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Kevin: Hello, all my wonderful noobs out there. We've got a really special episode for you today. So very recently, our very own Michelle Pierce Hamilton, you might recognize that name, was a guest on the Plant Based Canada podcast, and she sat down and had an amazing chat with host Stephanie Nishi. And I'm not going to give any spoilers here, so we'll just post that podcast here. And if you like what you hear, you can subscribe to the Plant Based Canada podcast and hear all of their amazing episodes. There's a link to their podcast in the episode notes. So without any further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy Michelle and Stephanie's conversation on the Plant Based Canada podcast.

Stephanie: Welcome to the Plant Based Canada podcast. Join us as we talk to experts to explore plant-based practices and how our food choices impact our health and the environment. We sit down with doctors, dietitians, athletes, and various fields to break down the evidence behind a whole foods plant-based diet and discuss the practical steps we can take in the effort to shift towards a healthier lifestyle. My name is Stephanie Nishi, and today I am joined by Michelle Pierce Hamilton as we chat about her experiences and explore how she keeps her curiosity thriving. Michelle Pierce Hamilton is a project management professional, registered holistic nutritionist, certified Canadian tea sommelier, yoga teacher, and podcaster. She holds a certification in plant-based nutrition from the T. Colin Campbell Centre for Nutrition Studies through Cornell University and is committed to staying current with the latest research on nutrition, diet, disease prevention, and longevity. With over 21 years of experience supporting complex change management in the private sector, Michelle transitioned to healthcare, where she has spent the last 15 years contributing to a wide range of clinical projects. As a teacher and facilitator, she has served as a faculty instructor at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, teaching both project management for the Lawrence Kilman School of Business and the tea sommelier certification. Additionally, Michelle taught at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition for seven years. Michelle's core philosophy is centered on a whole food plant-based lifestyle and a holistic approach to human health. This belief underpins everything she does from supporting her own family's healthy lifestyle to providing nutrition coaching for clients or even supporting her project team members and stakeholders. As an entrepreneur for over a decade, Michelle founded and operated an ethically sourced high-quality loose leaf tea business in Boca Teak Tea Room in London, Ontario. There, she implemented a whole food plant-based menu and hosted experience-based events and classes focused on consciously delicious food and drink, showing that healthy living can be both decadent and flavorful. In her current role as primary care transformation lead for the Middlesex London Primary Care Network, Michelle continues to make an impact in healthcare. She also co-hosts and co-produces the Nutrition for Noobs podcast with her best friend Kevin. The podcast breaks down nutrition topics in an engaging, light-hearted, and no-nonsense format that makes complex subjects accessible to everyone. But first, before we get into the discussion with our guest, we have something special that may be of interest to you from the University of Guelph. Do you want to take your plant-based knowledge to the next level? Then stay tuned for a special promo code. The online plant-based nutrition certificate through open learning and educational support at the University of Guelph has everything you need to know about implementing a sustainable plant-based diet. Each course is just four weeks long and will guide you through essential topics including nutritional benefits, disease prevention, and environmental impacts. You can also customize your learning with unique courses such as plant-based diets for athletes and implementing a plant-based diet at home. As the first university-level plant-based certificate in Canada, you'll explore current research, learn from leading industry experts, and join a community of like-minded people. You can use our exclusive discount code PBC2024 to save 10% on all plant-based nutrition certificate courses. The discount code is valid until December 31st of 2024. Learn more about the certificate program and find the discount code in the description of this episode. Hi Michelle, thank you so much for joining the Plant-Based Canada podcast today.

Michelle: Oh thanks Steph, it's such an honour to be here. I'm a huge fan and been a follower since the very beginning so thank you.

Stephanie: I'm looking forward to chatting with you and hearing more about your story. And to start things off, your career spans multiple fields including project management, nutrition, tea, sommeliership, and teaching. It's quite the span and I was wondering if you could walk us through your professional journey and how all these pieces came together for you.

