Introducing Kelly Stuart of DietFacts.com

Greetings and salutations. My name is Kelly Stuart. For months and months, I’ve been planning to write some stuff for The Health Blog. And Ryan has been as patient as a saint. (Thanks, RH!) Before I post anything useful or interesting, here’s a little background info about me:

I met my husband in 1989 when I was 19 years old, and we have been together ever since. We are both self-taught computer programmers. We live in southern Illinois with our three dogs, two cats, and about five hundred ants. (We’re hoping that last group is just temporary.) In our spare time, we like to travel abroad, taking photos and sampling local cuisine—the spicier, the better. When traveling far away is not possible, we can be found camping and canoeing and hugging trees with a group of our friends, attending a jazz concert, or standing in line to ride the latest greatest rollercoaster. It’s also great to just curl up together on the couch with a good book or an old Bogart or Hepburn movie. (Audrey or Kate, you ask? Oh c’mon. They’re both great!)

Most of our time, though, is spent in front of our computers, working into the wee hours. Here’s what I’ve been working on:

I started compiling a database of nutrition facts when my father was diagnosed with diabetes in 1995. I began with just a handful of his favorite foods and restaurants. Over time, the collection grew as more information became available. My friends and family saved oodles of their food labels for me. In 2002, I began using that information to create a website called DietFacts.com. My little hobby soon became a big project; eventually, my career. The site is presently visited by 5 million people every month, and I still get childishly giddy each time DietFacts is mentioned in the newspaper or on the web. The best perk, though, is getting email. Whenever I receive a message from someone who likes the site, it absolutely makes my day!

I’m happy to see that more and more restaurants are making their nutrition facts available to the public. These days restaurants often contact me, asking why their info is not included on DietFacts and then sending it to me. These people know that it is simply good business to give customers the information they want. On the flip side, [bring in the soapbox] some other companies remain secretive, making customers suspect that they’ve got something to hide, something hideous. The unknown is often exaggerated, imagined as the worst. Don’t these companies realize that? I feel that it is an essential part of my job to pester those secret-keepers and keep pestering them and rally other people together to pester them until that information is disclosed. As consumers, we the public have tremendous power—buying power—when we act as a group. We can remove our money from these companies, tell them why and demand change. If they want to stay in business, they must react. [exit soapbox]

My current job as professional pest and webmaster of DietFacts is the absolute best job I ever had. It beats the living tar out of my prior jobs. During my youth, I went through a phase where I wanted to be an artist but to pay the bills—and endure the suffering that all true artists must bear—I took some of the most low-paying and disgusting work on the planet. I slung the slop and mopped the floors in a nursing home cafeteria. “Excuse me, ma’am… You left your teeth behind… in your farina… on the floor.” I also took a job cleaning up after a veterinary surgeon. Let’s just say: that was enough to make any person turn vegetarian!

I lived a vegetarian lifestyle for over 10 years, but not a very healthy one. My husband and I didn’t own a stove back then. Our tiny microwave was used solely for making popcorn and finding out how long it takes stuff to melt and/or explode. Since we didn’t cook or even grocery shop, eating out was our way of life. Unfortunately, restaurants here in “The Heartland” rarely offer vegetarian fare. The green beans have bacon in them, as do the baked beans. The salads have bacon and chicken and eggs. Whatever doesn’t have bacon in it has chow on it. (I still don’t know what chow is; I just know I’m not going to put it anywhere near my face.) So for ten years I ate a lot of starch: white rice, pasta, cereal, corn, baked potatoes, dinner rolls. Eventually I got frustrated, not to mention malnourished, and I resumed a [slightly] meat-eating diet, mostly for the sake of convenience… Well, okay, it was laziness. I still don’t adore meat, but I no longer avoid it like poison.

Last year we invested in one of those new-fangled stove appliance thingies, with pots and pans and spatulas and all that jazz. I’m slowly learning to cook and—I’m proud to say it—we are finally eating healthy. There’s even a pot of black beans simmering on the stovetop right at this moment. Mmmmmm. We rarely eat out at all anymore and practically never at fast food joints. We wait until we have plenty of time and money to spend at one of our favorite sit-down restaurants—a place where they take pride in their food, in its taste, appearance and service. No fries. No soda straws or plastic sporks. We take care to order things that are too difficult to cook at home. Delicate Indian curries. Broiled salmon and white asparagus with a gourmet dill sauce. Coconut-crusted sea bass over couscous. Anything “new” with ingredients that sound exotic to us. Dining out is really special again and fun, like it was when we were kids. We even notice the garnish now: a radish rose here, a carrot bird there, a strawberry fan. How do they do it?

Well, to sum up: I don’t hold a degree in nutrition but do enjoy reading everything I can find on the subject. Ryan’s Health Blog is at the tip-top of my list! I also enjoy reading about science in general, medical news, and any history of scientific discoveries. My parents, who are both retired school teachers, instilled in me the desire to always be learning and to work hard. The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote how the brain causes a release of feel-good chemicals whenever a puzzle is solved or a fact is learned; he even wrote a book about the phenomenon: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. I hope that as you read “The Health Blog” you will experience that same natural high, that pleasure of learning new and interesting things.