In Conversation with the 2025 Linus and Ave Helen Pauling Award Winner Deanna Minich, MS, PhD, and Jeffery Bland, PhD

- Hello and welcome to this special episode of "Pathways to Well-being." Today we want to share with you a recent conversation with IFM Co-Founder Dr. Jeffrey Bland and the winner of the 2025 Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award in Functional Medicine, Dr. Deanna Minich. Doctors Bland and Minich discuss how Dr. Minich exemplifies the visionary spirit of both Linus and Ava Helen Pauling through her blending of scientific discovery, with her deep commitment to education, wellness, and advocacy, as well as how her pioneering research in phytonutrients, personalized nutrition and functional medicine has transformed our understanding of food as medicine, illuminating the intricate connections between nutrition, mind and health. - Well, I'm here with the 29th Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award winner, Dr. Deanna Minich. Deanna, thank you so much for having this opportunity to sit down kind of informally and talk about the topography of your life and your evolution as a leader within the functional medicine community. Your vision as to where the future might be taking you and the field, and just sharing your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, feelings about being an award winner for 2025, the 29th award winner. So, congratulations. - Thank you so much. And as you well know, I was very humbled and felt very honored to receive this award, not only because it's connected to Dr. Linus Pauling, but now bringing in Ava Helen, which feels even more significant and also symbolic for the times that we live in. So, thank you. And one of the things you mentioned too, is that I was born in this second generation of functional medicine, this lineage, and you were part of that. You know, you, Barb Schiltz, Dan Lukaczer, Joseph Lamb, Jack Kornberg, so many people that went into that second generation. So, I want to definitely acknowledge the entire history of where we've come from. So, giving that also back to you. - Well, thank you. So, let me start with an anecdote that I think exemplifies how fortunate we are to have you in our community. So, this is many years ago, and I can say with great fortune, our relationship, professional relationship goes back over 20 years. So, it was new in the relationship in which you were serving multiple focuses, overseeing publications and creative assembly of our information, clinical studies, and engaged with patient management from a nutrition perspective. And so I had a good friend who I recognized was in need of some help in terms of his understanding of how to manage his diet and his life. And so I asked you if you would take him on as a labor of love in doing nutritional counseling and evaluation. And so you graciously said yes. And so he started being, coming down from Canada where he lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. And he started to be transformed in his understanding of how he had not been doing himself a favor for many years in the way that he'd been eating and living. And it started to really get, take seriously, not just the diet, but the whole nature of his lifestyle and how it interfaced with his aging process and his body. And so he then eventually called you because your office was upstairs, as you recall. - That's true. - And whenever I would talk to him, he says, "you know, that lady upstairs, she's tough." You were always the lady upstairs. - Oh, and I was tough? I didn't know that. - Yeah, because you were holding him accountable, right? And I think it was the combination of you introducing him to new things about self-discipline, and then Barb Schiltz, who we were working with, who we used to euphemistically and lovingly call Sergeant Schiltz because of her ability to hold people accountable, that really... he exemplified the impact that you've had on people to change their usual and customary into a more enlightened decision making about how they're gonna lead their life. So, how do you do that? - You know, I'm so glad that you shine a light on that particular person and individual because it does bring me back to my earlier days of being in a therapeutic encounter with a client. And I think that my initial approach was much like, I would say Barb Schiltz, if I looked at how she went about clinically guiding people, I was very structured and I was almost like you said, a little bit strong about, okay, we need to do this, then we do this. And then as this part of the elimination diet, you have to do that. So, I felt like I was very structured, almost like the nutrition police initially, but I would have to say that I morphed from the point of seeing him and seeing so many other people because I realized that structure works for some people. But then flexibility and the art of working with people and the psychology I think was really important. And that's what I learned later. And maybe that just comes with experience after you've met so many different people and worked with so many different types of people. I can remember being in the clinic and also asking people to bring in their spouse, bring in your partner. I've done home consultations with people as a family because I