Most founder stories in this space follow the same shape. Someone watches a documentary, has a revelation, changes everything overnight, and never looks back.

Mine took over twenty-five years and I’m not finished yet.

I think that’s the more useful story, so it’s the one I’m telling.

I grew up in St. Louis eating the way most of the Midwest ate in the eighties and nineties. Meat and potatoes. Casseroles that started with a can of condensed soup. Cheese as a food group. Dessert that came out of a box and tasted, in retrospect, mostly of shortening.

Nobody in my house thought of this as unhealthy. It was just food.

In 1997 I left for college in Tampa. It was the first time I’d had regular access to food from more than one culture at once — Cuban, Greek, Vietnamese, Thai, all of it available and all of it new. I ate everything. I was almost nineteen and thought my body was a rental car. I also consumed a lot more dairy products I’d never sought after back home; sour cream, cream cheese, and many other cheese by-products sprinkled on everything…simply because it was easy access in the cafeteria.

Somewhere in that first stretch, I got sick. Freshman year honors studies, novice rowing, and signing up for every extracurricular campus club that interested me spread me thin and quickly depleted by battery.

Not dramatically sick. That’s the part that made it hard to solve. I was rundown — foggy, heavy, tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix. The mucous-laden head cold hung around for weeks. Nobody I talked to could tell me what it was, and the general assumption was that this was just what college did to people.

As part of the university’s student programming board, we brought in a nutritionist named Deanna Latson to speak on campus.

I went, I’ll be honest, without high expectations. What I got was the first explanation of food I’d ever heard that was mechanical — not “eat your vegetables,” but an actual account of digestion as a physical process with an energy cost. How much work it takes your body to break certain things down. What happens when you’re sensitive to something and you’re eating it at every single meal, so your system never gets a clear window to reset.

She described it in a way I’ve never forgotten: it wasn’t that the sickness kept coming back. It was that it had never been able to leave.

In my case the culprit was dairy, and I was drowning in it.

She also talked about her own path — about a mentor of hers, Roe Gallo, PhD, and about watching her own father work his way off a shelf full of prescription medications by changing what was on his plate.

This was also the first talk where I realized ‘humans are the only mammals that regularly consumed milk and dairy products after weaning‘ period – a mind-blowing concept that would carry with me as crux for biological WFPB logic.

I cut dairy and red meat that week.

I felt different in three days.

I want to be careful here, because “three days” sounds like the kind of claim this industry makes constantly and rarely earns. But that’s what happened, and I think the reason is boring rather than miraculous: I had been eating something my body was actively struggling with, in volume, every day, for years. I stopped. The struggle stopped.

What followed was less dramatic and more important. For the rest of college I had energy that didn’t make sense relative to my habits. I was running on four or five hours of sleep, doing video editing into wee hours of the morning, coding in my dorm room, sitting through morning classes genuinely alert while people around me were fogged in. I wasn’t better than them at anything. I’d just removed a tax I’d been paying without knowing it.

That’s when the switch flipped — and it flipped on the biologic/scientific side, not the ethics side.

I know that’s not the fashionable answer. The animal welfare argument is serious and I don’t dismiss it. But I’d be inventing a version of myself if I claimed it was what moved me at eighteen. What moved me was that someone explained a mechanism, I tested it on myself, and the mechanism held.

I’ve been chasing that same question ever since. Not what should I eat. Why does it work.

I graduated in 2001 and went into the workforce. “Internet marketing” and all things it encapsulated into the golden age of the internet; web design, SEO, creating banner ad graphics in Photoshop to support our humble internal team of marketers. Oh, and after work was disciplined enough to have a side hustle creating websites for local business.

The eating held, mostly. No dairy. No red meat. Chicken and fish stayed.

Two things are worth saying about this stretch, because most origin stories skip it.

First: it was genuinely hard to eat this way, then. Plant-based eating was barely on the radar in the Tampa Bay area in the early 2000s. There was no aisle for it. There was no app. Explaining your diet at a work dinner in 2003 meant being the difficult one at the table, every time, and either developing a short answer or accepting that dinner was going to be about you for ten minutes. I got very good at the short answer.

Second: nothing happened. For seven years I sat still. I wasn’t researching, wasn’t progressing, wasn’t chipping away at anything. I had found a level that worked and I stayed at it while my career took everything I had.

I don’t think that stretch was a failure. I think it’s the normal shape of this. People imagine change as a line going up. It’s mostly plateaus with occasional steps, and the plateaus are where you actually live.

Speaking of shape, I was petrified of taking a sedentary desk job after running around in circles at school. With little time for exercise, I felt my food choices helped me maintain a healthy baseline weight during my plateau era.

Around 2008 I dropped chicken (and skipped turkey at future Thanksgivings).

There wasn’t a moment. No documentary, no diagnosis, no scene I can hand you. It was accumulation — I’d been reading for years by then, and at some point the case for keeping it got thin enough that keeping it felt like inertia rather than a decision.

