Photo courtesy of David Levin
Hello, my name is Katie, and I am the mind behind The Muffin Myth. I am a university-educated nutritionist, a writer, and a foodie.
I write professionally, have a love of food, and a serious interest in food science and nutrition. Some years ago I decided to go back to school to pursue a Bachelor of Science in Food, Nutrition, and Health. It was a pretty big switch from my previous studies in Creative Writing, but it turns out I have a science brain after all, and I graduated (with honours, yo!) in 2011. Since I never feel like I’m done learning (and because I’m a glutton for punishment), in the autumn of 2012 I began graduate studies in nutrition at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at the Karolinska Institute. My MSc research focused on the role of artificial sweeteners in the development of metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes, and I successfully defended my thesis in June 2014. Woot!
I’m lucky to get to bring my passions for food and writing together in a professional capacity, but The Muffin Myth is where I get to do my own thing. I’m the boss here! So I write about the kind of food I like to eat – real food – and post recipes I hope you’ll like. My goal is to educate people about nutrition and prove that healthy food can be easy to make and delicious to eat!
I currently live in Stockholm, Sweden, with my husband, Paul, a professional engineer and a maniac endurance athlete who enthusiastically eats and critiques everything I cook. Life sometimes takes me back to Vancouver, BC, Canada, where I was born and raised. You can read about my path to healthy eating here.
My food philosophy: I think that food used to be simple. You grew it, you cooked it, you ate it. You ate seasonally, you ate local. You preserved things. You ate things made by people whose names you knew, and faces you were familiar with. Then, food became industrialized and science got involved and some people figured out they could make a lot of money by producing food in monocultures and tinkering with it and telling people that the end product was better than the plain old food they were used to eating. Lots of people believed the fancy new stuff they were eating was indeed better, and somewhere along the way people forgot how to tell the difference between real food and the other stuff.
I am often asked about my food philosophy, particularly when people find out I study food, and my answer is quite simple; I believe in eating real food. I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian since 1994 and I sincerely believed that since I was eating a vegetarian diet I was eating a diet that was natural and free of processed foods. The deeper I go into studying food, the more I realize how wrong I was and the more I change the way I eat. It scares me how little we actually know about food and nutrition and the consequences of the tinkering that has gone on with food in recent years. To me eating real food means asking myself whether the food in front of me was made by nature or by science, reading a list of ingredients and understanding what each one is and why it is in that food product, and understanding that there is a fundamental difference between food and a food product. Not only do I think food should be real, I think food should be something that we enjoy. We should not deny ourselves the absolute pleasure that comes from eating really fantastic food.
With my studies of Food, Nutrition, and Health, I have a particular interest in obesity and weight loss – something I have personal experience with. In addition to food and nutritional sciences, I have been focusing on sociological aspects of food and nutrition, and exploring malnutrition as a form of violence.
I can be contacted by email at themuffinmyth@gmail.com
You can also find me as a nutrition contributor on Oh My Veggies, and occasionally as a contributor over at Foodists.
“Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”
– Wendell Berry
The Muffin Myth 