned a thing or two about 'enhancing profitability and shareholder value' and 'managing earnings and expectations'.

When our first child was born, I traded my briefcase for a diaper bag and found myself in a world of picky eaters, on a limited budget, with no time.

Today, I am a married, mother of four children and the founder of the AllergyKids Foundation, an organization designed to help protect the 1 in 3 American children that now has autism, ADHD, asthma or allergies, that funds research into the development and practice of techniques designed to heal children with the 4As using an integrative, biomedical approach developed by doctors in New York.

Prior to unearthing all of this, I didn’t trust myself to do more than hit '2:00 START' on my microwave. And I have to laugh as I find myself on the front lines of our “national eating disorder’ given the battle that so many of us waged against food when we were younger.

I am an unlikely crusader for cleaning up our food supply. You may be, too. But fortunately, there is a lot that we can do about it. We simply have to get savvy and stand together so that our voices can be heard by leaders in our government and the food industry the same way that families overseas have made their voices heard over there.

And that requires transparency in our food system. I believe that we deserve full disclosure of financial ties behind industry funded research, our doctors and our medical organizations. I believe that knowledge is power, transparency is critical and that attitude is everything!

It is humbling to have appeared in the New York Times, on CNN, the Today Show and Good Morning America and featured in People Magazine, but more importantly, I am honored to have been invited to attend roundtable discussions with members of Congress on health care reform and to serve on the board of the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, DC.

I am deeply grateful for the work that all of you are doing and remain profoundly hopeful that together, leveraging our collective abilities, we can affect remarkable change in our food system for the health of our families.

And though we can't change the beginning of our stories, we can change the end. And hope is the knowledge that change is possible, even when it seems hard to imagine."

Here this all too important interview with Robyn and other such interviews at www.LifeChanges.ws.

Thank you Robyn for being on our show, and for being, along with us, a Positive Change Agent, ushering in the changes we wish to see in the world.

Filippo Voltaggio