Contributors

Jennifer T. Smilowitz was introduced to the concept of healthy living by her stepfather, a Russian physician who practiced holistic medicine. Accompanying him to international conferences as a child, she became “really interested in how the body works,” and how you could “achieve optimal health through diet and lifestyle.” As an undergraduate, Smilowitz decided that she didn’t want to focus on diseases or treat patients with drugs, but instead hoped to prevent disease from ever arising. This choice led her to pursue her PhD in nutritional biology and a five-year postdoc in food science, both at the University of California, Davis. There she discovered that lactation was not only the “best model to understand food for health” but also to understand “how food actually delivers health in the body.” In her current roles as associate director of the Foods for Health Institute and research scientist at UC Davis, Smilowitz has ...