This past week, I was honored by the Environmental Media Association and recognized with this year’s green parent award. The irony is not lost on me, as I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, recruited by Exxon and Enron out of business school and worked on an equity team that managed $20 billion in asset. The only thing that was green during those chapters of my life was the money that we had under management.
We moved to Colorado 16 years ago and quickly had four children. It wasn’t until our youngest was diagnosed with a life-threatening allergy that I began to pay attention to how our environment impacts our health.
Today, the statistics are dire: 1 in 2 American men are expected to get cancer in their lifetime and 1 in 3 women. Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease in U.S. children, according the to the Centers for Disease Control. In the U.S., 1 in 13 children has food allergies, 1 in 10 has asthma, 1 in 2 minority kids are expected to be insulin dependent by the time they reach adulthood, and the rates of autism continue to increase.
Our children have done nothing to deserve this, and the opportunity to fix this situation is huge. It is an invitation to all of us to lend our talents and skills, to leverage everything that we are to healing our families.
It was an honor to be recognized by EMA, but none of us can do this alone. Together, we can fix this. It gives us the chance to tell the greatest love story of all times—that of healing our loved ones. Please watch and share if you are so inspired.
More than half a million Americans die of cancer every year.
Breast cancer survivor Paulette Leaphart’s journey is a powerful reminder that scars—whether physical or emotional than cancer leave on our lives. These scars are not just fact of life for the survivors but their loved ones as well.
Paulette made a journey of 1000 miles, from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., on foot and topless to make a point to Congress about how broken our healthcare system is.
A 2011 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute determined the cost of all cancer care in the U.S. totaled $124.5 billion in 2010. The researchers projected the total cost would rise to $157.7 billion by 2020.
Each year, cancer costs the world more money than any other disease, according to the American Institute of Cancer Research (AICR).
Cancer costs $895 billion annually. Comparatively, heart disease costs $753 billion. Nothing else comes close, with traffic accidents and diabetes each costing about $204 billion.
The AICR estimates Americans lost 83 million years of healthy life because of cancer deaths and disabilities in 2008.
Watch her amazing video below.
A documentary is being produced about Paulette’s journey. Click here for more information.
We hear a lot about the moms driving change in the food industry, but ahead of Father’s Day, it’s time to shine a light on the dads.
As I began brainstorming about this list, it hit me: it’s huge! And I was suddenly flooded with gratitude for all that these guys have done.
It’s no small feat juggling a job and a family, but work in the food industry goes beyond that. It can be a calling. It’s a love that doesn’t stop, so it takes a special type of family to share someone with that.
So this is a shout out to those dads and the families that love them. Thank you for all that you do.
John Foraker, President of Annie’s. When the history books are written, John will be known for being a compass of change inside of the industry. He took a little bunny across the finish line for an IPO and then into a merger that will change history. Since their acquisition by General Mills, Annie’s has rolled out more organic products and Mills is now working with Organic Valley to increase the number of organic farmland acres in the U.S.
Matthew Dillon, Clif Bar. He’s been a driving force for change in the organic industry, spending significant time in D.C. working on policy, as well as some recent time in a studio, creating a new celebrity in the industry, Mr. Seed. He takes repeated threats, meme-manufactured insults and more and keeps going.
David Littlejohn, founder of Humanaut. His Save the Bros campaign has to be one of the funniest things the organic industry has done in the last ten years. The video went viral, and his team is still at it. With a new baby, he understands how crazy it can be for parents today, leaning into it, with irreverence and humor.
Darren Mahaffy, the VP of Marketing at Nature’s Path. There are so many great dads inside of this company, and Darren leverages all of that, as well as his personal experiences of a dad of kids managing food allergies, to help create safer products for all families. Nature’s Path has held out against so many acquisition offers, thank goodness, and is a moral compass driving the food industry.
Steve Young, lead on General Mills Natural and Organic Division. HIs role might be the toughest, creating an insurgency from within, but his experience and strength could not be a better fit for it. He is changing the DNA of a multinational food corporation, leveraging the Annie’s relationship, to create extraordinary and massive change. General Mills’ recent announcement about the conversion of farmland to organic to help their dairy lines is just one example.
