The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

So I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, Part Two of the local GMO labeling campaign. Today, we discuss how two local moms are leading the charge to get it done here in Orange County, so pull up a chair and listen to why this is so important, plus later, we'll tell you what's new at mothers and what's going on around town.

But first up, we're going to get to the latest on labeling gmos, and joining us today are two moms getting right in the middle of educating people on this very important issue.

Kathleen halal is a speaker and educator about gmos and a mother of three boys, one of whom has an autoimmune condition, and Zen Honeycutt is a mom of three boys and originator of Moms across America March to label gmos. She is a writer, community leader and activist, and a speaker, and we welcome you both to the mother's market radio show.

How are you?

Great, thank you, Kim. Thanks for having us.

Well, happy you could us... And before we get to our topic, tell us the scope and focus of your work... Well, we are leaders of the Orange County movement to label gmos. Kathleen and I were working together on that along with a lot of other great people, and we are committed to educate and really empower people to learn about genetically modified foods, especially moms, and to have them get active and be involved and to not eat JAMA. Well, today we're talking about the ongoing battle to label gmos, and here in California last November, the voters decided against Prop 37 that would have required companies to change the way they label their products, however, the fight is far from over. So let's get started by asking you, Kathleen, What issues did your son have?

Well, when he was seven years old, in the middle of second grade, he went from being a top student, very happy student, popular boy, to not wanting to go to school, he was uncomfortable in his shoes, he would hide into the desk, he would run away, he would do mischievous things. And increasingly, his behavior got a little bit more, he couldn't sleep anymore, he had anxiety, he was very angry, he forgot his math, he could no longer write clearly with a pencil, he couldn't... He had the ideas in his head, still I knew, but he couldn't get them down on paper, and he didn't understand why these things were happening in... Neither did we.

So we went to a series of doctors to try and figure out what was going on with him, and we went to so many specialists, we spent thousands of dollars trying to find the answer, and we went to the top child psychologist at UCI, and all the best doctors we could find... We asked them, we had several physicals taken and so on, and everyone said he's perfectly healthy, and he doesn't exactly fit into any category of any condition, like ADHD or OCD or anything, but he seemed to have some symptoms of different areas, and so finally we stumbled upon a wonderful dyslexia therapist who heard our story, and then she said, I think if he removed his tonsils, all of this will go away. And when she first said that, we thought, Wow, we've really gotten to the bottom of the barrel because this is the craziest idea what we've heard, but we followed her advice and we went to some ENTS... To look into it further, we went to two different ENTS and both of them said they saw a little bit of scarring on our son's tonsils, and maybe we should get a blood test and look further, so we got a blood test and we saw that he had elevator, elevated strep titers, and we got his tonsils removed by the ENT, and then we put him on antibiotics and our son came back, so he's now well and doing very well. Again, top of his class, happy in school, everything's fine, but as a result of that, I wanted to look into my child's nutrition to see how I could build up his immune system through nutrition, and that's when I learned about gmos and I got a little bit frightened because I thought, this is not good. And I heard the farmer, Howard Leger, speak from very farms, and he was talking about how the animals on his farms and the other farms he was seeing had auto immune issues, some of the GMO feed... Well, the GMO-fed animals seem to have a lot of health problems and they needed to be on antibiotics and they had problems with their stomachs and digestion, and kind of a side problem of my child was food allergies and food sensitivities, which were underlying, but not symptomatic, so I thought, Wow, if gmos can be linked to autoimmune issues and food allergies, then maybe I need to look further into this, so that's what motivated me to get started, that's an amazing story, and I'm so glad your son is being better, he's much better. We've taken them off of gmos as much as we can, and his health has greatly improved while... Kathleen, that's a great story. What a great ending.

Now, let's move over to your stories in... Let's find out what motivated you to get involved?

