Nutrition Is The Focus Of ‘Chew On This’

While studying at the Natural Gourmet School in Manhattan, culinary student Stefanie Sacks had a dream for herself.

Approximately 15 years ago, the then 28-year-old student decided that she would move out to Montauk and buy Naturally Good Foods & Café—her workplace when she was a teenager, and the inspiration behind her decision to attend culinary school. She thought she’d make a life out of feeding and touching people through her food.

That’s not exactly what happened. There was more in store for her.

“So much of life is about purpose,” she recalled during an in-

terview on a sunny afternoon last week, sitting on a bench along Main Street in East Hampton. “And it was then that I found mine.”

Ms. Sacks had a revelation, one that moved her to earn a master’s degree in nutrition from Columbia University. She realized that disease had always followed her—from her friends and family, to her clients, and even herself.

She knew a part of the solution. But it was a cure that the public ignored and doctors refused to talk about: food.

Today, the 43-year-old culinary nutritionist is finally being heard.

Earlier this year, Ms. Sacks and her husband, Corcoran broker Rich Dec, began shooting “Chew on This,” a show airing on LTV where the culinary nutritionist discusses different medical conditions—from heart disease and diabetes to skin care and behavioral issues—with an expert. Then, she moves into the kitchen for a practical cooking lesson.

“A lot of these nutrition professionals don’t really know anything about food,” Ms. Sacks said. “They know enough to tell you to eat brown rice, but they don’t know how to tell you what [type of] brown rice or how to cook brown rice or how do you make it tasty.”

Ms. Sacks, who’s been cooking since age 3, would know how to do just that. Growing up in a Jewish family in Armonk, New York, food was always central, she said, and she had always been drawn to the kitchen.

But at age 8, her health troubles set in. She developed asthma, recurring pneumonia, bronchitis and terrible allergies. Her doctors prescribed antibiotic after antibiotic, inhaler after inhaler. Not much worked, she said.

Seven years later, she found a distraction when she began cooking at the health food store in Montauk—her family’s summer vacation spot and Ms. Sacks’s current home. The foods fascinated her. She discovered bean dips, fresh tuna salad, seaweeds, whole grains and gorgeous herbs and spices, she said.

“All that sort of Birkenstock and dreadlock food,” she said with a laugh. “I was the resident food freak. I started reading voraciously all these different books on health.”

The first health food book she picked up was “Food and Healing” by Annemarie Colbin, who is now her mentor.

“That book was just like, ‘Holy ... Holy mackerel,’” she recalled. “Someone is talking about food and how it affects your health. These doctors are just not helping me. I don’t want to be on all this medicine. I feel like I can take control somehow. I have to figure out a way to help myself.”

The final straw was a few summers later. During the High Holy Days, Ms. Sacks was with her family at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton and medicated with the steroid Prednisone. She became extremely feverish and even began hallucinating, she said.

“I made this internal commitment to myself that I’m dying with all this medication,” she said. “I have to find a doctor that was going to start talking to me about my diet.”

Syracuse-based Dr. Sherry Rogers was the answer. She married conventional and alternative treatment and looked at the whole person, Ms. Sacks said, adding that she was—in the 1970s—extremely ahead of her time.

The doctor prescribed allergy shots and two inhalers. She also put Ms. Sacks on a sugar-free, yeast-free, dairy-free and ferment-free diet.

Within three months, Ms. Sacks was off every medication.

“That was the nail in the coffin,” she said. “It was, ‘How come more people don’t do this? How come more people don’t know about this?’ The light bulb went off in my head. Doctors aren’t talking about it, and if there are no doctors talking about it, people have no idea what to do. The only reason I was able to do this was because I was cooking in a health food store for five years. I was able to follow this diet religiously.”

The idea stayed in her head through her undergraduate education at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and her culinary schooling in Manhattan.

“I started to notice how food was making me feel and I was very hypersensitive to it,” she said. “I guess I just followed it as a passion. But in my late 20s, I realized I had never felt fab. It was never, ‘Oh my God, I feel so freaking good.’ I was always on this quest. Something felt off to me all this time.”

What happened next was more than a decade’s worth of misdiagnoses by at least 20 doctors and a couple of surgeries. All the while, Ms. Sacks played with her diet—vegan, vegetarian, ayurvedic, macrobiotic, gluten-free. She was her own lab rat, she said.

But nothing was working, she reported. Her doctors put her on a watch-and-wait protocol.

“I started really questioning,” she said. “I was tired of feeling like shit. I wanted answers.”

Two years ago, she went to Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook for treatment. And after a year of tracking her, the doctors diagnosed her with distal renal tubular acidosis—a genetic kidney disease.

“It turns out I have this disease that my kidneys cannot manage the pH of my blood,” she said. “The doctor told me that with the way my kidneys looked, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have passed kidney stones, and he attributes it to what I’ve been doing with my diet since I was 15. I alkalized my diet. I was helping myself without even knowing I was doing it. I was this food freak. Little did I know that I was saving my kidneys this whole time.”

In 2004, Ms. Sacks wrote a television show on how to use food to feel better. At that time eight years ago, no one wanted to listen to her, she said. That’s changed now.

She has shot six episodes of “Chew on This,” which air on LTV and are also posted to her website at stefaniesacks.com with a downloadable tool kit, which is chock-full with additional information she couldn’t fit into each 30-minute television program.

This summer, she said she’s hoping to gain some traction on the East End by bringing on guests who are in the public eye, including musician Nancy Atlas, chef Joe Realmuto and maybe even a few local Hamptons icons.

Though her show is extremely young, she has big goals for it. Her newest dream is to gain a following and have it picked up by television network, such as Discovery Channel, Bravo or Food Network, she said.

“If Rachael Ray can sit and talk about 30-minute meals and Sandra Lee can talk about semi-homemade, why can’t I talk about food for health? Nobody’s doing it,” Ms. Sacks said. “I want to be known as authentic. That’s critical to me. And I don’t ever want to lose my authenticity. I’ve been through hell and back—mentally, physically and emotionally—in my life and I try to embrace every moment as best as I can. And I hope to impart the realness of my journey on the people who I work with, and reach through the show, to help them on theirs.”

For more information on Stefanie Sacks and to watch “Chew on This,” visit stefaniesacks.com.