Michelle: I'm a very organic person and I'm very passion driven and I think I started out my career was a project management professional. I started out in working in a bank when I was in university and then never left and after my degree worked my way up through there but really discovered that my curiosity to understand a lot of things in a lot of different areas was so consistent with being a project management professional and I'm very passionate about making change happen and helping people communicate, helping people collaborate, make systems more efficient. Where nutrition ended up coming into my life was some people very close to me got very sick. My father got a cancer diagnosis and I was kind of at the peak. I was on the executive track doing what I was doing and it sort of shook things up because I was living in a different city and it just really reprioritized what was important to me and I moved back closer to home to be closer to my parents again with my kids and about I watched my dad go through a conventional sort of treatment conventional sort of death in hospital radiation chemotherapy etc and it just sucked the sense of control and power I think out of all of us as as many people can identify with and then after my my dad passed away a very short time afterwards a very close friend of mine let me know that she had been struggling with a secondary cancer that had had her breast cancer had come back to her bones and her liver and just devastating I was still grieving and I went to visit her and I'm a single mom at the time with two little kids and like working 60 crazy crazy 60 80 hour weeks I wasn't healthy at all I didn't like I exercised a little bit but I subsisted mainly on fast food and packaged foods and you know I had wine every evening you know to wind down so a very very unhealthy high stress lifestyle and I went to visit my friend with stage 4 liver and bone cancer and she was running around cooking healthy food in her kitchen and chatting it up and like I was expecting to see this incredibly sick person and she looked more vibrant than I did and I was like what is going on here and so I I was obsessed with with her um because I was concerned as her friend but I was also obsessed with why am I seeing what I'm seeing and why is this experience so different and she was really focusing on a healthy diet and she was exercising and she was meditating and and doing reiki and drinking lots of tea had stopped drinking coffee um she was also getting um acupuncture and other treatments through a Chinese medicine doctor and I I just really didn't understand any of it I was I I was had no framework whatsoever I grew up on a southwestern Ontario farm my one set of grandparents were were beef and and sheep farmers and my other set's grandparents were dairy farmers there was always lots of these foods in my home certainly had a very happy childhood very wholesome childhood but a very you know very traditional standard American diet and I when I was diving into what my friend Deb was doing and I kept asking her questions she said well if you're so curious why don't you check it out yourself I said okay so it really tipped for me with her Chinese doctor who um interestingly enough for me because I'm a I was I'm very skeptical very skeptical to believe things outside of you know I guess I'll say the norms that I was raised with um but this particular woman was a western medical doctor like a traditionally trained doctor as well as a Chinese medicine doctor she understood both sides of eastern and western medicine and she happened to be um had been a liver cancer specialist in China I was going to see her about three times a week trying to understand just out of my curiosity just trying to understand what is this and what are you doing and why is my friend look so good and she kept trying to get me to change my diet she I was doing acupuncture and and you know just exploring my curiosity but she kept bringing the conversation back to my diet and it was the only thing I wasn't willing to change and then finally one day she said to me you can come here all you want but unless you change the way you eat I can't really help you and that those words just like hit me so hard and I I it's funny to me now looking back the fact that that wasn't completely obvious is is amazing to me but I I don't think that I was where I was at that point is unusual to a lot of people than my experience today and it's really funny that you know even growing up on a farm I had no connection to food no no real connection to nature to what actually gives life what actually is healing so a lot changed for me in that moment and my friend did eventually succumb to her illness but I would say it was it was such a rapid decline at the end she had so much more quality of life and she had so much more vibrancy and we don't get to know why you know some people survive these things and some people don't that's not for us that's that's for god but um she we I I'm blessed to have spent so much time with her because in the last two weeks she talked a lot to me about her regrets and what she had to learn through her journey to try to fight the cancer through the things that make a body well and wishing she had done more of that before it got to the point that it was and the at her funeral I was I was a closet smoker too at the time like as many people in a very high stress job and I was standing outside of the funeral home uh for some reason I was by myself in that moment I don't know why I was and I was smoking this cigarette and I was looking at the funeral home and I was just thinking about everything we had just buried her or done her service and a rain but it had been raining and the sun came out and a rainbow formed over this building and I don't know what happened in that moment but I like I just decided and I put my cigarette out and I said to myself out loud I'm done and I never walked into another fast food restaurant I never picked up another piece of package processed foods stopped taking my kids to McDonald's I never I stopped smoking I stopped drinking coffee I did it all in one moment and I know that I'm very unusual in that regard but what I have taken from that experience is you know went on to study nutrition and etc and through nutrition I found tea I found that you know lots of people say that they want to make a change but you have to really want to like you you something there has to be a very strong why I had a very strong why what what came to me in that moment was I don't want this for my kids I I don't want to set this example for them and I think it's project manager in me to that that desire to you know make order out of chaos and have some control over your outcomes by being planful and prepared and looking at risks that I really loved the idea that I had some control over this and I looked into various nutrition programs and at the time I looked at going to brush out to become a registered dietitian but there wasn't really an easy way for me to do that through night school and I did audit one of the classes and then I audited classes at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition and I was just much more attracted to that at the time because they were teaching more about the links between diets and disease and not just about macronutrients and micronutrients in the class that I had sort of audited at the time and and it was easy it was easy for me to keep my career and do that through night school so that was the route that I took and met a lot of wonderful people and had a lot of wonderful experiences but when I quit drinking coffee in that moment and I had to pick up something else and I started drinking teas and when I um when I when I like something stuff I go deep like I have to go deep so I started to really investigate about about the tea industry and about tea the plan is the beverage and I really like it was funny that I had this realization this is just a food it's just a leafy green vegetable and um and when I understood about cultivation and terroir and and all these things I just fell in love and I adopted this philosophy that tea can be a doorway to a healthier diet and lifestyle because that's what happened for me it became very easy for me to pick up the tea and do different teas but my by drinking more tea it was easier to not drink coffee it was easier to not drink pop it was easier to not drink juice you know all all of these things because we often talk about nutrition what what um not to drink but we don't really talk about what to drink other than water so yeah they it all just sort of happened in a flow um as if I was definitely divinely guided and that's kind of how project management and tea and nutrition all sort of fit together that it sort of became my biggest project.