Congressman Tim Ryan. There are few inside of the beltway with the guts to take this on. We’ve been through a year of a presidential campaign and not one debate has discussed the sad state of the American food system. Tim knows this and is on the frontline fighting for Team USA. He’s a dad of three with a wife who is a school teacher. He is also the author of The Real Food Revolution. He knows firsthand what good food can do for families and communities. Our hope is that his team inside of DC grows fast.
Bert Cohen and David Lurie. These two dads have given so much to the food allergy community that there really aren’t words. They’ve led companies, Enjoy Life Foods along with amazing allies like Joel Warady, and Free 2b Foods. These companies are making allergy-friendly products for the escalating number of American kids impacted by the condition. Food allergies send someone to the E.R. once every three minutes in the U.S. They’ve got a marketplace that couldn’t be more grateful.
Robert Craven, the CEO of MegaFoods, and a driving force for health. The supplements industry can be a shady space, full of a bunch of junked up fillers and posers. Craven stands head and shoulders above the rest, and he shows no signs of stopping, building out a think-tank team to help drive home the importance of nutrition’s role in prevention, using whole foods supplements.
Tom Spier, Boulder Food Group. The founder of Bear Naked Granola and a lead on EVOL Burritos, he now runs the Boulder Food Group, an investment vehicle for the organic food industry. He’s driving change using capital and massive experience so that more of these little companies can grow into big ones, and he happens to be one of my brother’s oldest friends, so the stories are endless!
Gary Hirshberg, Stonyfield Farms. The founder and chairman of Stonyfield Farms works with other great dads like Lewis Goldstein of Organic Valley, so that American families have clean and safe yogurt, free from artificial growth hormones, artificial dyes, GMOs, Roundup and other junk. Gary is still on the front line fighting for American families and transparency in our food system for which he is owed so much gratitude, because he could have retired years ago. He has a heart that won’t stop beating for this movement, thank goodness.
Honorable Mentions: These dads have grabbed so many headlines over the years that they need no introduction, just a special shout out, once again: Jamie Oliver, Michael Pollan and Prince Charles.
But even as I write this list, I think about guys in the food movement like Pulin Modi, of Change.org, Nikhil and Alejandro, the millennial founders of Back to the Roots, Ali Partovi and so many more who are not dads but leveraging everything that they are to drive change. And then there are the dads inside of the grocery stores, like the CEOs of Kroger and Costco and Errol Schweizer who drove massive change at Whole Foods.
It is so inspiring, and if you aren’t in this industry, you may want to give some serious thought to joining.
Life can get absolutely crazy, especially if you have kids.
We have four of them, three teenagers and a pre-teen. I’ve made it this far, which is a good sign! But the ninja skills required to coordinate the moving parts of four kids and a husband, on top of the work and every other obligation, requires an incredible focus and the fact that I cannot afford to get sick.
I didn’t always operate this way. I lived on diet soda and fat-free food (if you can call it that) for years. I had a tendency to run hard, play hard and drive myself straight into the ground. I’d crash. Total wipe out.
And then when the health of my kids were hit with different conditions, conditions now impacting so many children today, I had to reassess. I had to keep my family healthy, and I could not afford to go down.
My background is finance and motherhood. I was a straight A, MBA number cruncher. I knew nothing about food and began reaching out to doctors, pediatricians and dietitians to learn.
There have been a lot of things that have surprised me along the way, but I think one of the most surprising things continues to be that some of the easiest solutions are right in front of us. Things like reducing exposure to pesticides, artificial dyes, GMOs, since we don’t know the long-term impact.
But one day, sitting in the pediatrician’s office, he asked, “Do you guys take magnesium?” We were there because one of the kids was dealing with a bullying situation at school, and the stress was high.
“No, why?” And he started listing the benefits and the fact that 80% of Americans could be deficient.
“How did this happen?” I asked, thinking about my 104 year old grandmother. He wasn’t sure, so I got digging into the research.
It turns out that current industrial agricultural methods take from the soil more than they give.