realized that you can't affect change just with one person coming into the clinic if the whole family isn't on board. So, I started doing home visits. So, I would say that my connection to that therapeutic encounter definitely evolved over time. Getting out of school, being ready to go, and in my mind being very regimented and routined and structured, that seemed like the approach, but then that softened over time. Then I think the color came in, the art. I was trying to make things more simple because I realized I was just too much up here with the head knowledge and I really needed to come from the heart. So, I hope he felt that because I think that that was in my my earlier days of trying to find my way as a clinical professional with, what's my approach? How do I interact with this person in a way that effects change, right? - Well, I think you've said so much about, my mind is just racing, knowing about your history and your contributions and your evolution in the field. I'm thinking of your father and mother because we're all kind of products, a little bit of our upbringing. So, you have these remarkable parents. Your mother has this extraordinary commitment to nutrition, to the nature of natural foods. You were raised with that. And then you have a father who was a policeman and has very, probably very big structure around his life. So, you couple those together and now your, you and your sister and brother were raised in a environment that probably had this interesting balance of art and you know, dynamics and then structure. And how did that play out as you see it looking back over your life? - That's a good question. You know, when I look back now at the age of 54, I would say it's all perfect. I really needed that structure and that discipline that I was raised with. I was also raised Catholic. So, when I went to Catholic school and just a lot of structure everywhere I turned, and initially I was really kind of moving against that when I was younger and as a teenager. But quite honestly, that did me well because it taught me how to discipline myself with studying. And I really enjoyed school actually. So, that was like, both things kind of came together. And I never quite honestly thought I would be in nutrition or even functional medicine. I thought I was going to medical school. So, much like you, you know, studying science, and I was pre-med, never wanted to have anything to do with nutrition or anything that my mother was imposing in our household. So, I was pre-med, I was just about to take the MCAT and I was working for doctors every summer that I would have a break from school. And then I soon came to realize, I don't think I want to do this exactly. And I was in my junior year of college and I thought I need to do something else. So, again, in that structured mentality of trying to figure out my path going forward and then almost reverting back to my mother's wisdom, maybe there's something about nutrition. So, then I went into grad school. So, I would say what you pinpointed as archetypes for me growing up is really relevant because you're right, the discipline, the rigor combined with the tough love of nutrition as well, and knowing that your body is your temple and how important that is. And also, I really admire my mom for being fearlessly authentic in the 1970s, just like your mother. I mean, at that time she was considered a health nut. Even my grandmother would look at her-- my father's mother would look at her--as a health nut. You know, what is this woman doing? You can't eat out of a microwave. You can't have strawberries with sugar on them, and you can't have white bread. But she was really a pioneer. And so I feel very grateful, and, you know, looking back, I realized the perfection and what seemed like the imperfection, but it actually, all of that creates who we are ultimately. - Yeah, yeah, it's beautifully said. And that mosaic wove itself together beautifully in what you have done with your life and how you use that as a booster rocket to be all that you can be. And so this graduate school thing is another interesting juncture in this kind of sequence of events in our lives that shaped us. So, you didn't decide just to do maybe of a traditional graduate school because you were a product of a US university, but then you decided to go and do your graduate work in Holland, right? - Yeah. - So, why, and- - Well, if you really want to know the personal reason of that- - You probably had a boyfriend. - I fell in love. - Yeah, okay. - And I followed my heart and I went to the Netherlands, but in order to be there and sustain myself after getting my master's degree, I thought I need to do something in some capacity. So, I landed a research position at a, in an academic hospital in a group of PhDs. And I thought maybe I need to stay here and do this. So, after six months, broke up with the boyfriend, stayed on to do my doctorate. And so that was four years. And my advisor, Henkjan Verkade is his name, he's an MD, PhD, he's a pediatrician and he was also pretty tough and really incredibly brilliant in his way and taught me a lot. And one of the areas of focus there was to publish. So, we had the best of, I would say, doing clinical trials. So, being that he was a pediatrician, my work was