Stephanie: First off, my sincere condolences for your father and friend. I can imagine how challenging and difficult those times were and also that many people probably could relate to those stories as well and those experiences. So thank you for sharing that. You mentioned so many different aspects and I'll dive into and ask more questions about nutrition, your experiences there, your tea room and things like that. But first, I want to jump back and you mentioned change and you have over 21 years of experience in change management and I believe 15 years in healthcare as well. And what have been some of your key lessons that you've learned that have shaped your approach to both this professional as well as personal growth that you've experienced and this change that you've seemed to have talked about throughout your experiences and career paths?

Michelle: That's a really interesting question, the way that you put it. I would say one of the strengths of a really good project manager is the ability to listen. And I always joke that project managers are kind of like the United Nations. They can't really do, they can't really make any decisions, but they can pass resolutions. But it's really about getting, finding the right people and getting them to hear each other and understand each other and collaborate. And often it means trying to find ways to convince people to do things that they don't want to do. Either they don't understand why it's important. So it's a really common thread, isn't it? When we're dealing with people that they want to see this change happen, but they don't really want to do the work to do it. Project management has and change management has really taught me about human behavior and how humans experience change and all the ways that you have to meet them where they're at. First and foremost, you have to listen and try to understand and then all you can do is really try to help show them benefit. But you have to get at the what's in it for them. And this always comes back to the why. So you can design the best, you know, clinical change in the world. But if you don't have the people on that unit on board, that they don't think it's important, and they don't want to do it, they'll go along with it, but then they'll just drift back to what they were doing before. So there has to be a real, genuine desire to see that change happen. And the same is true in our diet. And the other thing I I've, I would say is very parallel is that sometimes it takes more than once. There's been many clinical changes that I've been involved in in a hospital based environment, where I wasn't the first person to work on that project. They had tried it, you know, two years earlier, they tried it five years earlier, and the change didn't stick. And so we, you have to try to examine why was that? Why did that? Why did that change not stick? What did we not do? What did we do wrong? Or who did we not involve which stakeholder was missing? And that's that's true of us, isn't it? Like, like, well, I don't know about you stuff. But when when I came around to changing my whole life, and my diet and lifestyle, it was quite a journey until I got to being, you know, fully whole food plant based. And a lot of that was my own learning that I had to do in my own mistakes that I had to make in my own, like getting to know my own body and being in tune with it. So yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. But that's the way that I think about it. It's all about people, and how people experience change.

Stephanie: And you mentioned your own journey with that and transitioning to a whole foods plant based lifestyle. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that. How did this philosophy come about specifically for you? You mentioned your friend, but how did that impact your why and reasoning? And how has this led to where you are today?

Michelle: Yeah, so I wanted, I knew I just wanted to be healthy. And step one, as it is with most people, is just cleaning up all the processed packaged foods and, and fast foods, and added sugars and pop. And my kids and I, we used to do this thing called movie and junk food night every Friday, where we would order horrible processed food in and get tons of chips and candy and pop. And my kids thought I was the greatest mom ever. So things like that had to stop, and it had to become fruit. And, you know, even in those days, like healthy to me, I thought was crackers and cheese, and cottage cheese and cream cheese and all kinds of cheese. So it took a long time, but where where really shifted towards me getting this deeper understanding of, instead of the more the cleaner, you know, I'm going to say, quote, unquote, balanced diet was when my daughter, my daughter suffered a very serious concussion. She had a TBI right as she was going into first year university. And so I knew that nutrition was going to be exceptionally, exceptionally important for her to try to take on that, that level of learning and applying herself and her brain and being on her own, and and still be able to succeed because she was having a lot of issues with concussion symptoms and headaches and attention span and things like that. And then she came home after her first week of residence and announced that they'd had a dare and I think a little friendly wager that she wouldn't be able to be vegan for a month. Because I don't know why, it's probably the thing she had for chicken nuggets. Anyway, when I found out she was going to go vegan, my immediate reaction was, oh, no, she thought that's going to be very unhealthy. And that she's, you know, it's going to be so difficult on her own, there's no way she's going to be able to do that. And as I know, with any teenager, you can't just as a parent, you can't just say no, you can't, because that's immediately what they will do. So I did what I do. And I dove into evidence. And I thought, I'm just going to prove to her how terrible this is. And when I dove into it deeper and deeper, and I had learned some of this in nutrition school, it's just that it had been a little bit a little bit prefaced with the this can be done successfully, but it's really difficult, right? That was the way it was framed to us. And I had read Dean Ornish's book spectrum, like a lot of things that we've studied healthy 100 with with john robin. So I understood how good whole food was, I just, it was probably this paradigm from my upbringing, right stuff that I, you know, the dairy farmers in my grandparents and the beef farmers and my grandparents, and just that, that, that country upbringing, I just had a really difficult time with this idea that these things were unhelpful. And anyway, I dove into more current research. And it was at that point that, you know, I remembered having read about the China study and john robin's book. And so I read the China study, and I watched Forks Over Knives. And, and then I was like, Oh, my gosh, this, she's not wrong, I just have to make sure it's not Lay's potato chips and Oreos. So what happened was, I went vegan also. And after, you know, my goal was to prove her wrong. So yeah, she became my greatest teacher. And, and then I would say that I was probably about 90% whole food plant based for a number of years. And then for about the last 10, I was, I was seeing enough private nutrition clients on the side. And for whatever reason, I always seem to end up people who wanted help going through their treatments. And it was probably I just had this connection to cancer that with that story that a lot of people going through a cancer experience just seemed to gravitate toward me. And, and it just didn't fit with me anymore, when I was having, you know, just a little bit of this or like the odd egg or whatever. It's like, why am I even putting like, I'm telling these people this can save that help save their life. And yet I'm still eat like, why am I still eating it? I just decided to stop. And I think that's pretty natural to from people that I talked to, right? Like, you just don't miss it anymore.

