About

Ginny Kisch Messina, MPH, RD

When I first headed off to college to become a dietitian, I was a carefree omnivore. I’ve loved and felt great compassion for animals all my life—but for two-and-a-half decades, it didn’t occur to me that this had anything to do with how I should eat. You can read more of my story—about how the little light bulb over my head finally lit up—in my first blog post. Suffice it to say that once that light bulb clicked on, I started to shift my concentration toward vegan nutrition.

My present work as a dietitian and a public health nutritionist has two focuses. First, I’m usually knee-deep in the scientific literature on diet and health as it pertains to vegans. I’ve co-authored a textbook on vegetarian nutrition that is aimed at medical and nutrition professionals. I’ve also twice co-authored the American Dietetic Association’s Position on Vegetarian Diets, and helped develop a food guide for vegetarians and vegans.

But my work and background have also been devoted to behavior change—not just providing nutrition information, but helping people put that information into practice. I’ve worked with overweight teens, migrant farm workers, and families.  As a nutrition instructor at Central Michigan University, I taught principles of public health education to dietetics students. I was the director of nutrition services in a medical center serving more than 50,000 patients, and have developed nutrition education materials for many organizations including the U.S. government’s national cholesterol program.

Today, I’m first and foremost a vegan and animal liberation activist. My goals are to share solid information on how to be healthy as a vegan, as well as practical ideas and recipes that make ethical eating easy and realistic for everyone. Just as importantly, I draw on my background as an educator and public health expert to explore ways to further the cause of veganism and animal liberation.

Although veganism is a lifestyle and a philosophy, my focus is on the diet part of that lifestyle because—well, that’s what I do.  But readers who come to this blog looking for promises about the healing power of vegan diets are bound to be disappointed. The science of nutrition holds just as many questions as answers and we have no idea what the “ideal” diet is. Nor is there any reason to believe that you can’t eat some treats and processed foods and still enjoy good health.

In addition to writing this blog, I’m the National Vegan Examiner for the examiner.com site, and I work as a consultant in vegan and soy nutrition along with my husband, Mark Messina, who has a PhD in nutrition. I’m a volunteer at my local animal shelter, a board member of my local spay/neuter outreach organization, a feeder of feral cats, an avid gardener, a bookworm, and the devoted mom of a big group of happy rescued cats. I’m a transplanted New Jersey-ite (and a Jersey girl at heart) living on the wild and wooly Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest.

I moderate the comments on this blog to control for spam and offensive language, but all points of view are welcome here. So please read and comment, visit me at my examiner site, follow me on twitter and be my friend on facebook!