My son Arden was 18 when he found the lump on his collarbone.
The summer before, he took a cell tower maintenance job spraying Roundup along access roads. One day, the truck sprayer broke, so he switched to a backpack sprayer. He jumped a fence, the lid popped off, dumping glyphosate over his shoulders and neck. He was out of town and couldn’t wash it off until that evening — so it soaked in for the rest of the workday.
The symptoms started immediately. In just weeks, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Arden didn’t eat badly or neglect his health. He grew up in rural Tennessee, in a home where real food was taken seriously, where I poured everything I knew about nutrition into raising him. He had every advantage a mother who cares about health could give. And after glyphosate poured over his shoulders, a seven-year cancer battle began.
I wouldn’t wish this horror on any family. His 6-foot-5 frame dropped from 185 pounds to 125. Night sweats. Jaundice. Organs shutting down. Fluid pooling around his heart. An emergency rush to Vanderbilt, where the doctor remarked, “this is the worst case we’ve ever seen.”
But my son chose to fight. Seven years of chemotherapy and alternative treatments followed. When he was labeled chemo-resistant, there was nothing left but a full stem cell transplant to rebuild his immune system from scratch. Even then, he refused to wait to be healthy before starting to live. With sores down his GI tract, he forced himself to eat nourishing food. Battling extreme fatigue, he asked for an elliptical to be brought to his hospital room so he could exercise daily.
The doctors had never seen someone respond so well. What usually requires a four-week hospital stay ended in two and a half weeks. He came home pale and weak — and immediately got back in the gym and back in the kitchen. Today, years later, he is 100% cancer-free.
This is the connection our national conversation needs to make. Cleaning up our food supply and cleaning up what gets sprayed on our crops are the same fight. We cannot tell Americans to eat real food while ignoring the chemicals sprayed on it, then wonder why so many of us are sick.
My sister Pearl Barrett and I have spent over 15 years building Trim Healthy Mama. Long before this became a national conversation, we proclaimed that food is not a lifestyle preference — it is biological armor. And the chemicals on that food are a matter of what our children’s bodies will be made of when life tests them.
I think about that every time I look at Arden. His body was healthy and nourished, and still faced the fight of its life. A body already burdened would have faced even steeper odds.
Let’s eat well. Let’s demand a cleaner food supply. Let’s protect every family before they ever face what mine did.Serene Allison is a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of Trim Healthy Mama. Blog post also appears on the Harvest House Publishers blog