Stephanie: It's kind of going back to what you were talking about with the project management, sometimes you have to do things multiple times, and each time find a slightly different iteration to find what works for you. And then it ends up becoming easier and easier, potentially, as you go through.

Michelle: Yeah, I think it's that amygdala. I think it's that memory that that it's, it's more of the memory of the memories of eating that food and its relationship to your family that is harder to break than the food itself.

Stephanie: It is more than the nutrients. There's so many different aspects about it. It's part of our identities, our culture, it brings people together. So it's considering all those other aspects of it. And everybody eats so everybody has an opinion of it and can speak to it. So it's something that can also bring people together, but also divide people because of that. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more, you mentioned that you delved into doing research on this vegan, vegetarian diet when your daughter told you that you wanted to follow it. And my understanding is that you also completed the certification in plant-based nutrition at Cornell University. What were some of the most significant findings in recent nutrition research that you found most compelling and that you found when you were talking to individuals would resonate with them to help them make changes in their lives or find their reason for why?

Michelle: So basically, once you know, this is the way I am. Once I love something, then I think everybody should know about it. And I just fell so in love with nutrition and, and also this notion that I think, if I'm honest with you, my initial reaction on learning some of this was really angry. Like when I learned about, you know, how our government will subsidize the industries that produces the foods that contribute the most to our most prevalent chronic diseases. Like I looked a lot at the top causes of death, the World Health Organization, I would spend hours going on their WHO's website and segmenting by low-income countries, high-income countries, women versus men, and, and looking, looking at all of these variances, looking at one of the things that that CSNN was very good at, was it wasn't so much about our not like teaching us knowledge about nutrition, it was what it taught us to understand about the system, like we had to calculate our own carbon footprint. For example, we learned about alternative and comparative diets and giving given assignments to look at all of these diets and try to identify what about them is healthy, what about them is unhealthy, and how would you compare them, letting us make some of our own judgments and have our own debates about that rather than telling us. I really respected that about the program. I think when I read that, when I read the China study, I think because it shook so much of my upbringing, core values, you know, root chakra sort of programming, I was really, I was really amazed. And also another thing about me is that I'm, I'm half Indo-Pakistani, half Scottish by my DNA. And I came to the realization, I guess, as a result of the China study, I stopped all dairy. And at some point, and I didn't realize that I was one of those people. Like, I mean, I was never diagnosed as lactose intolerant or anything like that. But I felt so much better. The inflammation just went down in my body. And I think this is more of what happened for me was that testing little things, I would read something, I would test it, I would think about it, I would go deeper. I looked up Yeah, so I looked up all these, I looked up the China study, I read the thing. I read Dean Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial. I tried to get I even went back. One of the books that we I was actually teaching, I was faculty at Canadian School of Natural Nutrition for about seven years. And I was teaching lifestyle aging. So we dove into the precursor to the Blue Zones, the Alexander Leafs research with, you know, the Vilcabambans and all of those other centenarian societies. And I just became very fascinated at this idea that we could not only prevent and reverse disease, but we could actually meaningfully impact how we age. So I became a voracious follower of T. Colin Campbell, Cabell Esselstyn, Dean Ornish. In there, I found Walter Willett, Brenda Davis, our famous Canadian registered dietitian. So, so many of those icons that led me to Neil Barnard, you know, so I started following all of these, you know, really significant players that are having an impact on on shifting the culture and the understanding of the links between diet and disease and what it means to eat healthy and what it means to eat a planetary health diet that I started going to conferences. So I attended a plantrition project, our plantrition conference in the US, I started going to Real Truth About Health, I found Canadian plant-based healthcare professionals conference, and there are others, I can't remember the names of them. But that started to be how I spent my vacation, I would get three weeks vacation. And I would spend one week with a family vacation and the rest of it I would spend on nutrition, just going to these conferences and trying to learn, you know, beyond the education I had received. And I think it was at the plantrition program that I, I found out about the T. Colin Campbell Cornell program, and I immediately wanted to do that. So and I would say that's an ongoing, ongoing journey. Like I just, whenever I have the opportunity, I'm keenly, keenly aware that it's not so much the science changes, it's just that science gets better. And we get better abilities and new divergent thinkers who are brave, or find find ways to study things in a way that haven't been studied before that we just learn more. What is it that that one doctor says, the truth is always the truth, the truth never changes. It's just that we become to understand it better. And that's, that's just a passion of mine is to is to always seek the truth. I mean, on my podcast, my sign off is be real, right? Like, so like, the answer is always just being real. It's just always real food being being, being really honest and and showing up very authentically with yourself and with others. That's what it's all about.

