The landscape of childhood has changed. It is now much harder for our children to live a life free from food allergies, diabetes and obesity. Nowhere is that more obvious than in America.
Something is going wrong with the health of our children - in the US and in the UK, ours will be the first generation of kids who could have a shorter lifespan than their parents.
In a Letter from America, which we presented to Downing Street yesterday, campaigning groups and individuals like myself are urging British parents to take notice of what is happening in our country, so it might not happen in yours. I am urging you: do not accept genetically modified crops.
Maybe you've not thought about it before. Maybe you're asking, why?
There are a lot of reasons to exercise precaution around GM crops, but for me, the absence of any long-term science around their impact on health is one of the most urgent.
Ill health impacts our lives in so many important ways. Our children's health is already changing the face of American families and our economy. We spend 18 cents of every dollar on health care, managing disease. The pharmaceutical companies can't keep up with demand, and now there are shortages for drugs used to treat cancers.
I believe the solution can be found in the kitchen, not the medicine cabinet. When our youngest child had a life-threatening allergic reaction to a breakfast of blue yoghurt and eggs, we joined the growing number of American families dealing with this condition. It changed everything. I quickly learned that today, 1 in 13 children in the United States has a food allergy. I looked into the ingredients in our food supply and realized that there was so much that we hadn't been told about genetically engineered ingredients and the chemicals that are applied to them.
The potential for genetically engineered foods to cause allergic reactions is one of the reasons why 64 countries around the world choose to label these foods for their citizens, while 27 countries – including France, Italy, Norway, Switzerland – have either total or partial bans of GM crops.
Food allergies have been sky-rocketing in the United States in the last fifteen years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 265% increase in the rates of hospitalisations related to food allergic reactions in eight year period between 1998 and 2006, and the sales of EpiPens, a life-saving medical device for those with food allergies, has also seen a record 36% sales growth.
Whilst correlation does not prove causation, the introduction of GM crops into the US in the mid-1990s has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in a range of diseases including allergies.
Proteins incorporated into GM Crops were found to have similarities to known allergens, and because of this are suspected allergens. This is particularly true for proteins in GM Soya and the Bt protein used in GM Maize, both of which are widely used in the US food chain.
Scientific evidence is continuing to mount, courageously presented by doctors like Mark Hyman, MD, in his ground-breaking book, The Blood Sugar Solution, and paediatric specialists like Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. Alan Greene - and it shows clearly the role that diet and nutrition play in the health of our children.
"Children born outside the United States had significantly lower prevalence of any allergic diseases (20.3%) than those born in the United States (34.5%),” said the study led by Jonathan Silverberg of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York.
This - the fact that US kids have more than a 1 in 3 chance of having allergic diseases, like food allergies, asthma or eczema, while kids born in other countries around the world had a “significantly lower prevalence” of 1 in 5 - is the reason why myself and so many mothers have driven the labelling laws in each State - so that we can stop the escalation of these conditions, so that grandchildren will not be burdened in the same way.
American children are sounding the alarm bells. Mothers hear it, fathers hear it, and we urge those around the world to listen, too.
If you allow GM crops to be grown in your country and infiltrate your food system, you risk developing the same problems we now labour under in the US. It also makes our own efforts to label and regulate GMO’s in our country more difficult. It is going to take collaboration to address the needs of a world population that is burdened by both disease and malnutrition, but if we work together, we can revitalize our global food system, ensuring healthy soil, healthy fields, healthy food and healthy children.