It turns out that current industrial agricultural methods take from the soil more than they give. Monoculture (growing the same crop year in and year out, which depletes the soil of nutrients), synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and aggressive tilling further deplete minerals and trace elements from the soil and leave it vulnerable to erosion. This means much of the produce that we eat today has fewer nutrients than before these methods were utilized. In other words, this new way of farming stripped our soil. The word is “chelation”. And chemicals like glyphosate strip away key things like copper, zinc and magnesium. No one knows this better than Dr. Don Huber, a professor emeritus and retired military colonel who bravely spoke out on this.
As I dug into the research, I learned that a carrot you eat today can have 10 to 25 percent fewer vitamins and minerals than a carrot did twenty-five years ago.
And magnesium is one of those minerals that has been depleted. And it’s an important one.
True to form, I thought, “If magnesium can truly do all of this, why isn’t everyone talking about this? And how have I never heard of it?”
Because unfortunately, not enough docs get enough nutrition and this training (launching the industry for registered dietitians).
And here’s what I learned.
Every day, hundreds of complex chemical reactions occur in your body—and helping to regulate more than 350 of them is the hardworking mineral Magnesium.
Most of us are woefully deficient in this powerhouse of a mineral. Some doctors estimate that 80% of Americans aren’t getting enough magnesium. According to the National Institute of Health, an adult body contains approximately 25 g magnesium, with 50% to 60% present in the bones and most of the rest in soft tissues.
According to Dr. Frank Lipman, “Every day, hundreds of complex chemical reactions occur in your body—and helping to regulate more than 350 of them is the hardworking mineral Magnesium. Keep magnesium levels high and you’ll help protect your body against heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, type-2 diabetes, migraines, insomnia and depression.”
Shoot! Who wouldn’t want that?
So where to find this magic mineral and which company makes one of the greatest?
Today, a life threatening allergic reaction to food sends someone to the emergency room in the United States once every six minutes. EpiPen is now a $1 billion brand.
Today, one in eleven children struggle with asthma, and one in four are affected by allergies. The incidence of allergy has increased significantly over the past two decades, and allergy to peanuts has more than quadrupled from 1997 to 2010. Approximately 30 million children – more than 1/3 of our kids – are affected by one of these four new childhood epidemics. This is not something we can just accept.
An official statistic held that allergies affect some 7 million Americans, including about 6 percent of children below the age of three. That information came courtesy of U.S. Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner Lester M. Crawford, J., D.V.M., Ph.D., speaking before the Consumer Federation of America on April 22, 2002. But that data is now over ten years old.
Today, it is now estimated that up to 15 million Americans have food allergies, 1 in every 13 children. That’s roughly two in every classroom.
The Centers for Disease Control also issued a report in 2008 that said that there has been a 265% increase in the rate of hospitalizations related to food allergic reactions over the prior ten year period.
This begs explanation
An allergy is basically an overreaction by your immune system to a protein that it perceives as a threat—for example, the proteins in particular types of food, the dust mite protein, or pollen. For people without allergies, these proteins are harmless. But if you’ve got an allergy, your immune system sees these proteins as dangerous invaders.
To drive the invader out, your immune system mobilizes all its resources: mucous, to flush out the intruder; vomiting, to force it out; diarrhea, to expel it quickly. Such conditions may make you feel sick, but they’re actually evidence of your body’s attempts to get well.
A key aspect of the immune response is known as inflammation, characterized by one or more of four classic symptoms: redness, heat, swelling, and pain. Inflammation doesn’t occur only in allergic reactions; it flares up whenever your body feels threatened, in response to a bruise, cut, bacteria, or virus as well as to otherwise harmless pollen, dust, or food. Scientists now believe that much of our immune system is found in our digestive tracts, where many of these inflammatory reactions occur in the form of stomachaches, cramping, nausea, bloating, and vomiting.
Ironically, the immune system’s inflammatory reaction—meant to heal and protect the body—often causes more problems than the initial “invader” in the cases when allergic reactions become life-threatening.
Common Symptoms of Food Allergy: Immediate Reactions
rash or hives
nausea
stomach pain
diarrhea
itchy skin
eczema
shortness of breath
chest pain
swelling of the airways to the lungs
anaphylaxis
Food Allergies and Food Sensitivity: Our Immune System Overreacts Again
At first glance, the distinction between “allergies” and “sensitivity” may seem like a meaningless word game. But understanding the relationship between these two conditions is crucial to grasping the true nature of the allergy epidemic—and to seeing how even the supposedly healthy foods in our kitchens may be harmful to our health.