Stephanie: Mm hmm. Because there's so much information out there. It's like figuring out, okay, how do we actually find the truth or seek the truth? And where do we look for it? And how do we actually take that knowledge and put it into practice?

Michelle: The Blue Zones is another one that I really, really, I really admire and really identify with, because I think that Dan Buehner and his team have really given us a toolkit with Blue Zone communities. And, and all of that information that they have online as to how, like, you don't have to move to the Nequoia Peninsula to make this happen, right there, if there is political will, if there is, you know, a group of influential people interested, we can transform our neighborhoods. So thanks for letting me add that.

Stephanie: No, of course. And along those lines, Dr. Mylene Jeannot in Northern Ontario is actually working on bringing Blue Zones to Canada. So very interesting. And I'm so curious to see how that all comes together.

Michelle: Yeah, that's incredible. I don't know if the one there was one in Airdrie, Alberta. I don't know if you heard about that one. And I, I think that that was happening right around COVID. So I'm not sure if the project continued or not. That's interesting.

Stephanie: I'm going to shift gears just a little bit, because you have such a diverse range of experiences. And I'm going to shift more to your entrepreneurial journey and tea sommeliership. Yeah. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about it. So you founded an ethically sourced loose leaf tea business to my understanding and boutique tea room. So what inspired you? You mentioned that you really delve into tea when you're making your dietary transitions. And I was wondering what inspired you to take this next entrepreneurial leap? And what was the most rewarding aspect of this experience?

