Food can be a comfort, a social stimulator, a fuel, but Julie Daniluk constantly shows off how food can also be a healer.
When the Healthier You Expo considered whom to have on their mainstage - sharing and expanding on the message of people taking personal charge of their own well-being and health - what better place to focus than the stuff we eat. No matter what our ethnic background, socio-economic background, spiritual or cultural background, we all eat every day. What we choose to take into our bodies every day is a big part of how we feel that day and how the physical machine of our bodies performs in the long term. Daniluk has become one of the leading voices in the world on making food choices that double as wellness choices.
"I feel most alive when teaching people how to heal with food," Daniluk said.
One of the simple, introductory lessons that illustrates this idea is found within common words we use to describe what we eat. Diet. Taken literally, it simply means the stuff we ingest. Often, though, it's a word co-opted by pop-culture to imply force-feeding your body someone's predetermined list of rights and wrongs, a prescribed regimen around which you're to structure your life even though they don't know you or your community. Daniluk simply turns that around with a calculated pun: don't diet, she smiles, when you can live-it instead.
"I am honoured to witness people awakening to healthy gourmet food," she said. "I don't believe in rigid diets or meal plans because I think they are outdated methods of control that are bound to fail. Instead I enjoy inspiring people to look at healing choices so they can find their own live-it."
Daniluk will be at the Prince George Civic Centre as the keynote speaker at this year's Healthier You Expo on Sunday, and she will expand on this concept of eating for health as a part of a fulfilling everyday lifestyle, instead of inflexible and impersonal fuel sources.
"We're going to be exploring how we can increase our joy and longevity using anti-inflammatory superfoods," she told The Citizen during a phone conversation from Toronto.
That's where she writes her many books on the subject, and bases her television presence. Daniluk is the author of Meals That Heal Inflammation and Slimming Meals That Heal, both of which are stars on the international bestseller lists.
She is also the host of Healthy Gourmet, a reality cooking show on the Oprah Winfrey Network that looks at the ongoing battle between taste and nutrition. Additionally, she is a resident expert for The Marilyn Denis Show on CTV and has been a special guest on hundreds of other television and radio programs including the Dr. Oz Show.
Her main message is, you can enjoy your food and you can build cost-effective meals at the same time as you eat for health. It is utterly wrong, she said, that healthy food isn't tasty or that healthy food is more expensive.
"You can have simple, Canadian, inexpensive (anti-inflammatory foods) like flax, or exotic ones as well like acai berries," she said.
She advocates doing the best you can within your own lifestyles. If you refuse to quit a certain food even if it isn't ideally healthy for you, fine, but perhaps look at how to get the best quality, or use the best meal preparation for it so it minimizes the downsides and maximizes the upsides of that food. That might be as simple as buying the freshest coffee so the taste is so good you don't need to add as much sugar.
"I always encourage people to remember that green foods - asparagus, kale, cabbage - have tremendous nutrients that benefit our health. We've been told for hundreds of years 'eat your greens' by our parents and grandparents, but now we have the science to back up the why," she said.
It's simple stuff, but the science that maps and explains nutrition is not simple at all. It is painstaking, the hypothoses are difficult to test, and new information is always being added in dribs and drabs to the public database.
"I thoroughly enjoy wading through the research," said Daniluk who attended the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition to become a registered holistic nutritionist and a natural nutrition clinical practitioner, then studied culinary arts at George Brown College, added on herbalism at Emerson Herbal College, and she sprinkled in the designation of emotional eating coach from the Institute of Psychology of Eating.
Her lifelong study of food and human machinery started young for all the most unfortunate of reasons. She struggled with childhood food allergies. That led to bulimia during her youth. She was then struck by a couple of bouts of intense stomach illness as a young adult.
It all accumulated with her taking command of her food intake and the effects it had on her body, tweaking her nutrition according to her physiological responses, but learning to investigate credible science as source information, not quack or pseudo science, but also keeping a healthy skepticism of any one research project, no matter how acclaimed the university or academic authors might be.
She also checks to see who funded the research, just to keep her mind rational when new reports are released.
This informs her writing, the content of her television segments, and the public discussions she has at special events like the Healthier You Expo.
"I like to have fun. I call it edu-tainment," she said. "There is no one path to healing. There are seven billion paths for seven billion people."
That's why she doesn't take strident views like veganism. The body of research indicates humans are perfectly suited to eat meat, but not all humans find this to be true for them, and not all meats are healthy and no meats are healthy in disproportionate amounts. It's something the individual has to find out for themselves.
"Also, I'm going to teach people that even in our own backyards there are plants that are incredibly healthy, like dandelions. Dandelion root actually makes a delicious coffee substitute. When you dry out the root of a dandelion plant - roast it in the oven - and then grind it like you would coffee, it tastes a lot like coffee and it's very powerful for detoxifying your liver."
From fun factoids to crucial information, Daniluk will deliver her personality and her knowledge to the audience at the 10th Annual Healthier You Expo on Sunday at the Civic Centre from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is free of charge to attend.