with babies and children. And so we were looking at the role of bile in the absorption of essential fatty acids. And looking at children with cholestasis, looking at children with cystic fibrosis to see whether or not we could optimize therapies for them with respect to fatty acids. So, first we had to understand mechanistically how those essential fatty acids were absorbed. So, we used a bile diverted rat model, which I didn't love so much to be honest, but we needed to do some of that work initially with stable isotopically labeled lipids. So, we did that and we published on that to understand the role of bile and then moved into the studies with children. And that actually helped me with, even though we were an international group with a man from Germany, from China, all over the place, I learned to speak Dutch because I was with children, right? And so I would be connecting conversing they would correct me in my grammar. And at some point I was also teaching at the medical school, I was teaching a nutrition course in Dutch. - Mm, wow. - Which was not good by any means. And you know, I can, but you know, Dutch people are so good with English. So, I could quickly revert if I had to, but it was quite an experience. It wasn't just an intellectual one, it was a personal growth one. - Well, see again, I think that comes back to what you were talking about earlier. There's a balance between structure and then there's this capacity that you have had that's a, I think a earmark of your professional and personal development of flexibility of being an experimenter of being fearless, doing the unexpected that kind of fit together. So, let's talk about then one of the many contributions that you've laid down to our field, not just the functional medicine field, but the whole of the field of healthcare and nutrition. And that's your artistic side as you alluded to, and how it has led in you being the leader of "The Rainbow Diet" and the colors of food and how that influences the nutrients that a person consumes based upon how they view the color of their diet. - Yeah. Well, and that actually goes back to my master's degree. So, I was at the University of Illinois in Chicago and I was working in the lab of Dr. Phyllis Bowen. Dr. Bowen was a PhD, RD. She had a lab in which she was studying carotenoids. So, carotenoids are the plant pigments that are very colorful. They're red, orange, yellow, sometimes green. So, I was actually working in the lab with Dr. Maria Sapuntzakis, which she was her primary research assistant. And I was helping Maria with working up samples, tissue samples, serum samples, and analyzing carotenoids. And as part of my graduate work, we did a feeding experiment with university men and looked at their levels of oxidative stress after feeding them lycopene. And so that was kind of like my first toe in the water of phytochemicals. And what is this about? Carotenoids, 700 different plant compounds in nature. And they're make, they make nature look pretty, like thanks to carotenoids and these phytochemicals, we have beauty too. So, I would say progressing on from there, I was... and when I came to work with you in 2003, what I would see is that nutrition was a polarized field. So, you know, one day, and I remember at that time in the early 2000s, it was about butter, margarine. Is butter good, is butter bad? You know, there was always like the flavor of the day, like some food that was either maligned or, you know, loved or beloved. And so I was thinking, you know, this just feels unscientific. And when I went into the literature as to like, okay, what can people not refute? What I would say time and time again would be fruits and vegetables, whole plant foods. And even though I studied essential fatty acids, so I studied a macronutrient, there were all of these phytonutrients. And back in the 1990s, this became the functional foods movement where you would take a phytochemical like lutein and you would add it into like prune juice to give it the added benefit and boost of that phytochemical. And I think during the 1990s, as you probably recall, we kind of looked at those phytochemicals as just generic antioxidants. But then we get into the 21st century and we start to see that antioxidants is so 1990s, it's not really just now we have epigenetic modulation, we have DNA repair and on and on. And so to me, the phytochemicals are really the underdogs of nutrition. And even still, you and I just recently reading an article about, what is it? "The 183,000 Food Components." So, I feel like we still have only reached the tippy top of what foods are about. But that was kind of my thinking is, what is irrefutable? What can you not arm wrestle me on? And what is not going to swing like a pendulum? And that was it, color. - Well, and I think you as an artist, and I can say with personal pride, having received some of your art, which is now sitting in my office and my home, that you're a color master. Your art reflects color, it reflects the spectrum. It reflects diversity, which color of the rainbow represents and how that then translates into your writings and your book, "The Rainbow Diet." It's kind of a symbol that people can use. It's, if you're using natural colors of foods, not synthetic colorings, then it helped