Michelle: Oh my gosh, how much time do you have? So around when I was turning 40, my husband asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. And I decided I wanted to go to the World Tea Expo in the States, because I was just enamored with tea. And I'm a big fan, you know, being a mom of two very, very busy kids of how can I get as much information as possible in a short period of time. And it was like, I was in I was in my nutrition study at that time, I think I was in the second year. And so I was, as a student, I was just voracious for information. And when I got to World Tea Expo, I got to attend several lectures by different scientists, and really diving into the the chemistry of tea. And but what frustrated me was that nobody could really talk to me about, like, intelligently about the actual health benefits, like about the metabolizing of it in our body. And so I couldn't really get anybody on the tea on the tea side to help me understand the health benefits, I couldn't really get anybody on the nutrition side who really understood tea other than the fact that it had caffeine. And so I made that my own area of study. And I found out about the George Brown in Toronto was doing the first tea Somali certification in Canada. And I was working in Toronto at the time. So it was very convenient for me to just go there to night school on Fridays while I was going to nutrition school. On Tuesdays, I was living in London, but I was working in Toronto. So I was commuting like two or three days a week. So I sort of straddled those worlds for for a period of time. And so I kind of graduated nutrition and tea at the same time. But I really isolated the people that I found in the tea community that were scientists and that that had, you know, experience of bridging this, what does this mean in the context of diet, right? This was kind of what I was interested in. Yeah, I just kind of made myself sort of a, I don't want to say an expert, because I wouldn't say that I'm ever an expert in anything. I'm an eternal student. But certainly an area of my particular interest that I became quite competent speaking about. And, you know, because I found out that it's not just about the polyphenolic compounds. It's not just about the tea. It's about and it's about this amino acid theanine that actually crosses the blood brain barrier. There's no other food that does that, like unless it's fermented, right, or it's turned into a drug. But tea is a natural beverage will cross the blood brain barrier, and it will sit in the receptor sites, and it will calm you down and make you feel zen and cool. And then that bridged with what I was learning sort of on the more spiritual side of whole health and food and feeling good is that, you know, Buddhist monks have been using this beverage for 5000 years to help enhance states of deep meditation. So my one of my favorite sayings became when people would say, well, isn't isn't caffeine, isn't there caffeine in tea? And isn't that going to make me like jittery? And I was like, I would say, I would always say, do you do you ever see a hyper monk? No, you don't see a hyper monk. monks use this to calm to calm and to go into deep states of meditation. But what I came to understand is that it's just a food, unless you do a whole bunch of stuff to it, and, and add sugar and add milk and, and chemical flavorings and, and do things to it that are not natural, the same way that we do with our food. You know, it is one of the healthiest natural beverages on the planet, it's full, it's a great way to get additional polyphenol compounds into our body in a very quick way. So it's the same thing, it has to be good quality. You have to use good quality water, and drink it as a natural beverage the way that it was intended, without doing a lot to it. So I always, my mantra was that if, if you start with good quality leaf, you don't have to cover it up. Same way I feel about a vegetable or a fruit. And so yeah, how did that lead me to the tea lounge? Well, I started to drink so much of this tea for my own consumption. And I went around this expo, and I met suppliers, I talked to people from different countries. And because of the environmental nutrition education, I had gotten in this sense of social justice when it comes to foods and tea industry is one where there can be a lot of social justice issues in certain countries. I was very interested in making sure that what I was paying for was not at the expense of somebody else, that that that people were getting a fair living wage. And coincidentally, when you pay somebody a pair living, fair living wage, they make a better product to go figure. So I got so that I was sourcing about 40 different selections just for my own interest and enjoyment and consumption. And I thought I can't be the only person worried about this. There's, there's got to be somebody else that would like to know that a nutritionist aka T sommelier has already done the work to investigate what's the best product that is going to be a great quality, great taste, and and the cleanest and the best for my body without me having to worry about that. And so I just started selling tea online. And then a few years later, I well, immediately I started at a farmer's market and got a lot of experience there. And then I opened the tea room. And because of where I was at in my diet, the tea room was had had a very large number of healthy whole food options. But we also served, you know, clotted cream with scones and and we had cheap we had a cheese board as well as a vegan cheese board. And then eventually I got the courage to to ditch the dairy altogether. We never did have meat of any kind. It was just some of those dairy products. I was I would say that dairy is the last thing to go when you're on your journey to to plant based. But yeah, that it's a very it's a very big story that the tea lounge became for me it became a place where I helped have classes I collaborated with with different local chefs and we would put on these amazing dinners. So whether the chef was a plant based after whether they were conventional chef, they were just the best chefs in the best restaurants in our community. And what I would tell them is that this has to be an ethical, sustainable whole food plant based dinner. So within that guideline, design four courses of whatever you want, any cuisine that you want, and I will do a tea pairing with each course. And so we did that many, many times over the years that I that I had the business and it was such a rewarding experience because it was an opportunity for me to collaborate with all these chefs in the community. And, and even though it might not have been the values of that particular chef, they took on the challenge with with such joy, and loved it. I mean, and and I that's been my experience as a consumer to I don't know if you found that but if you go into a really nice restaurant that your friend takes you to, even if it's not a vegan restaurant, and they don't have anything vegan on the menu, you say, would you please ask the chef that I can't have any of these foods, and that with whatever great ingredients they have in the kitchen, I'm going to be grateful for anything that they create for me. That's often what I say. And then they go back and my friends are often astounded that my meal is actually so much more interesting and delicious than what they've ordered. Because the chef has had fun coloring outside the lines, and and being creative and not just doing the same thing every day. That's, that's my my feeling on it. So yeah, we did a lot of education. My goal was to teach the public in a very subtle way, like not screaming with a sign outside saying that we are plant based, or we are vegan, just we're a tea room, which is a tea room that serves really good food, and have them come in and discover, oh, this doesn't have any of those types of foods in it. And, and, but it tastes really good, or it's really delicious, or this scone is just as, just as, as decadent. And, you know, so, you know, the chocolates, like we had a lot of, a lot of really great, simple, but delicious experiences without all of those animal based foods. And we were the only place. So it's sad that I've, I've had to move on from that. And it's not there in that, that fashion anymore. But it was such a rewarding experience.

Stephanie: It sounds like such a fun opportunity to be creatively delicious as you put it and to get to explore those signs of things and even like invite others to be able to explore that as well and take those quote-unquote risks outside of the norm and it's so interesting that the marketing it's not specific to oh it's this way of eating but it's just general it's just eating overall so I found that really interesting too.

Michelle: Yeah I had I really wrestled with that a lot as a business owner especially coming out of the COVID time which was just it nearly devastated every small business in my community so many places closed and there were a few of us that were mom and pops that just kind of white knuckled and got it through and you know did all the pivoting and all that stuff but you know the question was because we had just in 2020 was when we had just moved 100% whole food plant-based so in one way I was thinking oh my gosh this is the worst possible timing for us to do that so we we just while we were locked down we paused the food and just focused on doing online tea orders while I really figured things out I really had the the time and the space to think about it and I debated there were a number of people telling me don't do it don't do it you need to do anything that you can to survive and then there were the other people saying well if you're going to do it you have to let people know you have to put a sign up that says that you're that you're essentially vegan now and I just thought about it and I thought why I said well okay I'll soft launch it first and won't really say anything I'll just say that we've updated the menu but when I thought about it Steph you don't see a giant sign hanging out of other restaurants saying we serve meat you know so I didn't really feel in need for me to put out a big sign that says we don't so um we just we just serve really good food and and I did disclose that we were consciously delicious and if you went on to our menu and you looked at it you could see the ingredients so it wasn't wasn't like we were hiding anything it's just I struggled with this knowledge and I think this comes back to the understanding people and understanding behavior change and what motivates people that you can just as easily motivate somebody with a couple of words as you can deter them with a couple of words and the the v word for whatever reason has become quite divisive and and quite controversial so I never wanted to use the word vegan um and so even plant-based whole food plant-based a lot of people don't understand what that means exactly so we did we said consciously delicious and when people would ask me I'd say well we we follow a whole food plant-based philosophy in order to deliver you know the healthiest options for people and the planet because we I think it's our job as a business to support the sustainability of this community and not just the healthfulness of what we serve here and um and that little phrase would cause the customer to kind of tilt their head and go huh and not in a controversial way they would the idea of them eating something conscious and delicious felt good to them I think or a majority of people there were a few people that were upset that we didn't have milk um but I just considered those weren't our customer yeah and I found that that doing that subtle approach worked you know people don't want to have things shoved down their throats they they they like being it being more comfortable to try it and experience it and go wow that was a really cool experience

