Kyra Tywanick

Kyra's interest in nutrition started in middle school when she realized how her eating habits affected how she felt, her energy levels, and performance in school and the gym. She started reading online how different nutrients work and reading food labels to discover what really is in the food she is eating, and started experimenting with her diet. In high school, science classes and cooking classes were her favorite classes. Science classes helped her understand how the body works, and cooking classes taught her how to prepare foods to fuel the body. Going into college it was obvious to her that she wanted to study nutrition. Every nutrition class had 100% of her attention. In other science classes she could see how nutrition was a key element as she learned how body systems work, and these classes made it even clearer the processes and the cascade of events from consumption of food, to its breakdown, and then absorption to be used as energy, all the way to how the waste products are excreted. Even in science classes or environment classes based on plant cycles it was obvious how nutrition played a role, as those classes were teaching how our food works, and then in turn how we process that food to eat it, and how it then works in the body. Every class was food and nutrition related from her point of view. In organic chemistry, learning about individual molecules is still really about nutrition, just at the smallest possible scale. Rutgers University gave her the education to see nutrition from the widest lens possible down to the smallest individual molecule. From cooking classes to see how different amount of flour affects the textures of muffins, to advanced nutrition learning every detail about carbohydrate metabolism, she absorbed all of the knowledge Rutgers had to offer and, since graduating, has been putting it into practice in hospital and long term care settings, helping patients with a wide variety of diseases manage their health through nutrition.