Robyn O'Brien

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 equity analyst where I covered the food industry and the tech industry - meeting everyone from Martha Stewart, to Meg Whitman, to Henry Paulson, to the management team of Whole Foods along the way.

During those years, I learned a thing or two about “enhancing profitability and shareholder value” and “managing earnings and expectations”. And how management's primary responsibility is to their shareholders. And I loved every minute of that job.

But when our first child was born, I traded my briefcase for a diaper bag and threw myself into the world of picky eaters, nuked nuggets and childhood epidemics. We had a limited budget, limited time, and I couldn't cook.

Flash forward ten years later, and 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 from the chemicals now so pervasive in our food supply. Chemicals like "obesogens" that are triggering everything from obesity, to allergies, to asthma in our children.

If you had asked me where I thought I'd be today, I'd have told you back on Wall Street, stirring it up as a food industry analyst. Because prior to learning about how compromised our children's health is, I didn’t trust myself to do more than hit '2:00 START' on the microwave, and I certainly didn't know what an "heirloom" tomato was. And in our diet obsessed culture, the last thing I wanted to hear was that my diet soda just might be compromising my efforts to get into my skinny jeans!

But I couldn't unlearn what I had learned, and I couldn't turn my back on what had to be done to restore the health of our children. So 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 as "food's Erin Brockovich", in Forbes Women as one of "20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter", in SHAPE as one of Ten Women Shaping the World, and by the Discovery Channel's Planet Green as a "Visionary". But more importantly, I am honored to have attended roundtable discussions with members of Congress on health care reform and child nutrition bills 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. I'd love to hear from you over at Martha Stewart's Whole Living where I write a weekly column or at SHAPE where I have a daily blog.

And we'd love to have you join our team at The AllergyKids Foundation where we are working to restore the health of our children by protecting them from the chemicals now so pervasive in our food supply.

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.

http://www.robynobri