guide you in food selection, which you've done very beautifully. And making that as a kind of a metaphor for how you construct a diet. - Well, and I would say that all of those many clinical encounters actually helped to inform me, because I was seeing that people would get muddied, I would say intellectually trying to figure out calories and counting. And then I figured out eventually that maybe we should just count colors. Maybe we should make this really easy and we just focus on whole food colors. And what's interesting, you know, I also spent some time in the food industry. And so when you said about the synthetic artificial dyes, you know, color is an enticing lure to the point that it's used in marketing for specific reasons. And we see fast food signs with specific colors to generate a certain psychology. So, I was feeling out from just looking at the psychology of color, the psychology of working with clients that, okay, let's just do the simplex, let's just bring it down into again, what people can do over time and they don't have to get into analysis paralysis. - Mm-hmm. You've done that beautifully. And I think I see so many people who have picked up on that concept now. It has, you know, the best ideas are ones that are expressed and they spread geometrically. And that concept has spread in our field very, very dramatically. That leads me then to a next part of your career that I'm aware of, which was working on one of the first medical foods, and that is the HeartBar and how that whole thing developed. Beause that's another chapter of the evolving nutritional therapeutics. Tell us a little bit about that experience. - Wow, you've done your research yes, absolutely. - Well, I've known you for 22 years. - I know that was such a sliver of my professional life that I thought went unnoticed, but not by you. And in fact, you know what you're calling forth makes me think that there's almost a palette of different things that I've done in nutrition, right? So, what you're speaking to is the time after I finished my PhD, it was the time of the dot-com era, and I went to go work at a startup company in the Bay Area. And this was for one product and it was called the HeartBar. So, this was under the auspice and the research of Dr. John Cooke, a cardiologist at Stanford. And so he had this product, and this is when medical foods were really starting to gain traction as you know. So, this was again, in the late 1990s. And so, great experience because it was all about, how do we create a therapeutic product for people to fulfill what their dietary needs may not be giving them, right? So, that kind of fits the general definition of a medical food. So, that was interesting. I was there just a short period of time before that company was bought by a larger company, and then I progressed into the larger food industry. - So, all of that transition ultimately has opened up another part of your personality, which is to look at the diversity of the world at large. You have traveled now extensively. You have been an educator in many, many countries. You have been confronted with or had the opportunity to experience nutrition cast through many lenses of different cultural and ethnicity-specific interpretations. And you worked with clinicians that are speaking different languages from different backgrounds, that all share similar objectives. Tell us a little bit about that. Your travel plan that has led you around the world and created a polycultural person. - You know, bit about that too. - A little, yes. - I think you have over 1 million miles now. - 6 million. - 6 million? - Yeah- - Well, goodness, I- - Yeah, we are not gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about you. - Well, I'm up around, yeah, close to 1 million. It is something to have traveled the world and met all of these wonderful people. You know, Dr. Ben Brown came up to me after he saw that I was the recipient of the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award and he said, "Deanna, congratulations, you know, you've spread functional medicine internationally." That was part of it, is what his eyes were seeing. And I said, "But Ben, if it wasn't for you inviting me, I wouldn't have had that opportunity." So, I think about all the people who graciously invited me, whether it was Claudia in Taiwan, Lorraine in South Africa- - Peter. - I went to South Africa twice. Peter Williamson in Sweden. - Peter Williamson. - I've been to Sweden several times, even in Europe, a variety of places. You know, it's been fun, Australia. - Oh, yeah. - Oh, my goodness. We've had some fun time in Australia. So, hundreds, thousands of people. And it was so intriguing each time to see how functional medicine was brought into those different countries and to see how they took functional medicine to the next level because it was all very unique. I mean, even Columbia. - Yeah. - You know, Brazil, which I had been to as well. - See, we keep adding countries. - Well, I just- - See that's why- - All these great memories coming forth now. - Your 1 million miles sounds a little bit conservative to me. - Yeah, I mean, Brazil, all of the nutritionists, you know, each place had its own signature of what made it special. And I learned through them, and you know, some