Jocelyn Ramirez On Making Healthy Food More Accessible For All - mindbodygreen.com

Well, I am born and raised in Los Angeles, grew up in a southeast southern suburb called South Gate, which, growing up, was considered a food desert. I had within a mile radius a McDonald's, a Jack in the Box, a Tacos Mexico, a liquor store, that were kind of staples as a kid growing up, places we would go and eat. My parents were both working full time, and that meant that my mom would come home tired a lot and wouldn't always prepare the traditional meals that she grew up eating from her mom's side. So our healthy alternatives were at Pollo Loco, Subway, things like that. When she wasn't too tired, she would prepare things like–she's from Zacatecas, Mexico–so she would prepare things that are known as guisados. So like chicken or pork or beef stews and lots of veggies or nopales and potatoes and things like that.

It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I started to really see the health implications of the things that we were eating. What triggered me to start to look at my diet was when I was diagnosed with a thyroid issue. The doctors wanted to remove my thyroid and have me start taking hormone pills, and I didn't want to do that.

So I turned to vegetarianism to try to see if I could find ways to cure the things that I was dealing with. During that time, my mom was diagnosed with high blood pressure and my dad has had diabetes since I was a teenager. So diabetes was something that we were all kind of fearful of.

It wasn't really until my dad got diagnosed with cancer, not once, but twice, that my whole family realized, "Wow, what's going on?" We didn't really make too many dietary changes in the family until round two, when he was diagnosed with cancer in the same area of his body. He had throat cancer.

My dad saw that I was getting healthier with the type of food that I was eating. He said, "All right, I'm willing to do whatever it takes."

He changed up his diet, mostly doing superfood smoothies. I cleaned out their whole fridge and their cupboards and took them to farmers markets, Whole Foods [Market], and Trader Joe's. We had a month leading up to surgery, and all his doctors said, "Wow, what are you doing?" They were shocked that he was getting better and that the cancer wasn't advancing as much as it was before.

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