An Interview With Sara Connell
Never say never: When I finished my undergraduate education, I said I was done with school forever and never going back. It turns out, I missed school and went back twice, for my Masters in Public Health (MPH) and PhD in Public Health. The moral here was: Always be open to learning and trying new things.
Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dana Ellis Hunnes.
Dana Ellis Hunnes PhD, MPH, RD, is a senior dietitian at UCLA Medical Center. She is also an assistant professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dana is the author of the new book with Cambridge University Press: Recipe For Survival: What You Can Do to Live a Healthier and More Environmentally Friendly Life (2022). Dana is the mother to an 8-yr old son, and is concerned about issues surrounding climate change and sustainability.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and how you grew up?
I grew up in Clearwater, Florida, near Tampa bay. I have an older sister. My mother is a psychologist and my father an intellectual property lawyer. I was always interested in the weather and would spend hours watching the Weather Channel growing up. I was also very interested in food and cooking and similarly, spent hours watching the Food Network and learning new cooking techniques. I was very athletic, dancing 15 hours each week at my studio, ran track in high school, and was a swimmer. My mother was a health teacher at a community college in NY for a few years, so nutrition and health were very important in our house. When I went to college, I studied nutrition, and learned all about the importance of healthy diets to take care of our own health and prevent disease; later on, I learned all about the importance of healthy diet for our health and the environment as well.
Let’s talk about what you are doing now, and how you achieved the success that you currently enjoy. Can you tell our readers a bit about the work you are doing?
I’m a Registered Dietitian at UCLA Medical Center and an assistant Professor with the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. After completing my undergraduate education in nutrition at Cornell University, I completed my dietetic internship at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, GA and spent a couple of weeks interning at CNN’s medical unit in Atlanta.
I moved out to Los Angeles, and started working at UCLA Medical Center in May of 2005. I went back for my Master of Public Health in 2005 and completed that in 2007 at UCLA. I started on my PhD in public Health also at UCLA in 2009 and completed that in 2013 with a focus on climate change and food security. I traveled to Ethiopia to learn more about how individuals there, in a developing country that depends on rain and climate stability to grow their foods, is dealing with climate change.
I was still working at UCLA Medical Center (and continue to today).
After giving birth to my son in 2014, I began writing everything I had learned and researched about climate change and nutrition and food security. Eventually this turned into a book proposal, and I submitted it to Cambridge University Press, in England. I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to write my own book, and writing this book transformed my life.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Tenacity: Throughout my education I had counselors and advisors tell me that what I was doing wasn’t possible, or wasn’t likely possible. For example, I went to my undergraduate counselor within the first few weeks of college and said, “I want to graduate in 3 years.” He didn’t think I could do it, but I guess I wanted it badly enough and was able to complete my undergraduate degree in 3 years, some of my best grades were the semesters I took the most credits. Same thing happened with my MPH and PhD. My advisors didn’t feel I could work full time and complete a Masters and PhD in a timely fashion. Not only did I complete my MPH in 2 years, like everyone else, I received the only high-pass score on my comprehensive exam that year, and I completed my PhD in 4 years, completely within the expected time frame, shorter than most students in my program.
Goal-oriented: When I set a goal for myself, I also establish what steps I need to take to reach that goal. I am someone who thrives on having goals and checking off those goals; for it gives me a sense of achievement and progress. Just like the stories under tenacity, I couldn’t have made those things happen without being goal-oriented and internally driven. You cannot expect to get your motivation from others, seek to find it inside yourself.
Lead-by-example: I’m a big believer of talking the talk, but ALSO walking the walk. You have to have experienced and understood the steps it takes to do the ideas and actions you’re asking others to take so that you can give tangible examples of how to do them. My book is just one example of this. I talk about 20 actions we can all take right now to be more environmentally friendly and healthier, and be better stewards of the planet and our own bodies. But, the only way I could legitimately speak and write about them was to do them myself.
What’s the WHY behind the work that you do? Please share a story about this if you can.
Writing about, advocating for, discussing and working with people on some of the most existential threats we face (climate change!) are so important to me because of my son. When I gave birth and realized the threats that he (and his generation) face on this planet that is warming, having more weather extremes (drought, floods), food insecurity, and biological diversity losses, I realized I couldn’t stay quiet. I was overwhelmed with fear and grief about what was happening. I knew that the only way I could overcome those feelings was to take action and to educate others, through my writing and discussions, about the issues and provide tangible actions we can take to do something about it. So, the WHY I do what I do, and try and advocate as often as I do, is my son.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am grateful to a number of people who helped me get to where I am. I’ve had a few teachers in my life who truly believed in me, one was my 3rd and 5th grade teacher (I had him twice), and he always believed I could do whatever I wanted to do in life. I’m still friends with him today. My biology teacher in high school, who I had for 3 years (I was in an international baccalaureate program, and we were fortunate enough to have most of our teachers 3 out of our 4 years). He also believed that I could succeed in college and beyond and wrote me great letters of reference. My director who hired me at UCLA believed in me and hired me full time despite the fact that I was a new graduate (only 22), and had just gotten into my MPH program at UCLA. She supported my decision to go back for both my MPH and PhD and without her support, could not have gotten to where I am.
My parents, always believed I could do anything I set my mind to (hopefully all parents do!) and supported me in my journey.
And lastly, my book editor at Cambridge University Press. Without his belief in my research, the story I wanted to deliver, I would not have the book that changed my life, and hopefully the lives of many others.
Awesome! Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”? Can you share a story about how it impacted you?