Stephanie: and and getting there on their own and that tea room experience it sounds like it led to a lot of different learning opportunities and you have since sold it but you've gone on to another entrepreneurial initiative and that's podcasting so you've joined us in the podcasting realm and you currently co-host the nutrition for noobs podcast which um talks about different nutrition topics and I was wondering if you could tell a little bit more about what motivated you to start the podcast and what feedback have you received from listeners and if there's any particular topic that really stands out to you that you've covered so far oh that thank you for asking about that

Michelle: yeah because nutrition for noobs is my new obsession my new my new passion and it's really filling a void for me of what I I miss about um you know my customers knew that I was passionate about nutrition and that it under lay everything that we did um in my store um and I lost my outlet for that right so when when I was in you know the middle of the busyness of of running the business doing project management on the side seeing clients on the side running my own little nutrition groups um my my best friend Kevin and I um used to get together in the summer and I would rent my other friend's cottage and we would just spend you know two or three days hanging out um at the cottage because you know we live in different cities and I don't get to see my friend very often and when we would spend time together he would ask you know I'd be making my food he'd be making his food and I'd sort of trying to be subtly saying you know maybe you want to try some plant milk in that coffee or something like that and he started to sort of learn a couple things from me and he he finally said you know you should have a podcast and and he is in the the the voiceover um sound industry and I just said Kevin when am I gonna have time to do a podcast and he said well that's okay you just show up and talk and I'll do it and and the truth was he wanted an opportunity for me to teach him more and he wanted to explore these topics so and and his vision and I think he was right his vision was we need something that's just for noobs like there's lots of really in-depth podcasts on all these subjects but but this is such a complicated topic and the average person like me that that doesn't know very much and we're not I'm you know I don't really understand scientists when I talk and I just you know I just want I just want something for at my level and I thought well that's just the conversation that I have over the counter at the store like every day and I thought I could do that and when you ask about the questions that people ask well we started out just covering like the basics like talking about carbohydrates talking about protein talking about fats like just kind of laying down the foundation and then some of the other things that people write in and ask us about you know you'd think that they would be complicated but they're not like we had someone ask you know can you talk about salt I still haven't done that episode but I have to do it can you talk about chocolate is chocolate actually good for you and what about you know I heard something about the alcohol guideline changing like so like what what is the deal with that so they're actually it's really interesting stuff that I expected more complicated questions but people are still really just asking about the very very basic things about you know what's on their plate what they're what they're eating in a day and it's it's not really about you know the keto diet versus protein synthesis or anything like that so I'm and I'm really enjoying that so you know we kind of let it go where it wants to go but we're trying to just be you know simple for the average person and you know it and engage them in having that growing that connection with food and I'm hoping over time people hearing us talk and have these conversations that they will go through that same process that I did where they'll make a connection with hey what what I'm paying for at the register isn't only impacting my body it's impacting people in other countries and it's impacting government legislation and it's it's it's impacting you know our very food supply who's profiting off of what I'm buying and what does that mean to the quality of what I'm actually ending up with on my plate that that's what I'm hoping happens kind of inferred through the conversations and the way that we approach them but again being much more simple than than we are in the plant-based Canada podcast which I thoroughly enjoy by the way.

Stephanie: Thank you. Michelle looking ahead what are some of your future goals you've done so much and I was wondering both professionally and personally what are you looking forward to and what excites you in looking to the future?