Well, I also have three boys were the three boys moms club over here, but my three boys have allergies to milk eggs, gluten in wheat, all nuts, and most recently, my oldest boys with my oldest boy with the one with the life-threatening allergy to nuts Fane found out, he has an allergy to Karen Ganon. And Karina is a seaweed food ticker, which is in almost everything that kids like, it's in hot dogs, ice cream, sauces, salad dressing, candy. It's also in toothpaste. It's in a lot of different things. And what happened was my son got a red line around his mouth and his lips swelled up and they got painful and they got flaky and it lasted two weeks, and you had to go to school like this, and we didn't know why this was happening. We had to actually take him to an Arnold IST to find out that it was a caring union allergy, and we later confirmed that through him accidentally being exposed to it again, and that allergy was what sparked it for me, why all of a sudden, can he eat hot dogs one day, but not the next, you know, the nothing and the dairy thing that we had sort of accepted that as a normal, like a lot of kids are allergic to that now, but the Karenina on... I was like, What the heck is going on? So I started to do some research, and I found out through Robin OBriens TED Talk called patriotism, monoplane mama for who has allergies, that An allergy is a reaction to the body, seeing food as a foreign invader. And so she asked, Is there a foreign invader in our food and found out, yes, in 1994, they decided to put genetically modified proteins into our food without telling us, and that's what has been... Our kids have been exposed to... And so what happens that this pesticide that's injected into the corn and the say what it does is it erodes the lining of the stomach, and this has been widely confirmed by doctors and just animal to studies all around the world, and it erodes the stomach lining and then this permeability, the food escapes, and the body attacks that food like it's a foreign invader, and therefore you have a food allergy and irritation in the stomach and inflammation, and what really scared me as I found out that inflammation leads to stomach ulcers and stomach ulcers. Lease to stomach cancer.

And so we cannot just put a cream on this and just hope the allergy will go away, this is serious. And so that's what got me involved. I researched, I told my son about gmos and he said, Wow, so it's not me. Like there's nothing wrong with me, and I said No. And he said, You know, Mom, you know how you say I'm really compassionate and sensitive, 'cause I said, Yeah, he said, Maybe my stomach is just really sensitive to, and I can tell what the bad foods are for everybody.

I was like, Yeah, that's a really good way to look at it. And my son got empowered and he did a happy healthy students report for his fourth and fifth grade class on the third day of school, he just voluntarily wanted to share with other kids how these bad junk foods with preservatives and gmos and food dyes and gluten and all these different chemicals in them can really make you feel irritable and fidgety and tired and droopy and all that, and then he showed pictures of the kids faces of people like that, and then he showed alternative foods and that he did the report in front of the class and the kids were like, Oh, hang. This is awesome, you know when some kids put food back that later on, my mom friend told me that her son put food back that they normally would have got, it really made a difference, them... And he inspired me, he turned something from embarrassing and painful and being a victim of his allergies into something positive, empowering and a contribution to other people, so that's why I became active in Prop 37 and got really involved in this...

Wow, another great story. And there does seem to be an increase in food allergies among our kids, here's the thing, if you look at any statistics, all of these problems with children in classrooms, if you talk to teachers who've been around for more than 15, 20 years. In other words, they had experience in a classroom before gmos were introduced to the food market, and after they will all tell you that all of these problems and conditions have really increased the... On the rise in these conditions corresponds exactly to the introduction of gmos to our diets, autism 500% has increased... Yes, allergies, hurries, all of it has skyrocketed since the gmos were introduced into the food supply in the mid-90s, the life-threatening allergy visits to the ER alone, that's children being admitted by doctors, not just a parent who's worried, has risen 265% in the past 14 years since gmos were introduced, and that's people who are fearing for their child's life because they ate food... That's unacceptable to us.

Absolutely, and as it should be. That's why we're talking about it. And what would you like to see happen?

I would really like to see an awareness of gmos, I would like to see every citizen of the United States, but especially every mother, every teacher, every nurse, every pediatrician, understand exactly what gmos are, exactly how they function so that we can truly look at them and say, Is this a good thing for our children... Is this a good thing for our society?

They've been inadequately studied, and the evidence that seems to be out there, the common sense kind of evidence, tells me that there's enough question out there that we all need to look hard at this, when I look at the classroom where my children are in every classroom, there are a certain number of children, maybe two or three that really struggle more than others, they have certain issues, and if you speak with the teachers, they will tell you that the numbers of children with these quote issues, whether it's a auto mine issues or autism or allergies, they will all tell you that this is... It's on the rise, and in my opinion as a mother, it's out of control, we need to protect our children.

Okay, then, anything you'd like to add to that?

I completely agree. I would also like to see our food services directors in schools get on board and actually demand from the USDA and the FDA that the food that they are serving to our children is GMO-free. I would like our city council members and our local leaders, our representatives to get on board and to moms and communicate to the Congress in the state and everywhere that this is not acceptable for the American people, 62 other countries around the world, have it either banned or labeled, the only reason why it's not here is because we haven't spoken up about it, and I would like to see people be courageous and speak up about it, hopefully your passion will help others on being aware. Right now, we need to take a quick break is very interesting information, but we will be right back and we are talking about labeling GMO. Stay with us, we'll be right back.