Fish stayed. Fish is still, as of this writing, on its way out. More on that below, because I’d rather tell you than have you find out.

I started VeganMint around 2012, and the honest reason is that I had two things at once: a genuine obsession with this material, and a professional skill set in SEO and web design that meant I could actually get it in front of people.

This was before “influencer” was a job title. There was no playbook and the creator economy was just in its infancy. Just authentic passion for educating others, and cataloging my recipes.

The name came from the herbs. I cook with fresh herbs constantly — mint especially — and I liked that it sounded fresh rather than clinical.

The premise was translation. The vegan products were arriving on shelves and most people had no idea they existed or what to do with them. So VeganMint was about showing you that the comfort food you grew up on was still available to you. Same dish, different components. You don’t have to give up the thing you love; you have to rebuild it.

It worked. The site ranked, the following grew on Twitter and Facebook, and eventually brands started shipping me products to feature in recipes.

It ran hot for about four years.

Then my job ate it. Jumping into a startup as employee #1, I spent the better part of a decade climbing inside it, frequently at fifty to sixty hours a week.

That’s the whole explanation. There’s no dramatic collapse, no falling-out, no burnout story worth dressing up. I was running a demanding role at fifty-plus hours a week and VeganMint was the thing that got cut, the way the unpaid thing always gets cut.

I never stopped following the field. I read the whole time. I just stopped publishing, and the site went quiet for years.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, and I helped him through hospice during COVID. He was stage four. There was no version where nutrition was going to change the outcome.

What I thought about constantly through that period was timing. Not whether food could have saved him at stage four. Whether any of it might have mattered thirty years earlier, when nobody in our family — including me, for the first eighteen years of my life — had any framework for thinking about it at all.

I can’t answer that. Nobody can answer that about a specific person or diagnosis.

But it hardened something for me about when this information needs to reach people. The whole architecture of how we handle health in this country is built around intervening at the end. The eating question comes up last, if it comes up at all, usually after the prescriptions.

That’s backwards, and it’s most of why this site exists again.

Earlier this year I completed the Whole Food Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies.

I went in expecting to confirm what I already knew. What I got was a correction.

For fourteen years I had been running a site organized around animal vs. plant. That’s the axis VeganMint version one lived on, and it’s the axis most of this conversation still lives on. Get the animal products out, and you’ve won.

But a vegan cookie is still a cookie. Vegan cheese is an ultra-processed food with a marketing department. I’d built a whole platform on a substitution model, and the substitution model was solving a category problem while leaving the actual problem largely intact.

The stronger axis, the one the evidence keeps pointing at, is whole vs. processed.

That reframing is what brought the site back, and it’s what makes this iteration different from the last one. The recipes here now lean away from the packaged vegan products I once celebrated, and away from extracted oils, olive oil included. Whole nuts and seeds stay; the oil pressed out of them doesn’t. That’s a Campbell-framework distinction and it’s one I got wrong for years.

I am not fully whole food plant-based. I’m close, and I’m still moving.

Dairy and red meat: gone since 1997. Chicken: gone since 2008. Fish: still on the plate, less all the time, on its way out.

By any strict definition, that makes me a pescatarian running a site called VeganMint. I’ve thought hard about whether to say so on my own website and concluded that not saying so would be the single most damaging thing I could do here.

Because the reason I’m telling you is that it took me 25+ years and I still got enormous benefit the entire way. Not at the finish line. At every single step.

That is the actual finding. Not “go all in or don’t bother.” The relationship between whole plant foods and outcomes is a dose-response one — more is better, across the range. It’s a dial, not a switch. Every notch counts, including the first one, including the ones you take fifteen years apart.

I’m pushing 50! Most of my friends are watching a parent get sick, and in almost none of those conversations does anyone raise diet. It’s the last thing considered, if it’s considered at all.

Meanwhile the research keeps accumulating, and (slowly) the clinical posture is starting to shift. More physicians are willing to put food on the table as an intervention rather than an afterthought.

So this site has two jobs.

For people my age: the mechanisms, the citations, and the practical version. Written for someone smart who’s tired of being handed either a diet plan or a lecture, and who wants to know what’s actually established and what’s still contested.

For people much younger: what I wish someone had handed me at eighteen — which, as it happens, someone did. That was the entire difference for me. I’d like to be that for someone else. My experience with nutritionist Deanna Latson was her way of ‘paying it forward’ to other students, and I consider that I’m extending that offer as my way of ‘paying it forward’ to others.

And for everyone: this is a judgment-free zone with a point of view.

Those aren’t in conflict. I’m not neutral — I think the evidence is clear and I’ll say so. But I’m not interested in purity contests, and I have no standing to run one. Come as you are. Eat mostly whole foods: legumes, leafy greens, fruit, vegetables, whole grains. Make the best decision available to you today, with the time and money and energy you actually have. Then make a slightly better one tomorrow.

You wouldn’t put regular gas in a car you spent eighty thousand dollars on. You’ve got one body, and there’s no trading it in.