Knowles - The Nutritionists Kitchen

IVE ALWAYS HAD an insatiable hunger to travel and explore. When I was a small child, I would seldom stay in one place for long. When we dined out, which was often, I would leave the dinner table midway through the meal to meet and greet neighboring diners. When I was older, I traveled in more conventional waysI lived with a host family in France in high school and managed to live and study abroad again in college. The instant I graduated, I packed my bags and embarked on my biggest adventure yet, to a very rural village in northern Peru. This time, I didnt buy a return ticket.

After a six-hour camioneta (small pickup truck) ride northeast from Piura into the desert and along the Andes, I was eventually dropped off in my new homea town called San Francisco with a population of roughly two hundred. There was no running water in the village or electricity for miles, and the towns worn pay phone rarely, if ever, worked. It was remote, to say the least.

I worked with a U.S. nonprofit started by two Peace Corps volunteers, whose mission was to promote and sustain healthy behavioral change in rural and impoverished communities, specifically with youth. We collaborated with a local community organization to deliver basic health and hygiene education while promoting leadership skills, critical thinking, and healthy lifestyle activities. The days were long and hot, and the nights were too. The work was hard, personal time was hard to come by, and the local diet was extremely limited.

I found myself trying to get creative with meal planning, given our few ingredients. How many ways could I rearrange these ingredients? We had access to white rice, pig lard, white bread, plantains, bananas, beets, cilantro, lemongrass, chicken eggs, and on special occasions, dehydrated meattypically including maggots from open-air storage. I was entertained at first trying to find new and tasty combinations. I once made a modified borscht (beet soup) that amused my host family for weeksthey would laugh at me daily and ask me why I would ever, for the love of God, drink pink soup!

Eventually, the novelty wore off, and I would crave fresh produce and protein. I didnt realize how much I relied on fresh food, especially produce, until then. I would stuff my backpack full of it when we took our monthly camioneta trips back to the city for meetings. Inevitably though, those foods didnt last long in the heat without refrigeration and would be gobbled up in a couple of days. The fresh fruit, local ceviche, heirloom corn, tricolor quinoa, guinea pig, spicy peppers, and abundance of colored potatoes Peru is known for were more than a thousand miles away in southern Peru.

At first, I could manage the limitations of this diet. It felt short term, and I was determined. After a few months, though, I didnt feel well. I slowed down a lot, gained weight, and felt worse in general. At the same time, I was trying to understand why many of the villagers had white spots growing on their eyes. Later, I discovered these were Bitots spots and they were actually losing their eyesight due to a deficiency in vitamin A, a critical nutrient for vision, which is one of the leading preventable causes of blindness in developing nations. I also learned that vitamin A can easily be found in, among other foods, eggs, sweet potatoes, kale, spinach, pumpkin, whole cows milk, and carrots.

As I learned more about nutrition and compared it to the local diet, I became more intrigued and fascinated and, frankly, concerned. Eating vitamin Arich foods is enough to prevent blindnesswhoa! Contrarily, not eating enough vitamin Arich foods can lead to blindness. This was a profound moment for me. Food really is medicine. Before my epiphany, these were just fancy words I would read in fancy books and magazine articles or hear at new age juice shops in Portland, Oregon, where Im from. My discovery also validated why I was feeling so dull and unhealthy.

A light turned on at that moment. This was the beginning of a new path for me. I could feel it in my bones. I knew right then and there, standing in my adobe room, that I had to learn as much as possible about optimizing your health with food and nutrition. I wanted to learn for those who arent given the opportunity or dont know where to access reliable nutrition information. I wanted to study the foundation of nutrition, how we assimilate food, which foods provide which nutrients, how to prepare foods to maximize their nutrient content, and so much more I couldnt even fathom at the time. Specifically, I wanted to learn how to use food as medicine. I wanted to become a registered dietitian nutritionist.

Almost a year later, when I finally returned to the U.S., I applied and was accepted into the graduate program in nutrition at Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. This is when I really started to understand the impact of nutrition and the incredible healing powers of food. Each meal, each snack, each sip of your favorite drink is another opportunity to nourish yourself. What you eat can actually prevent disease, help you function optimally, and even heal and restore your body. I was hooked.