Or welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the podcast from our website, mothers market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now back to our interview with GMO activist Kathleen halal and Zen Honeycutt, and we're talking about labeling GMO, and so Kathleen, you mentioned your son's condition, a auto immune condition, and wanted to ask you, what is it called? This well, it's called PANDAS or PANS. They're not really even sure what to name it yet, a lot of doctors are studying, researching what's going on, there's major studies going on at Yale, Stanford, National Institute of Health, Johns Hopkins, so a lot of the top psychiatrists and neurologists are looking into this condition, but it's just, it's an interesting condition because it looks like it's a psychological condition, but actually it's an infection that's causing the behavior. So I just wanna tell people that there's a website you can go to if you know of a child normally, this afflict children whose personality is sort of suddenly changed, usually it happens during strap season. And they can go to saving saint or saving Sami Facebook page and get more information. There's a mother named Beth Malone, who's done a lot of research, and she's written a book called Saving Sammy about her own experience with her son, who is now just fine, a successful college student with multiple majors... I think he's at Carnegie Mellon in New York, I hope I can say that. And he's just doing really well. And she's led a lot of us to find the way to help our children treat this condition, so the symptoms can be... It can look like OCD, ADHD, anxiety.

The children can have ticks or threats, they all have different kinds of symptoms, but in general, what they have in common is that their personality suddenly changes.

Wow, well, thank you very much for sharing that.

Next question, what are you doing right now? About gmos locally, right here in Orange County.

Well, first of all, I wanna acknowledge that Kathleen hosted Howard liger to come here, who's a speaker on gmos, and he's a third generation farmer, and she's a mom with three boys and soccer mom doing a lot of stuff, and she and her husband just sponsored a farmer from Iowa to come to Orange County, and he did 17 different talks in a week here, and that's the kind of heroism that is really gonna turn this country around as far as being aware of what's happening with gmos. So I just really wanna say thank you, Kathleen, for that or... And we're also... Something else we're doing is we're creating Moms across America March to label gmos on July 4th on 2013. and where that's gonna be is at parades near you, if you're on vacation, there'll be a parade near you, and you can join in with Moms across America, March to gmos, it's not just moms, but moms are leading the way, because really, we buy 85% of the food, and because we're the moms, we love our kids and we'll do anything for them, and we would like to have your support and joining with us kids, students, dads, everyone, and what we're doing is having sign up, it's gonna be coming up probably the end of February beginning of March, you can sign up on Moms across America, Moms across America dot com. And now, I just wanna say a little bit about why we're doing this. And this is to raise awareness locally and nationally simultaneously, there's still a lot of people that don't know about genetically modified foods, and with a local hometown parade, we'll have mom's marching in the parade, and then also maybe the dads and some kids supporting on the side handing out flyers, and we wanna a million people through this march and really just educate people about gmos and also offer them a solution, you know, moms, we got enough problems. Right, we want solutions, so we're gonna be handing out some flyers with some non-GMO project verified brands on there, some organic brands and letting people know actually non-GMO project verified has 680 brands now that are non-GMO, so it is available. They have 7500 products, and we wanna give moms the solutions as well.

So that's what's coming up.

So if you're interested in shopping for your family and buying non-GMO products, there is a non-GMO shopping guide, if you Google that, you can download it or purchase it, or there's also an app you can put on a smartphone, so it will help you up in shopping for your family.

So is this slowly catching on, Are we making a dent and our people catching on are more aware of gmos... Yes, it's starting to be. And a lot of people still don't understand why it's so important, and so that's something that we're doing with educating people and having speakers come in and sharing things like Robin O Brian's TED Talk and The Movie genetic roulette. And I just wanna say one thing we see about this march and having 100 people at every parade in home towns across America is that that power of us together mom struggle with feeding our kids meals pretty much six meals a day. And how are we gonna feed them? Non-GMO food, but when you connect with other moms in your neighborhood that are going through the same thing, we really become unstoppable together, and the bond is priceless, meaning Kathleen through... This has just been wonderful. It's like your best friend that you just were... Have you been all my life? So that bond of connecting with other moms in your neighborhood, town, it's very empowering, and that's really important in the whole process to get there, to having 100 people in the march is gonna be wonderful because what we're inviting people to do is if one mom shares with 10 moms, you just have a jam of potluck party or GMO-free snack or Dessert Night, and you have them over and you show Robin O Bryan's TED Talk patriotism on a plate, or the 10-minute version of genetic relate doesn't even have to be the fulling version of genetic roulette, you show that and moms talk about it, and you ask those 10 moms, Hey, will you share this with five moms, and then when you ask those five moms to share it with five moms and those five moms to share it with five moms, if that only happens three times. Each one of those moms will have reached 12070 moms in their town, Monsanto may have billions of dollars, and these... All these other chemical companies may have millions of dollars, but our love is bigger than their wallets, and they may have power, the FDA has a lot of power and a lot of different organizations have a lot of power, but we have the gift of gab, and they cannot stop us from sharing with each other about what's going on with our kids and how they're improving by going off gmos, my son's that red rash that he got around his mouth two or three months off GOs, he was accidentally exposed to caregiving through the toothpaste at the dentist office and his lips just got mildly pink, he is healing, his stomach is healing from going GMO-free, and that means that he's looking at a future where he'll be cancer-free, the rates right now in America, one out of two men are expected to get cancer, and one out of three women are expected to get cancer that is four times higher than any other country in the world, and we are last on the list of 17 of other affluent countries, last on the list for infant mortality rates. And I just have to say That soy formula is 46 to 64% GMO, and that is sprayed with glyphosate, glyphosate is a chemical. This is a fact that Keats meaning at hugs and draws out the vital nutrients in any living thing, and those vital nutrients that stop us from getting cancer, that protect us from diseases, and our babies are being fed this formula, this is not acceptable to us. That people don't know this.