As we’ve seen, allergies are an overreaction of our immune system, a kind of exaggerated response to a perceived danger. When a child comes in contact with these proteins (peanut, egg, wheat, etc.) her immune system “recognizes” the protein as dangerous, just as it would have seen the danger in the bacterium that causes pneumonia or the virus that causes mumps. In response, her immune system creates special “fighter” proteins called antibodies designed to identify and neutralize the “invader.”
These fighter proteins are known as immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short. When they’re released into the bloodstream, their purpose is to “seek and destroy” the invader, which they do by creating one or more of the classic food allergy symptoms, such as the hives, or the diarrhea with which other children respond, or, in more extreme cases, the anaphylactic shock that can kill a child within minutes.
The classic IgE response occurs within minutes or even seconds, because IgE proteins are some of the most aggressive antibodies we know. That immediate IgE response is the defining characteristic of an allergic reaction.
Food sensitivities start out in a similar way. If a “sensitive” child is exposed to a protein that his system perceives as a threat, he’ll manufacture another type of fighter protein, known as Immunglobulin G, or IgG. Although IgE and IgG antibodies play similar roles, they produce somewhat different—though often overlapping—symptoms.
A crucial difference between the two, though, is their reaction time. The less aggressive IgG antibodies typically produce a delayed response that might not appear for hours or even days after the child has consumed the offending food.
So even though food sensitivities and food allergies both produce painful, inflammatory, and potentially dangerous responses, this delayed reaction time has led many doctors to give food sensitivities second-class status. Partly that’s because they don’t present an immediate and obvious threat to children’s lives: only the IgE proteins trigger anaphylactic shock, for example, and in that sense, only the IgE proteins can kill (though the IgG reaction can have serious long-term consequences). I also think that traditional doctors tend to downplay the importance of nutrition, frequently dismissing the idea that such symptoms as earache, eczema, crankiness, brain fog, and sleep problems might be related to a child’s diet.
However, an article in The Lancet, Britain’s most respected medical journal, casts another light on the subject. The article referred to doctors who use elimination diets—diets that begin with a very limited, “safe” array of food choices and then add potentially problematic foods back into the diet, one by one.
The reason to do an elimination diet is to identify which foods in your diet might be triggering symptoms like skin rashes, fatigue, or stomach ache. Often, some foods affect us without our realizing it and we live with the symptoms, taking medicine to alleviate the suffering. But if you eliminate these foods from your diet, you may find that your symptoms disappear. What becomes even more interesting is that when you reintroduce the offending food, you may suddenly suffer drastic symptoms which make it clear that the food was indeed triggering one or more problems. An elimination diet can sometimes reveal with dramatic speed that a particular food you’ve always believed was harmless is actually causing such chronic symptoms as headache, digestive problems, and even more serious complaints. Masked by your daily diet and by the slowness of the food-sensitivity reaction, the offending food does its dirty work without ever realizing that it is the culprit behind your—or your child’s—disorders.
When you take a break from eating that problem food, however, and then add it back into your diet, you see how powerful its effects are and how responsible it may be for a seemingly unrelated problem. Foods that you thought were safe for you turn out to be highly problematic, indicating the presence of a previous undiagnosed food sensitivity. As a result, the authors of the Lancet article conclude that the prevalence of food sensitivity (referred to in the article as “food intolerance”) has been seriously underestimated.
Certainly, food allergies are far more dramatic. Whenever you read about a kid who died within minutes of eating at a fast-food joint or after breathing in the peanut dust from a friend’s candy wrapper, that’s an “IgE-mediated” food allergy. They’re fast, they can be deadly, and I’m glad doctors want to give them the attention they deserve.
But I also think doctors should be looking at delayed reactions, too, the “IgG-mediated” responses to food sensitivities. And some doctors do look seriously at both. Most conventional doctors, though, tend to focus on IgE immediate reactions. I think there are lots of reasons why they should view the two types of reactions as part of a larger, single problem.