audiences very advanced, other audiences, this was a new thing for them. Functional medicine, what is this about? So, I really had to sculpt and connect with them in a way that the message of functional medicine would be received. And also to be thinking about potentially a translator in the back and how they might perceive the information and how do I make it clear and concise. So, yeah, that was fun. And I continue to do some of that too. - Yeah- - Which I'm glad for. - It's a huge important sharing process that seeds other information receptive individuals to create their own application areas, that transitions and hopefully transforms people's lives in positive ways. So, yeah, it's a huge, you know, huge gift, but it's also a big responsibility being on planes and traveling and being away and eating in strange places and strange hours. And I know it well, it's some sacrifice. - But also that was a teaching principle for me. How do you actually eat healthy when you're on the road? And I remember I would be posting and using some of that material, even in my lectures, talking about, what do you do when you're on a plane? How do you help to override circadian dysregulation, right? So, I think everything we do can be juiced for some nugget of information and inspiration in some way. - You're here, so I know you gained some of your information from your cats. So, what have you learned as being a steward of your contributing pets to your life's quality? - I love animals. I have had some cats and you know, it was always trying to figure out their food. Figuring out, you know, animals or connection with food and looking at that is very symbolic and also informative, right? And so, you know, I had a cat who with hyperphasia, you know, just lots of eating and had to figure out, and I felt like this was also a little micro-experience of like, how do I do, you know, cats have some of the same things that people have. It's not like they're very different, you know, body wise, yes, but maybe behavior wise there were some patterns that I could learn from. But you know, I always like to learn from nature. And even in "The Rainbow Diet" book that I just recently redid, I had to really think like, what are some of nature's principles? Whether it's cats, plants, seasons, humans, what do we all share? And I came up with four things. So, color, obviously talking about that. And the importance of color, the psychology of it, as well as the physiological aspects of phytochemicals. The second one is creativity. And I do think that creativity is a healing force. So, many people, as I started to do retreats and workshops and bring women together, especially to talk about things like emotional eating, I realized that there was a lot of stuckness and stagnation in relationship to their ability to create and express, and what does that really mean? And helping people to see that creativity needs to be part of the functional matrix, I think. The functional medicine matrix to me, every single piece of it is connected and tethered into our creative life force. So, that doesn't mean having to paint or, you know, dancing or singing, creativity can be how we think. It can be strategy. I have a friend, a good Dutch friend who is a financial planner and we had a whole conversation about the creativity behind financial planning and just numbers, you know? And how beautiful that is. So, creativity is a big one. The third one is diversity, which you've already touched upon. That was something that I came upon when I was looking into the research of phytochemicals. How it's not just getting the color red, but it's diversity within the color red, the whole spectrum of red from a deep hue of red into a lighter pink of red. And how there are different foods with different phytochemicals within that spectrum, right? So, diversity is so important not just for foods, but also for people experiences, which is why I think that the travel was very enriching. Then the fourth one is rhythm. That one I added later in life when I started to do research on circadian rhythm, pineal gland, melatonin, the endocrine circuitry, which I see as very connected to the, what I call the psycho-neuro-endocrine-immune system and that has been used in literature. But you know, at one of your PLMI meetings, I presented on the phytoneuroendocrine system, right? How these plant compounds are regulating that endocrine and neuroendocrine circuitry within us. And the beauty of that communication. - And we traditionally, as humans, were eating seasonally. We didn't have the foods, all the foods all the time like we have now. So, the circadian rhythms of the plants led to the circadian rhythms of our diet, which led to the circadian rhythms of summer versus winter in our biology. - Yeah. - Which we're kind of like confusing now because we're eating summer foods in winter and there's all sorts of interesting information that's crosstalk. - Yeah, and in fact, I remember working with Dr. Jack Kornberg in the clinic, and he would say to patients that were having oranges in the winter, he would shake his finger and say, "But you're telling your body that it's summer when it's really winter and now you're gonna store fat." So, I remember that clearly. But then I also think, you know, it's