Christina Pirello, MFN, CCN is one of America’s preeminent authorities on natural and whole foods with a radiant personality that only serves to make her message more powerful. At age 26, she was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. By the time her illness was identified, the cancer had already advanced to an acute stage. Her doctors gave her little reason to have hope for the effectiveness of conventional medical therapies and told her she had only months to live. Then a co-worker introduced her to Robert Pirello, a whole foods advocate who helped her adapt her lifestyle and diet based on whole, unprocessed food. With love, dedication and death-defying discipline, Christina overcame the odds, and in the process developed an expertise in cooking with whole foods. After just two months of eating beans, grains and vegetables, her doctors noticed a significant improvement in her condition. In fourteen months, her cancer was gone.

From that time, she was utterly convinced of the close relationship between diet and health. She knew her life’s calling was to help others discover the importance of this relationship in their own lives. To that end, she studied and became an expert in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, acupuncture and earned a Masters Degree in Nutrition. Today, almost 26 years later, Christina is a glowing example and inspiration on the power that our food choices have on our overall health and well-being and has been teaching whole foods cooking classes, conducting lifestyle seminars and lecturing all over the United States.

Christina is the Emmy Award-winning host of the television series Christina Cooks!, which airs weekly on over 200 national public television stations nationwide. She has written five cookbooks, the bestselling Cooking the Whole Foods Way, plus Your Way to the Life You Want, Glow, A Prescription for Radiant Health and Beauty and Christina Cooks: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Whole Foods, But Were Afraid to Ask. Her latest book, This Crazy Vegan Life was published in January, 2009 and she is currently at work on her sixth book.

In 2008, Christina founded The Christina Pirello Health Education Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to changing America’s relationship with food, with community outreach, media programs and several in-school programs designed to teach our kids to make healthier choices before it’s too late. She works closely with the city of Philadelphia on various school and farm market programs under the umbrella of The Initiative.

Christina holds a faculty position at Drexel University, where she lectures as a professor of culinary arts. She also serves on the board of The Farm Market Trust, The Green Council of Philadelphia, The Green City Youth Council of Philadelphia, The Chefs for Humanity Chef’s Council and is a member of IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) and Women Chefs and Restaurateurs. Christina earned both her Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Fine Arts from the University of Miami, and was awarded a Masters Degree in Nutrition from Philadelphia’s Drexel University in 2003.

www.christinacooks.com
www.christinapirello.org

Blog Entries by Christina Pirello

Healthy Lifestyles Neglected In Favor Of Pharmaceuticals

Posted November 24, 2009 | 10:31 AM (EST)


The headline screamed from the New York Times front page: 'Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Not Taken.' A statement designed to intrigue the reader, the article tells the tale of the ignored pharmaceuticals that can prevent cancer in men and women. Apparently, study after study has shown us that diet...

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It's American Diabetes Month

2 Comments | Posted November 9, 2009 | 11:55 AM (EST)


As November approaches, we leave Halloween and breast cancer awareness behind for the next holiday in our yearly calendar of illnesses. Seems each month has its signature malady. Type 2 diabetes is such an American epidemic that we can skip giving kids bikes for Christmas and move right to the...

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Children's Health And The Meat Industry

59 Comments | Posted November 8, 2009 | 07:12 AM (EST)


When did our children become disposable?

This loaded question was posed around the conference table in Anthony Geraci's sunny office at the Baltimore School District headquarters as a group of us talked about programs designed to help our kids make healthier choices in their lives, beginning with the food they...

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Children Are Living Messages We Send to a Future We Will Not See!

3 Comments | Posted October 20, 2009 | 03:55 PM (EST)


No one has to tell you that the statistics are staggering, in fact so terrifying that even Stephen King could not come up with a worse scenario.

Obesity now ranks second only to smoking as a preventable cause of death in our population. Super-sized portions, snacks, soda, candy, unhealthy diets...

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Newsflash! CNN Offers Conclusive Proof: They're Meatheads!

2 Comments | Posted October 14, 2009 | 10:24 PM (EST)


It's on the evening news and in newspapers all the time. Not a day goes by that someone isn't talking about health, how to eat, what to do about obesity, heart disease and diabetes and our food supply. So it was no surprise to see Larry King devote an entire...

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One Real Thing You Can Do to Avoid a Personal Health Recession

Posted October 8, 2009 | 06:39 PM (EST)


Everyone's talking about the real suffering we are experiencing during the current economic recession. Everyone's worried about their jobs, financial situation and future. Everyone's thinking about living and eating on the cheap as a result. But ... But, is anyone thinking about the health recession we have been in for...

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Cure? They Don't Want No Stinking Cure!

7 Comments | Posted October 1, 2009 | 04:42 PM (EST)


It's October and we all know what that means. Pink! From ribbons, to kitchen appliances, workout wear to M & M's (ah, the irony...), we are bombarded with creating awareness of breast cancer (like there's one woman unaware of it), promoting mammograms and raising money for the Cure. For more...

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Real Health Care Reform Begins in the Kitchen

7 Comments | Posted September 23, 2009 | 04:49 PM (EST)


The debate about health care rages on, with both sides weighing in at a level of lunacy I have never seen. Conservatives are screaming about death panels, government takeovers and socialism, and extreme liberals are screaming about the ignorance and close mindedness of the conservatives. And in the middle of...

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The Top 10 Foods for Great Sex

3 Comments | Posted September 8, 2009 | 06:23 PM (EST)


Everybody wants to have great sex. If you're not having any sex, you want it; if you're having okay sex, you want an upgrade to great and if your sex life is great, well, you want it to be mind-blowing. And it's possible. But there's more to great sex than...

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Why Society Works Better When We're Afraid and Fat

1 Comments | Posted September 1, 2009 | 04:24 PM (EST)


America suffers from an insatiable hunger...for food, technology, houses, money, power, fame, knowledge, phones, gossip, information, clothes, cars, computers, televisions. But with all that we know; with all the information at our fingertips; with all our security systems and firewalls, it only takes a news sound bite to send us...

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Why Choose Health When You Can Have Dinner in a Bucket?

8 Comments | Posted August 25, 2009 | 04:52 PM (EST)


Walk into a fast food restaurant and look at the menu closely. Your head will spin at the sheer number of options available to wreck your health and accelerate your arrival at the Pearly Gates. They may call it convenient and even more criminally...food, but what they're really doing is...

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Why It's So Hard Not To Be Fat

30 Comments | Posted August 19, 2009 | 11:43 AM (EST)


Fat, sugar and salt; the triple threat to our waistlines... and health. Mere decades ago, the food industry made a conscious choice to seduce the American public into eating more food by making these three ingredients the cornerstones of our beloved diet of processed food. And we could not have...

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