First, both reactions have the same ultimate cause: the immune system’s overreaction to apparently harmless food. According to internationally acclaimed author and physician Kenneth Bock, M.D., there’s also quite a bit of overlap between IgE and IgG symptoms. Both can contribute to inflammatory responses in multiple body systems.
True, the delayed IgG reactions are less likely to cause hives and are more likely to produce a host of apparently vague symptoms, such as headache, brain fog, sleep problems, joint pain, fatigue, and muscle aches. But both the immediate and the delayed responses are immune system problems triggered by a supposedly “harmless” food.
Conventional doctors’ tendency to separate “IgE-mediated” food allergies and “IgG-mediated” food sensitivities into two separate problems has the effect of minimizing the allergy epidemic. Remember, IgE allergies, IgG sensitivities, and asthma—three similar ways that our immune systems can overreact—are all on the rise. It makes sense to find a doctor who is willing to address all three as symptoms of a greater underlying issue.
Common Symptoms of Food Sensitivity: Delayed Reactions
fatigue
gastrointestinal problems, including bloating and gas
itchy skin and skin rashes like eczema
brain fog
muscle or joint aches
headache
sleeplessness and sleep disorders
chronic rhinitis (runny nose), congestion, and post-nasal drip
Five Take-Aways:
1. Even if your kids can’t talk, their skin speaks volumes! Did you know that the skin is a person’s largest organ? Even when your kid is too young to tell you how he feels or too used to her symptoms to identify them (when kids hurt all the time, they don’t know they hurt!), you can often read your child’s condition in his or her skin.
Does your kid have eczema? Does he get rashes around the mouth, especially after he eats a certain food or swallows a certain beverage? Rashes around the knees, elbows, or armpits? Does he have “allergic shiners”—that is, dark circles under the eyes?
These are all inflammatory reactions, signs that the body is trying to rid itself of what it perceives as “toxic invader.” In your child’s case, that “toxic invader” might be an apparently harmless food, to which your kid is either allergic or “sensitive.” Keeping that invader away from your kid may bring relief from symptoms—and it may clear up other problems, such as brain fog, crankiness, sleep problems, inattention, acne, and mood swings.
2. Look below. Your kids’ bowel movements, not to be too delicate here, also speak volumes. Runny poops are a sign that a person isn’t properly digesting his food. And indeed, as we got the allergens out of some children’s diets, poops tend to firm up.
3. Chronic ear infections are often a sign of dairy allergies. In some cases, milk may have ill effects like eczema, upset stomachs or chronic ear infections for children who are allergic or sensitive to it.
4. Find a doctor who is willing to work with you, test for both IgE and IgG allergies and sensitivities and to address the important role that elimination diets can play in managing allergic symptoms like eczema, ear infections and chronic mucous.
5. More research is needed. Food allergies are impacting a growing number of Americans. It is impacting everything from how schools feed children to what snacks airlines choose to carry on planes. Napster co-founder, Sean Parker, recently donated $24 million to Stanford to conduct research to get to the bottom of this condition, what is triggering it and how to cure it.
6. Find a friend. Find an ally to help you get safe snacks in the classroom or meet with your Congressman to discuss this epidemic. The landscape of childhood is changing. It is changing families and changing the food industry. None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something.
Always discuss individual health inquiries and medical issues with a qualified personal physician and/or specialist.
In May 2009, I was on a book tour when I first met Paul Hawken. He has been a visionary and leading voice in sustainability for decades, a founder of Smith & Hawken.
After I spoke, he took me by the shoulders and shared some powerful and inspiring insight, and it’s been an incredible friendship ever since.
When he sent me his book, Blessed Unrest, I fell in love with the way that he describes this global movement to bring sustainability to our world in the way in which he described it. It was the deep understanding that we are all moving this forward together.
But nothing more eloquently describes the hope he has for our future than a commencement address he gave that same year.
I reread it as I prepare to give my first commencement address this May, in part for the inspiration and in part because it is such an elixir of hope.
Grab your favorite beverage and enjoy. And if you don’t already know him, please meet the amazing Paul Hawken
When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.
Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.
