Welcome!

Hello. Hola. Konichiwa. Salut.

Welcome to Matt's Plate, a place where you will be able to find information and tips about healthy eating and exercise! I plan to use this space to share my ideas, opinions, recipes, and knowledge I have gained from over a decade of studying health and nutrition among individuals and communities across the U.S.

I am excited to provide a forum for anyone who is interested in improving their health, or needs a simple cooking tip. I hope that my passion for eating healthy and being active can be viewed as a model for others so that everyone in the world can experience a long and healthy life. I thought it be would be fun to share my story of how I got interested in this field and how I got to where I am today.

As a child, I was raised on Cheetos and soda pop. There were always cookies and candy in the cupboards in my home, which my mother attributes to my paternal grandmother, who spoiled my father when he was a child. To this day, I fondly recall my grandmother's sweet tea, which was essentially liquid candy and might have had more sugar than tea! I certainly had no complaints as sweet foods are every child's weakness. In fact, I became a skilled master of Halloween in my pursuit of the addictive buzz one gains when eating sucrose, the ordinary table sugar so prevalent in candy (these days, it is the buzz from high fructose corn syrup a child obtains in their candy, but I digress and will discuss that topic another day). To obtain the maximal amount of candy possible, I would map my route beforehand, set out as early as possible, and would bring along multiple costumes I could change into when I came across a house that had a particularly good stash of candy so I could return immediately and grab seconds (or thirds). It is a wonder that I do not have Type 2 diabetes!

Halloween as a child. I am the far right. Im gussing my brother and I are GI Joes, and I am not sure why my sister is Spiderman (Spiderwoman?)

Somehow, despite being constantly surrounded by candy and sweets in those days, I always had at least a passing interest in health, and would often watch what I was eating or spend extra time exercising if I had too many snacks in one day. I can remember days when my mother was too busy to fix dinner so she would send my father on a fast food run and have my siblings make a list of what everyone wanted, and numerous times, I would refuse to get anything, instead opting to eat healthier food at home (and save my father a few dollars!). I also wanted to become a certified master chef, and learned how to cook things from my mother and home economics classes. Although I maintained this interest in food and health, I chose to study engineering when I started college, not having the foresight to pursue my true passion.

After struggling with advanced physics and calculus, I began to debate changing my major at the start of my junior year of college and started taking classes in physical education, which offered classes in health studies. During this time, my father, who had never been sick a day in his life according to my mother, unexpectedly passed away from heart disease. We never saw it coming. The pain and tragedy of that event changed me forever as I decided I never wanted anyone I knew or loved to deal with that type of adversity and emotional distress and thereby officially changed my major so I could learn more about health, physical activity and nutrition. Unfortunately, I had one more hurdle to cross as my university dropped the physical education major and I was forced to find a new school to obtain a degree in a health-related field. Fortunately, a small state college was an hour away and had a Health & Exercise Science program that I was able to enroll in.

I thrived in that program as I was finally free to study health and nutrition and physical activity, and my undergraduate advisor recommended that I attend graduate school. At the time, my goal was to become a personal trainer and use my knowledge and passion to help others get fit and healthy. But I loved school and learning things, so I decided to give grad school a chance. My father (and his father before him) had gone to Kansas State University, which just so happened to have a great Kinesiology program. Kinesiology is the study of health and human movement, and what better way to honor my father than by attending his alma mater that he loved so much?! I was accepted into their graduate program where I was able to get a position teaching health and exercise classes and helped in research labs. During my time there, my department brought in experts to speak on a variety of topics related to exercise and health, and one afternoon, I found myself listening with rapt attention to Dr. Ross Brownson from St. Louis University as he gave a talk on public health and physical activity. I had never considered how parks and sidewalks and public access to places to be active could be a way to influence the health of others, and Dr. Brownson had opened my eyes to a whole new world. I decided I no longer wanted to help individuals become healthy by training them one on one, but rather, I wanted to help EVERYONE get healthy by being a part of Public Health. I decided to get a PhD in Public Health.

Dr. Ross Brownson, who had a huge impact on my career. Today he conducts research at Washington University in St. Louis. 

I was accepted into the School of Public Health at the University of Iowa, where in my 4 years there I learned how to conduct research studies of health, nutrition and physical activity, collaborate with communities, form coalitions for improving community health, and teach others how to eat healthy and be active. I loved working in communities and learning about foods and exercises, and I even revived my interest in cooking by teaching myself how to cook anything and everything (thanks to the internet!). I taught a food and nutrition course and had my students set a nutrition goal each semester while setting a goal for myself. One semester, my goal was to try a new fruit or vegetable each week, and I had a fantastic time seeking out new foods to eat (my favorite was either the rambutan or the star fruit).

A star fruit and rambutan. Should be pretty easy to figure out which is which!

I decided that a postdoctoral experience would be the next step for me to continue learning about health and nutrition, but also for applying my new skills in researching factors associated with the foods we eat and how/why we are active (or inactive). I applied for and was accepted into a postdoctoral experience in the department of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, a city with a very unique environment (in other words, there are a lot of cowboys there!). In my time there, I helped teach nutrition education to underserved communities and undergraduate students, and studied food deserts, or places that lack adequate healthy foods. I wanted to continue doing this work and took another postdoctoral fellowship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, where I am currently located. In this role, I spend my time analyzing a cohort of Mexican Americans for their health behaviors, in particular, their physical activity. My passion for community education in health, nutrition, and physical activity is at an all time high, and I hope to continue this work in the future. The next step for my wife and I are to have a baby (a girl due in March), where I am sure I will learn many new things about family and child nutrition. I promise to share everything I know and learn here on this blog! I truly want to use my decade of studying health, nutrition and exercise to help everyone become as healthy as they can be.

Please let me know if you have any questions and happy holidays!