The book that changed my life is my book: Recipe For Survival: What You Can Do to Live a Healthier and More Environmentally Friendly Life (2022). It changed my life because of everything that I learned, researched, and discovered WHILE writing it. It’s not JUST a book that gives you the standard “drive less, take shorter showers” information that we all hear about. It’s a book that describes the lesser known, and not readily discussed actions we can take NOW that are — in fact more impactful than the “typical” things we are told — at reducing our environmental impact and keeping ourselves healthier.
Also, learning about all the tragedies that are happening around us as a result of human-created climate change was also incredibly eye-opening. In fact, it changed me, because when I first began learning about these issues, I fell into a pretty deep depression. I was angry, I was sad, I was horrified, I was shocked, and I didn’t know what to do about them or how to address my feelings of despair.
Writing about everything I learned, gave me a sense of empowerment, it gave me a feeling of, “I can educate others, and they will realize how bad things are and want to do something about it.” And then of course, writing about the 20+ actions we can ACTUALLY take, starting now, to do something about it, also gave me hope and a feeling of, hey, we can do this!! If enough of us act, we can do this. So, it changed my life in that it truly turned me into an advocate, it got me out of my depression, and it gave me hope.
What was the moment or series of events that made you decide that you wanted to take a specific course of action based on the inspiration from the book? Can you share a story about that?
It was the film, “The Cove,” and then the film “Racing Extinction,” and “Plastic Paradise,” and “Blackfish,” and “The Ivory Game,” and then “Before the Flood.” Seeing all of these documentaries, and realizing that I was not alone in my understanding of the threats and the world around us, and that there are other people out there who care and want to make a difference helped me. It compelled me to take a book-writing course through the extension program at UCLA and develop a book proposal that I could send out to publishers to write the book that I did.
If I hadn’t seen all of these films and that there are other people out there describing and educating others about the biggest threats of our time, and I definitely would not be in the position I’m in today. I probably would have continued to write or research as possible in an academic sense, but would not likely be the advocate I am today.
Can you articulate why you think books in particular have the power to create movements, revolutions, and true change?
I believe that books can summon movements, revolutions, and true change, because books have the time and the space to present topics in an in-depth way and provide readers with the resources and citations they might want to also look into themselves as a way to allow the reader to better understand what is being presented to them. While movies can do that too with their poignant images, movies are also often quick — due to short-attention spans — and so, it isn’t always as easy to achieve the same depth that books can.
A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, the size, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that can change lives?
I think the most important/essential ingredients include the writing style and perhaps the cover. The cover needs to draw readers in and give them a sense of what the book is about at a glance, and the writing style needs to be engaging and understandable so that it draws readers in to hear what you have to say. I think other aspects are important as well, such as the topic, it needs to be salient to the readers, important to them, and in order to make it important to them, it has to be relatable and (again) engaging. People want to read books that are written as though someone is speaking with them, not AT them. That is what I strived to do with my book. Speak with the reader and engage them, not speak down to them or at them.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why?
5 things I wish someone had told me before I started my career are the following:
- Never say never: When I finished my undergraduate education, I said I was done with school forever and never going back. It turns out, I missed school and went back twice, for my Masters in Public Health (MPH) and PhD in Public Health. The moral here was: Always be open to learning and trying new things.
- Don’t have a set-path in mind: You never know where life will take you. I did not anticipate that I would be writing a book that would change my life (and the lives of others), but, when you see where the road takes you, opportunities you never expected can arise.
- Nutrition is not one-size-fits-all. In school, we tend to learn formulas for calculating calorie needs and protein needs, and we learn about various “diets” that are taught to patients for various medical issues, but when you’re out in the real world, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Patients are individuals with unique needs, cultural preferences, and environmental situations, and those all need to be taken into account (the psycho-social-cultural perspectives).
- The moment you are comfortable, something extraordinary will happen to disrupt things. COVID did that. I’d been at my work for 15 years, comfortable in taking care of all types of patients and then COVID created all kinds of new ways of having to operate in a hospital system, and new ways of caring for a young child in a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) event.
- That if you find you have an interest outside of your career, it’s OK to spend time on it outside of work and it will often be to your own benefit. My love and interest in climate change and sustainability have led me to do things (such as write a book and talk at length to the media) about these important issues. If I had not found this outside interest and followed where it led me, I think I’d feel a sense of loss, in the sense that, I have a lot of knowledge to share and would not have the same opportunities I do now. Follow your heart, follow your interests, do what you love, even if you don’t get paid to do it, it will still make you happy.
The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?
I genuinely hope that my book inspires an environmental and a health movement that focuses on the foods we eat and how they are grown. All too often, we hear about unsuccessful government campaigns to slow-down climate change that get stalled in congress or at “high-level” meetings, and that can get extremely discouraging and make many of us feel powerless and/or indifferent. So, I sincerely hope that as people read my book and learn how we can simultaneously improve our own health and the environment with every bite, with every meal, every day that they will want to participate and help protect their own health and the planet. We only have one planet we can live on, we only have one body that we can live in. We really need to take care of both, and we can do that, starting with our next bite. So, I’m hopeful that my book starts the environmental and health movements that add life to our years and years to our lives rather than potential pain and suffering that comes with unhealthy bodies and an unhealthy planet.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m on twitter: @danaellishunnes
I’m on IG: @danaellishunnes
I’m on medium: https://medium.com/@recipe-for-survival
I’m frequently in the media: If you google my name, I’m often in articles about health, nutrition, or sustainability.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.
Author Dana Ellis Hunnes Of Recipe For Survival On The Book That Changed Her Life was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.