Nora Minno is an award-winning registered dietitian and certified personal trainer based in New York, NY. Over the past 10 years, Nora has built a reputation in the fitness and nutrition space as a credible expert developing communications and marketing strategies for top CPG companies, professional sports teams, global health apps, and leading healthcare groups. Her work, writing, and advice have been featured in national outlets including The Today Show, Women's Health, Health Magazine, and Well + Good and she appears regularly as a trainer on Daily Burn’s Emmy-nominated show DB365.
Nora Minno is an award-winning registered dietitian and certified personal trainer based in New York, NY. Over the past 10 years, Nora has built a reputation in the fitness and nutrition space as a credible expert developing communications and marketing strategies for top CPG companies, professional sports teams, global health apps, and leading healthcare groups. Her work, writing, and advice have been featured in national outlets including The Today Show, Women's Health, Health Magazine, and Well + Good and she appears regularly as a trainer on Daily Burn’s Emmy-nominated show DB365.
Welcome to Lost in the Supermarket. Today, a very important discussion about health, about fitness, and what we need to be doing. My guest is Nora Minno, an award-winning registered dietitian and certified personal trainer based in New York City. Over the past 10 years, Nora has built a reputation in the fitness and nutrition space as a credible expert developing communications and marketing strategies for top consumer package goods companies, professional sports teams, global health apps, and leading healthcare groups. Her work, her writing and her advice have been featured in national outlets, including the Today Show, Women's Health, Health Magazine, and Well+ Good. And she appears on a regular basis as a trainer on Daily Burns Emmy nominated show DB 365. Nora, welcome to Lost in the Supermarket.
Nora:Thanks for having me, Phil.
Phil:So, you know, first up, I guess, you know, you're gonna tell me that I really need to get more fitness in and exercise and stuff like that, but we're not gonna go there.
Nora:We're not gonna go there.
Phil:We're not gonna go there. So, you know, a couple weeks ago, President Biden convened a group at the White House to talk about the term healthy, to talk about how we need to change, maybe put front of package labeling on products, whether it's stars, whether it's traffic lights and so on. You know, give us your opinion. Is this good? And do we finally have some kind of definition for the word healthy?
Nora:Well, listen, I think, and I always say this, that nutrition is, it can't... It's never good, it's never bad. It's a gray area which frustrates a lot of people because yes, in an ideal world, we could put a red, a yellow, a green light on a package, and miraculously folks would start making healthy choices and everybody would be fit and healthy and disease would be gone, right? Like, that's the ideal world. But we know it's much more complicated than that. We've seen programs like this in the past. Some may be more successful than others. For example, calorie labels on meals at restaurants we know actually do have somewhat of an impact on consumers choices when they are eating at that restaurant. But that's one meal out of their week. What are they doing, you know, the other six days a week and the other three meals a day. So, you know, yes, I think there's some good that can come out of this. My hope is that it brings more awareness to consumers purchasing decisions. But we just know from some historical data that when it comes to reading labels and paying attention to the call-outs on packages, about 50% of consumers are actually paying attention. And I imagine it's 50% that are maybe a bit more educated or actually care a bit more. So it, you know, I like to be an optimist here and I think any attention on good nutrition and healthy choices is a positive, but I think we'll just kind of have to wait and see because as I said, nutrition is very gray.
Phil:So, you know, you bring up a really good point that 50% of the people who are reading labels probably don't need to be reading the labels. Sure. And the other 50% are ignoring them. Typically they fall into that bucket where the disease states like diabetes and heart disease and so on are probably at a higher incidence. So how do we get to them? I mean, what responsibility does a brand, does a supermarket have to really help them to eat healthier? Or are we overstepping our bounds and should we just let people eat whatever they want to eat?