The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
This afternoon, I had a call with a friend who has had a tough year. We are at that age, where we suddenly find ourselves not only losing our parents, but also losing friends to things like heart attacks and cancer.
That had suddenly happened last spring to my friend, and then this winter, he took a particularly bad hit to the head. It compounded a lifetime of injuries accumulated playing sports, skiing and just living a courageous life. And it took him out.
For the last three months, he’d been seeing specialists, physicians and all kinds of people in the health field, but as I listened to him today, I heard something else.
We spoke about how our bodies have this weird way of hanging onto things, emotions and memories. The tension in your back or shoulders, the stomach churning. More often that not, it’s born out over a habit of coping. Our bodies are so strong. They can handle a lot, until they get some kind of external shot to the system.
And he talked about the work he is doing to heal. To put the parts back together. The broken parts.
As he talked, I listened, thinking about the glass bowl that once broken can be mended but it’s never the same. You always see the crack.
And I said, “What if the broken parts are meant to happen? To make room for what is supposed to evolve? Maybe we hold on so tightly to what we think we should be, according to some inherited programming, and we have to break, to let ourselves open up to what we are supposed to become?”
And I talked about how this work broke my heart over and over again. Expectations shattered, relationships changed, broken bodies and dreams. I fought it for a while. I’d lay with it at night, thinking, “This sucks. This really hurts.”
And I remember getting to a place where I realized that the hurt, the push against my expectations, my beliefs, my definitions, were my boundaries being challenged. I got to the point where I realized that those moments were designed to teach me something, to make me strong, to expand my vision.
And I’d lay there and think, “Help me understand the lesson I am supposed to learn quickly.” I’d say it to myself almost like a prayer.
And one day, I realized that the hurts, the setbacks were teaching me things. They were making me stronger, making room for new things, an authenticity. And I realized that my heart had to break to make room for all of the love that was needed to do this work. The boundaries had to come down, the walls had to fall.
And I had no intention at all to put it back together. I didn’t want to do anything with the broken pieces. They’d made room for what was supposed to evolve, to be, for what this work was supposed to become.
So as I listened to my friend, he shared where he was and how he was trying to heal, to put the parts back together.
“But what if you aren’t supposed to? What if this is all happening for a reason, opening you to something you may not yet see?”
What if we are like seeds, and we are meant to break open to allow what is inside to fully form and become what it is supposed to be? That’s a beautiful thing not something to be resisted or fixed.
And as I listened, I thought about how deeply I truly believe that we are here to evolve into our own unique design. How great it is to see a friend brave enough to do it. We are here to become the best version of ourselves that we can be. We are here to own our story. We have to break through old designs, dismantle those protective outer shells. Sometimes, life happens, and things happen that get us there faster than we were going to get there ourselves.
There really are no accidents. And once you realize that all experiences, even the terrible ones, are here to teach us something, show us something, you stop fighting them and let them teach their lessons.
Life throws curve balls. Our happiness is defined by how we handle them.
The seed has to break open to allow the breakthrough, and it has to break open in order to root down.
Maybe we’re not that different, and things have to break open to make room for us to root down and become all that we are meant to be.
April is Stress Awareness Month, as with the school year winding down, most parents can feel it! But it’s not just parents that are feeling the stress. Across the board, Americans are living with more and more stress. Thankfully, there is a lot that you can do with diet and nutrition to help manage it.
This Raspberry “Cream” (dairy-free!) Smoothie packs a nutritional punch, as it is brimming with antioxidants, healthy fats, magnesium and probiotics! It takes care of you from the inside out. It’s a great snack for between meals and also makes a quick breakfast that you can take on the go. This recipe uses coconut-milk yogurt for the base, which is perfect for those who are sensitive to dairy or have digestive issues, but you can also substitute any non-dairy milk or yogurt of your choice.
Serves 1
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 0 minutes
Ingredients
1 cup organic raspberries, frozen
6 ounces vanilla-flavored coconut-milk yogurt with probiotics
1 teaspoon Raspberry-Lemon Flavor Natural Calm 1 cup ice
Directions
Blend all ingredients until smooth.
Enjoy immediately.