Michelle: Oh well that's that's such a great question post entrepreneur or retail shop entrepreneur I went and got my yoga certification so definitely doing more for me like even even though I have all of these you know certifications in healthy living and things like that I would say being an entrepreneur did erode my ability for self-care so one of the things that I'm really focusing on is that but I'm extremely grateful that I've always kept my my toe in my project management profession on the side there's a different stimulation that I get from that kind of work that I I knew I had the insight to know that I needed there's only been like maybe a span of a year or two that I I wasn't actively working on a project in health care in recent years and I've been very fortunate that I've gotten a new role that I'm dedicated to full-time right now working as the primary care transformation lead for Middlesex London and and again it would seem like this is such such a separate piece from the rest of my life but it's not it's not because I'm in a world in the world of health care we we see you know so many problems plaguing our system of care that so many intelligent and passionate clinicians um you know doctors dietician like all the LA health professionals and specialties are really trying to influence and I think we're really fortunate in Ontario that we have Jane Philpott and her health for all vision for Ontario and we're trying to work towards that but where my worlds have collided is that I I feel so blessed and fortuitous that I've I've I'm in this position of understanding this world of of nutrition evidence-based nutrition and what and be exposed to all these you know brilliant uh people in the plant-based Canada world that I was faced with having a goal of an educational symposium for my primary care audience in the coming year and one of the priorities we have through Ontario Health is chronic disease prevention management and to date there hasn't really been a lot on the prevention side other than cancer screening they classified the cancer screening programs as prevention and you and I both know like that's important cancer screening is obviously incredibly important but it isn't really prevention in the sense that we like to think of it is what can we do to stop you know any disease process from from occurring in the first place so and and I was to my delight a lot of um other voices um across the province felt the same way that we want like we want more real prevention it's just really not sure how to deliver it so I feel very fortunate that um I've made connections through um the Canadian plant-based nutrition professionals yeah I'm I'm super excited that we have a wonderful lifestyle medicine family practitioner who is has been doing um lifestyle medicine in her practice with patients in terms of chronic disease prevention and she's going to come and be a speaker at my at my conference and it will be the first time in my community that we've been able to introduce some really practical advice to help family doctors that are interested in this approach to try to incorporate it in a in a way in their practice that feels like they can do it like understanding how to work within the billing codes and really all of the things that really plague them administratively every day that makes some of these things hard because we all know that there's so very little time for a patient interaction but how to how to structure those visits and do group visits etc so and we have a lot of other topics a lot of really meaningful things that we're implementing in our region to um help improve the health of our population and access to care in our population but I'm I'm really excited to be able to bring these two worlds together for me and provide this opportunity and I got the idea I have to tell you from the first um Canadian plant-based professionals conference because I remember the keynote speaker that year was a doctor from Mississauga Beach who was um talking about how he did this in his practice so that was kind of where I thought we could do that we could do that here so so even though the venue has changed I am still thinking outside the box experimenting with how I can do something differently how can we implement something how can we do something unusual that is going to teach people a different way an alternative way that maybe helps them and helps the population because you know it's important I think too that we introduce this for physicians and providers themselves I think there's physicians and dieticians and nurse practitioners and physician assistants all those people that are part of our primary care community are such caring individuals and they're they're so passionate about what they do that they don't necessarily care for themselves so I I think that's one of the things that um Dr. Moroney is has has emphasized with me too that I think is so important for us to bring into this opportunity is like let's let's introduce this for their own lives as well as their patients and then you know it will be truly impactful so he's going back to

Stephanie: practicing what we speak about and um the integration of prevention whether it's the discussions on this or strategies of this is something that really could be beneficial and is often not as regularly talked about as it could be because of our systems focus on treatment versus prevention and that's where a lot of funding tends to go yeah yeah that that

Michelle: personal exploration is really what did it for me right like it was all those little experiences those dietary changes that I made and feeling it in my own body Michelle where can listeners find out more about you and your work oh that's wonderful thanks for asking so I would love for any listener to connect with the nutrition for noobs podcast and we're you know anywhere you can get your podcast spotify apple um I think there's one called red fin and it's just nutrition for noobs you can email and to connect with me at michellepiercehamilton at gmail.com that's michellepiercehamilton like the city at gmail.com or they can message me or and kevin at n for noobs uh capital n the number four n o o b s at gmail.com and uh yeah we would love to hear from anyone and hear their perspectives um prospective guests or any questions that they have and uh we'll add them to our roster but yeah thank you so much for this opportunity it's just an incredible honor to be here on on this uh you know what I consider to be one of the greatest nutrition podcasts um out there today so thank you so much thank you very much Michelle for those kind words

Stephanie: and as our final thought do you have a take-home message or final thought that you would like

Michelle: listeners to leave this episode with I think for me my final message is always just um be curious be curious and seek the truth um that that's been my guiding light uh to you know look at the evidence myself um and form my own opinions and consider critically who benefited from this uh to try to find out you know what's real and what's not and uh so it always comes back to my tagline just be

Stephanie: real everyone thank you very much Michelle thank you this episode was hosted by myself Stephanie Nishi and Clint Stamatovich is our audio engineer this podcast featured royalty-free music from freesound.com a very special thanks to our guest Michelle Pierce Hamilton for speaking with us and sharing her insights and of course thank you for listening if you enjoy our podcast please consider supporting the show you can do this by clicking on the link at the bottom of the show notes the Plant Based Canada podcast is an initiative of the group Plant Based Canada which aims to educate health professionals and the public on the evidence behind plant-based whole food nutrition for individual and planetary health to learn more about the show visit our website at www.plantbasedcanada.org and stay up to date by following us on instagram youtube and facebook at plantbasedcanada.org and on x formerly known as twitter at pbc underscore org until next time