Nora:Right. I think it gets complicated and we know that folks who just want to eat what they wanna eat are, are gonna do. So, and like I said, nutrition is complicated. Behavior change is very complicated and that takes a lot of work from an individual, typically with a professional. So I think if we kind of bucket this into two sectors, okay, the government side of it, and then kind of the private sector being the supermarket when it comes to the government side, you know, intervention much earlier on in terms of health, education, nutrition, education in public schools and much wider programs. You know, we see programs like WIC and things like that are quite effective, but they're just kind of far and few between. Particularly kind of in public schools and public education. But then when we look at the supermarket, I think, you know, what we're seeing happen with registered dietitians becoming more readily available and more employed by supermarkets is a great resource because they're there if folks wanna engage with them on a more kind of personal level. And they're there to help provide some guidance and kind of excite people about food, which I think is awesome. But I think, you know, when it comes to supermarkets, they're there to really just provide the choices and like I said, excite people about food, which I love to do as well. But, you know, we can't always limit what's offered there, because then that just gets into a whole conversation. But yeah, so I think there's two ways to look at it, what's happening on the government side and then what's happening kind of on the private sector side.
Phil:What do you say to people that say, you know, eating healthy is too expensive?
Nora:My whole philosophy as a dietitian is that food and eating healthy should not be expensive, stressful or time consuming. And so I've kind of built a career and sometimes it doesn't get the sexiest headlines, right? No, no fad diets not being crazy, but just sticking to basic fruits, vegetables, things like that. And that's where I do start to get concerned about adding more labels and classifying food in other ways, because that can create a lot of stress around food choices when it can be kind of quite simple. Find foods that you enjoy, eat when you're hungry, don't eat when you're not, you know, focus on fresh focus on whole. It sounds like super simple, but it kind of is. And that degree going back to basics there, and you look at foods, especially we know a plant forward diet or a heavily plant based diet, there's loads of research showing how important that is for prevention of disease and long term health. And you can buy a can of beans for 75 cents and that's, you know, two to three protein portions for a day. So it really doesn't have to be as expensive, I think, where we start to see the prices getting jacked up as these kind of fancier brands doing all of these, you know, more exotic ingredients or starting to slap more of these labels on the front of the pack. Because once you know you have more of these labels, you could charge more for it, right? Cause it's where it's exclusive. So, I'm very strongly and firmly against the argument that healthy food has to cost more.
Phil:During the beginning of the pandemic, certainly there were a lot of articles written about people just wanted to eat comfort foods. So we saw a lot of cookies. You know, sales go up a lot of candy sales go up a lot of what I'll call junk food. You know, really being consumed has that waned as the pandemic is decreasing or did people get into bad habits and they're keeping them?
Nora:That's a great question and some more research I think to be done there because we're still slowly coming out of that really intense period of the pandemic. I think I definitely contributed to some of those cookie sales. But what I think is quite interesting is that during the pandemic folks started turning to brands and products that they trusted and felt more familiar with. And I just took a look at the International Food Information Council 2022 study o n k ind o f just food and health& wellness and a lot of those patterns of kind of choosing brands that are more familiar have stuck around. So that's something interesting to note, I think. And, you know, an important thing to call out about nutrition is, y ou know, if we're kind of putting our cellular metabolism hat on, it's very basic at the surface level, right? You eat a carbohydrate and it gets digested and break it down to glucose and your blood sugar, your insulin, you know, you could go through kind of everything that happens throughout the digestive process, but we can't always forget the emotional aspect of food and the wellbeing. So there are those times where a cookie can help you kind of downregulate your stress and your emotions and provide you that little bit of comfort and that's great, or provide you that bit of pleasure and that's great. But kind of, you made an interesting point, like, are those habits, do those linger and do people start to kind of take something that could be a good habit for maybe managing stress? And then that starts to kind of turn a little bit into maybe a habit that we've built that we don't want to last long term, or it can start to snowball into other things. So that's an interesting point you raise. And it really goes back to just individuals continually to be aware of their body and their choices. So it's just constant practice of awareness and mindfulness when it comes to food choices.
Phil:So Nora, look into your crystal ball and, you know, what does America health and fitness and food look like in five years from now?