Our friends over at Natural Vitality actually put together a little book to help manage stress, this month or anytime. You can grab your FREE copy of the Calmful Living book here.
We receive emails and notes from readers every day. Some stop us in our tracks, like this one, and we feel that they are really important to share so that others understand that they are not alone in their work and concern over the health of our families and food system.
What can we do? Educate each other, share resources and stories, keep working towards a smarter food system. The legacy is ours to create.
Dear Robyn,
I just read your post about the woman who worked for Target and your advice to her. It resonated with me because I work for a conventional farm. They spray pesticides, including Roundup. I lost my mom to cancer when I was 26, she was 56.
Before she died, she encouraged me to find my birth mother. I did. I just lost her to cancer too. I’m 42 now, my birth mother was also 56 when she died.
My birth mother was a landscaper her whole life. She sprayed Roundup almost daily. She was told it was perfectly safe and that she didn’t need any PPE. She never saw a label or SDS for any of the pesticides she worked with. She recalled getting it on her hands and clothes and breathing in the mist from the spray.
She was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer. By the time they found it, it had spread to her lymph and lungs. From there it progressed to her bones and then her brain. She had no family history of cancer, and genetic testing confirmed this.
I work for a small family hop farm in Oregon. The farmers are good people. They are farming the only way they know. The mother of the current (4th generation) farming family was diagnosed with grade 4 glioblastoma two years ago. I am friends with the family and I’m also a scientist with a background in biochemistry and interest in nutrition.
When she was diagnosed they reached out to me for advice. I had already done extensive research about cancer and treatments, both conventional and alternative, for my moms. I worked with the family to learn how much they were willing to adjust their lifestyle and invest in health in the face of a lethal brain cancer diagnosis. As is consistent with my experience, the answer was not very much, with the exception of what mainstream MDs advised.
Based on my research, I determined the most effective thing that would be the easiest to do is to adopt as much of the Budwig diet as possible. She did this, and I’m happy to report that she is alive and well, and the cancer has not come back after her initial surgery. This is basically unheard of with grade 4 glioblastoma, and while her doctors are impressed, I was asked not to come back to any of her appointments with her after the first and only time I accompanied her to her appointment (they did not appreciate my questions).
I’m writing to you to ask for your help. I feel like I should stay at this farm and do what I can to effect change. I have tried and mostly have been met with resistance and negativity, but I have also had success in other areas around sustainability, so I remain hopeful.
The challenge for me is that there is so little information about how to farm any way other than conventionally. I helped the farm become salmon safe certified, but there is still so much to be done. Going organic is not an option for them in the short term, but I am wondering if there are any resources you know of for farms hoping to make the transition or even just for reducing pesticide use.
Thank you so much for the good work you do. You inspire me and give me hope for the future.
Erin Schrode has done more in her first 25 years of life than a lot of people do in a lifetime. She and her mom founded a groundbreaking organization called Turning Green that has gone on to impact families around the country.
Since co-founding Turning Green in 2005, she has developed education and social action platforms to inspire, educate, and mobilize millions of students and the global public. Erin is also the eco correspondent for Fusion (ABC and Univision’s new joint venture). But that’s just the start. Erin has been featured in and tapped as an expert for the NY Times, Vanity Fair, ABC, CNN, Seventeen Magazine and various multimedia outlets. As The White House said, “Erin is a dynamic, passionate and ambitious young woman committed to creating big change everywhere she goes.”
But most importantly, she is a friend, and she has been for several years now. Wise beyond her years, you can’t say you have watched her “grow up,” as she has more wisdom in her than people twice her age. What has been fun as her friend is to watch her champion causes for a better planet. Our health is one of those causes. We won’t get far without it.
And now, from her hometown of Marin County, California to New York University to seventy nations around the globe, this innovative entrepreneur is on a lifelong journey to inspire people to action that ensures a just, safe, thriving world for future generations. Erin is running for Congress. You can follow her on Twitter @ErinSchrode #ErinForUs. And you can listen to our podcast, Take Out with Ashley and Robyn, and this inspiring interview with one of the most powerful game-changers of her generation and in our country. Please meet Erin Schrode. http://tinyurl.com/hhw89ax