about rotation, right? - Yeah. - Not abstinence or veering away from anything in an extreme, just not overdoing something. But yeah, seasons inform us. There's the menstrual cycle, there's the seasonal cycle, there's even our month of birth cycle. You being born in March, you know, you have a cycle as well. There are aging cycles, like nature is cyclical. But I love the aspect of food in seasons and that is a topic I did present at the Annual Conference for IFM in 2024, really talking about chrono-nutrition, I feel like, and when I was studying nutrition, there was so much focus on the what of eating, but not so much on the when of eating. And now we see that even if you have healthy food at the wrong time, it can have an untoward effect. So, I do think what we're finding out in the literature on phytochemicals now, having chronobiotic effects or seeing that. Polyphenols are actually connecting into the hypothalamic region, and then again informing our entire circuitry to bring us into alignment. Because in my view, the body is very intelligent and we want that alignment. And I feel that plants taking in that intelligence helps to keep us connected. - Hmm, that's beautifully said. Wow, that's a drop the mic statement. So, life is filled with its own topography, ups and downs. That make us what we are, helps to build our resilience, our understanding that there's no such thing as the perfect day every day. So, your life, like all of us has had topography, you lost a brother. What impact has that had on you? Because he was obviously someone you knew well, he was an adult, so you had years of relationship with him. So, how has that shaped any of your thinking as it relates to how you see yourself going forward? - I feel that when we have deaths of people that are close to us, it informs our living even more. And one of the things, I don't know if you know this about me, but my grandfather was a funeral director. So, I was always around death. Like even as a child, he had a funeral home, and we lived a block away and I would go running around in this funeral home. So, I was always around death, and I, so it was never something that was very foreign, it was the process of dying that was actually probably more formidable and something to reckon with. And that probably connected me even more to this whole area of functional medicine and health, because that is where I saw the suffering. The death was that finality, but the leading up to that process was perhaps a little bit more trying. So, to me, that turned me towards, I would say more spirituality or a more of a sense of softness. So, my brother died when he was 29 in a car crash. Actually, today is his birthday. - Oh, my- - He would've been 46, so here we go, that's- - Wow. - So, I think for me, I, you know, I don't have this feeling that... I've lost him physically, but I haven't lost him in the sense of just being connected. So, what has happened for me, I would say as I got older, is the sense of connecting science with spirituality. Because so often as a scientist, what I would see, whether it was my PhD advisor or different people that I would work with in the field, they either had a very strong sense of something bigger than them, or they just kind of wrote it off as just like all science. It seemed to be very like extreme. So, a lot of religiosity and a sense of that presence or none at all. Like just, you know, nature is doing its thing, which I also see as very spiritual. So, I think for me, losing him and just seeing so much death just made me realize that death is a part of life. We have, you know, cells that are dying as we have new life, you know, we can plant certain thing. I just planted a beet that was going bad and you can already see it's sprouting new life. So, you know, we're cycles upon cycles. So, in some way I always feel, and this is my personal philosophy, that everything happens in its own right and in its own time. And that felt like it catapulted the growth of my family. - Mm-hmm. - It brought us closer. - Mm-hmm. - It showed us what was really important, you know? And so I think for me, and even now, maybe it's just a function of age, but I start to see that, you know, spirituality, the sense of how we define it in functional medicine, like meaning, purpose, connection, like really looking at what matters needs to be joined with the method of science. Like how do we actually- - It's beautiful. - Connect that? - Yeah. So, I don't want to leave your extraordinarily talented sister out of this discussion because sisters share some unique bond. I have a sister, but it's probably different as a sister-brother relationship than a sister-sister relationship. So, how about your sister? How does she have played a role in your development and your view of yourself? - I'm smiling big on this one because my sister is four years younger, but yet she feels like the older sister. She's the wise one. She was always, if I think of Ava Helen and Linus, it's almost like Ava Helen being counsel to Linus. You know, Linus probably having these big ideas, the big vision as you saw it too. And you need people to water that, those seeds of that vision. So, Ava Helen did that for Linus and supported him and grew that. And I feel like my sister Brenda did that for