Were My Parents Healthy?

There’s a question I get more often than you might expect—usually asked with genuine curiosity, sometimes with quiet suspicion:

“Were your parents healthy?”

It’s a deceptively simple question. What people are often really asking is: Where did this all come from? The curiosity about food, the attentiveness to wellness, the decades-long relationship with nutrition that has shaped my life and work. They want a neat origin story. A granola household. A mother grinding flaxseed in the kitchen. A father who never touched sugar. Something easy to categorize.

The truth is far more interesting—and far less tidy.