Wow, well, you're right about that. What are you guys doing in your families, How are you empowering your families... Well, it's kind of like an Olympic sport because I'm sure then does the same thing I do, I shop at four or five different places for my family, finding the brands of things that they like that are non-GMO or organic, we shop at our local farmers market we go to the Farmers Market at UCI on Saturday mornings. We write many fruits and vegetables, you can also buy chicken beef eggs there, so you can get products from organic farmers there, also... We shop at mothers, we love mothers. Trader Joe's has a fair amount of organic products and they say that their products with their name on the label, any Trader Joe's brand is more... I trust them to a certain extent, but what I really prefer to do when I shop is look for the non-GMO certified label because then all of the foods have really faced rigorous screening, so either organic or non-GMO certified, but it's true that other markets mainstream markets like Albertsons and especially rape have growing organic departments, and so really, you can go to a lot of different places to get quality food for your family, but my rule of thumb is either it says Non-GMO in the label or organic.

So what types of food to the kids eating... My kids love nature's path cereals in the morning, and we love Annie's organic, the little bunnies instead of gold fish, we have those... They love the organic fruit snack type bars, and bodies I hear is it's not non-GMO verified yet, but they say their GMO Freud's gluten-free bed was... We also have to be gluten-free, it really... Once you do it, it's really not that hard, you start to find more and more brands, it's really not that hard, and especially for us because we live near mothers and we come here all the time, but something that my preschool director said, 'cause she watched genetic related her watch it, and she said, You don't, but it's so much more expensive, and I said, Well, let me have your budget, and over Thanksgiving, I'll get you a pre-school snack plan that's non-GMO free organic.

And she said, Okay, so I did it for her 123 under budget. So it's absolutely possible. And if you look at the price of junk food compared to organic food, if you go by per pound, organic food is way more, it's not expensive, it's way more nutritious, and it's not more expensive, and also you eliminate a lot of the pediatricians bills and medicine bills on the other end, and that's very expensive, we've been through that with our family, and it's actually much less by the quality organic food and avoid the doctor's office.

I priced out stomach ulcer surgery is 25000, and even with a decent copay, you'd be paying 20500, that breaks down to over 300 a month. We do not spend more than a 300 a month more for organic food, I would say it's probably 150 a month more for organic food, that's what we spend.

Well, it's worth every nickel, it's either pay me now or pay me later.

So really, what can our listeners do to get involved... Oh, you can go to Moms across America dot com, our website, and you can also go to the Facebook page, Moms across America March to label gmos. And you can get involved, you can also just get involved by talking to your moms, your friends, your PTA, your book clubs, and just start reaching out and sharing with them about this because this is gonna alter their entire lives, the future of their children's health, speaking of book clubs, a really good book is revenue, Bryan's book, where you mentioned earlier, we did the TED talk, she wrote a book called The unhealthy truth, and that's an excellent book for starting out on the ashes or Queen... We love her.

Yes, she's brilliant, brilliant mother, and she's got it going on in his website called allergy kids.

Yes, she'll explain how to develop a plan for shopping for your family and taking care of your kids, and I wanted to mention as well, if anybody wants information on hand, as they can go to saving Sammy dot net, and there's a lot of information there. You could either write an email into Beth Malone or go to the Facebook page and you can get help there to explore those avenues.

Wow, well, you definitely make a great team and love your passion, and it really comes across, thank you so very much for being here for your time, and we really appreciate your knowledge and passion for this topic in the meantime, you can get more information on the website Moms across America dot com, and learn more about how you can get involved. Thank you so very much for being with us today.

Thank you. was wonderful, thank you.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen, mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.