me. I would come home from school, I'd be teaching her on our chalkboard, Brenda, here's what I learned. Here's, you know, I would already be role playing with her. And she was very smart. She was the one that didn't need to study at school, but I was the one pouring over the books and just making sure I knew everything and I'd always go to her for feedback and counsel and guidance. And I have to say, she's pretty arty. She's in marketing, and so she always has a good spin on things from an artistic or a creative point of view too. - Well, here we are, you know, we've had the, I've had, and all of you who are privileged in watching this have had the opportunity to get to know you, Deanna Minich, at a much deeper level as the 29th recipient of the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award. I think you can all see why she is the awardee. There is no doubt here. And I think that the thing that people might ask is with high-performing individuals, do they ever really go through a period of what has been euphemistically called the imposter syndrome? A period where they think, oh, gee, do I really deserve all these accolades? You know, am I really true to what I believe? Blah, blah, blah. So, how do you deal with that as a person of celebrity in our field? - I never really had to think much about it until I was the recipient of this award because I was thinking, why me? There are so many other of my colleagues that are doing X, Y, and Z and I really had to think long and hard after I received the call from Amy Mack about receiving this award. Like, do I deserve this? This is really me? That was my reaction to her, really? Are you sure you have the right person? And maybe that says something about me in some ways and about, you know, where I need to take this. And I feel that that was really a turning point for me and what is the imposter syndrome, right? So, yes, I may have felt a little bit humbled, big time humbled by this award and what it really means, the gravitas of it for me, because I never thought that I would be a recipient of this, quite honestly. I mean, I'll be very candid with you. I feel that it has become, for me, a catalyst to do and be and serve even more actually. And you and I actually had that conversation about like, now, you know, there's no reason not to step up to a greater level of service. So, yeah, I felt it then. In some ways, you know, when I would give presentations, I would think about, you know, am I good enough or, you know, am I the right person? But, you know, one thing that has always helped me, because I had a lot of performance anxiety very early in my career, but one thing that helped me was saying to myself, it's not really about me. And I just, before I would go on stage, I would say a small, I would say invocation of like, let me be the vessel. Whatever needs to come forth and the ways that it needs to be said, let me be that conduit. So, taking me out of the picture, relieves me of the imposter syndrome because it's, you know, even though we could say that I'm the recipient of this award, it's not only me, there were so many people that went into the making of this work, yourself included, and so many other people. You named all of my family, my friends, my colleagues. I mean, it's kind of like a spider's web, right? So, if we see our lives as this web rather than as just one point, then I think we let go of that a bit. And that's actually how I even counsel and mentor some younger, I would say nutritionists and students that have come to me like they're so nervous, you know, the shiny object syndrome. Like, do I need another certification? Do I need another program? Do I need another degree? Do I need more letters after my name? And you know, so much of it is about, you know, what nourishes you? What do you feel most impassioned by? Just focus on that, don't focus on your self and you know, your identity in that way, just focus on what you love to do. And I feel like that's really what it's become for me because I wake up in the morning, what I love to do after having breakfast with my husband is I go and look at my PubMed alerts. I really do, I even did it this morning. It's like, what's new? And I just get excited by it. It's like, nobody's paying me to do that, I just want to do it. - Yeah. - So, it's, I think imposter syndrome, it's about moving out of the way and saying, okay, it's more than me. - So, you can see why we all have been so privileged to have Dr. Minich as part of our community over the last 23 years. This is an example of leadership at its best. It's where I think leadership is needing to go. This is, I would say the leadership of cooperativism, the leadership of collegiality, the leadership of example, the leadership of team building, the leadership of self-sacrifice. Those are true leaders. And you are that, and we're privileged to have you as the 29th recipient of the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Award. Thank you, Dr. Minich. - Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for being such a great role model for me too. - I take that with a great amount of respect. Thank you. - To join the conversation on this topic, visit IFM's pages on Facebook and Instagram. 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