Nora:Wow. Wow. That's a great question. There's two ways, what I hope it will look like and what I think it will look like. I don't know if they fully align. You know, I think, or I hope that we continue to kind of just get back to basics again. I think in the past couple years we've gotten so caught up and is it organic? Is it gluten free? Is it keto? Is it this? We've gotten so caught up in that exclusivity of nutrition, what's food is not. And I would love for folks just to start to focus on what food is. And it's a lot of things. It's nutrition, it is social, it's celebration, it's spiritual, it's all of these things. So I'm hoping that we can get back to a point where we're focusing on what food is. I don't see kind of, cooking and things like that at home, enjoying meals, slowing down anytime soon, which excites me as well. I think folks might be ready to take that into their own hands a bit more than maybe meal kits and things like that. Personally, I feel like those have had their day and kind of saturated a bit at this point. But I think, I hope at least, that folks will really get their hands on their own food and continue to cook at home and get back to basics. Like I said.
Phil:You bring up a really good point that probably for the past decade, you know, we've looked at foods as what it's not. And I think that that's a really interesting and insightful observation. So we've gone to the'avoiding of certain ingredients',' avoiding of certain nutrients' and so on. How do we turn that around? How do we do exactly what you said, focus on what food is versus, you know,"Oh, we can't do that, so we're gonna run down the aisle and look for something else".
Nora:Sure. I think the responsibility to make that shift can be put on every individual, starting even, kind of every group I guess, involved in this process, starting from the brands that are producing food and the way that they market and the claims that they are seeking to put on packages. You know, when we start to get conditioned for things like keto and paleo or, you know, gluten-free, this or that, like absolutely that has a place because that can be helpful for some folks that are actually need that for whatever reason. Medical reasons or allergies, even just preferences. But just in how we market and the products that we're putting forth and kind of the message that it conveys even into the advertising, like what kind of messages are we sending with the advertising, how we're putting products forward? I think another group that this responsibility falls on is health professionals, right? It's easy for us, and this has been always a challenge in my career of not getting caught up in newer trends or fads or things and having to kind of dig my heels down into the ground, even at times where it might not have propelled my career forward, but I've kind of stuck with what the science says and what I believe to be true as a dietitian from my own experience of working with individuals. So for us to kind of just stay grounded and focus on food from a place of abundance rather than restriction. And then even on the individual side, I think, you know, removing jargon from just vocabulary that can kind of perpetuate some of these fad diets or kind of even just binge and restrict cycles that particularly here in women's conversation and other conversation like,'Oh, you know, that's a little fat', or'I didn't eat'.'Oh, I can't, I can't have the ice cream today.' Oh my gosh. You know, just those, that type of language that we're all kind of contributing to I think really plays a role in all of it. So I think everybody has a role to play. And I hope that we continue to kind of move forward in realizing that food is connected to our wellbeing rather than just our weight and health and disease states. It's connected to our emotional, our spiritual, and our physical wellbeing. So I hope that's a direction that continues to trend in, especially could have mentioned this before, but as you know, our society and particularly in America, we're more focused on self-care and emotional healing and just being more present and being more in control of that aspect of our lives. I hope that food can start to align with that a little bit more and be part of people's kind of healing and just self-care journeys.
Phil:So Nora, what keeps you up at night? What are you worried about as it relates to, you know, food and overall health for Americans?
Nora:That's a great question, Phil. What keeps me up at night, I guess would be just the increasing gap in terms of access to food and just, not even access, but just trying to find the right way to say this. Just the growing divide between access to both information and food. For one thing we could teach nutrition in public schools, but if those ingredients aren't readily available in certain neighborhoods, and if individuals don't have the resources or the tools to make those, and that becomes increasingly difficult to kind of close the gap, particularly for those in more low income areas or don't have the resources that other individuals in different neighborhoods or different income populations might have. And it goes beyond that. It's just, you know, the need for parents to continue to work, you know, more jobs and so they can't be home to make a meal and have meal time. So it's just that kind of growing divide that keeps me up at night, because if the parents can't be involved in a child's kind of nutrition journey, you know, they're the ones grocery shopping and preparing, and it kind of, the cycle starts all over again, if you will. So that would be the one thing that keeps me up at night and just ensuring that, you know, all populations have access to nutritious and affordable food.
Phil:Nora, as always, great insights. Great commentary about where we are now and where we need to be going. Thanks so much for joining us today on Lost in the Supermarket.
Nora:Thanks, Phil. Thanks for having me.