Growing up Greek, meals were about so much more than food. Aside from nourishment, it’s about connection, culture, and tradition. My grandfather had a produce business in Chicago and later went on to have restaurants in the area for decades. As a child, I grew up in an environment focused on food, choosing the right ingredients, and preparing meals.
After pursuing an undergraduate degree in Communications and starting my career in marketing, my passion for food naturally extended to an interest in nutrition, health, and wellness. With often-contradictory nutritional information and science in the media, I also wanted to be able to discern for myself amongst the various content, and went back to school to become a registered dietitian nutritionist. With the explosion of the wellness industry along with the emergence of social media, media messaging is more all-consuming now than ever.
Along the way, I learned about functional nutrition, an emerging subset with a personalized method of optimizing health based on individual genetics, lab values, lifestyle, and more. But what does that actually mean? The focus is on the patient versus the disease, and using food as medicine. It’s a personalized approach which centers around nutrigenomics, how nutrition interacts with your genes. We are all given a set of genes, but it is largely up to you—through diet and lifestyle—to decide which ones to turn on.
Working for a health sciences company, I’ve spent many years training physicians and other licensed health care providers how to utilize nutrition to correct metabolic imbalances and how to achieve genetic potential through nutrition. I have extended this reach 1 ) through my blog to translate nutrition science into usable information for anyone to use, and 2) through outreach to teach these principles to children while they are young to set the foundation for a lifetime of healthy choices.
