AgainstThe Grain Nutrition


Melissa's Background

Melissa Diane Smith is a leading authority on how to use food as medicine for a wide variety of health conditions and how to protect against health-degrading genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs, and pesticides. She is the author of the cutting-edge book Going Against GMOs and the internationally recognized author of the groundbreaking Going Against the Grain: How Reducing and Avoiding Grains Can Revitalize Your Health and the companion guide Gluten Free Throughout the Year. She also is the the coauthor of the national bestseller Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance. For close to three decades, she has been educating the public about topics that are vital to understand to protect health but aren’t covered by the mainstream media.

Melissa is a holistic nutrition expert who specializes in:

  • grain-related conditions, including gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, other autoimmune diseases, and grain allergies and addictions;
  • sugar- and insulin-related health conditions, including excess weight, metabolic syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, diabetes and prediabetes;
  • the health risks of unnatural, laboratory created genetically modified foods.

She coaches and counsels clients long distance over the phone and gives nutrition presentations to healthcare professional and mainstream audiences throughout the United States and Canada.

Melissa has spoken at numerous conferences, including the 2nd Annual Health and Human Rights Summit, Resist and Regenerate Our Communities Summit, American Academy of Physician Assistants annual conference, the "Polycystic Ovary Syndrome: The Perfect Endocrine Storm" conference, Natural Products Expo West, the Nutritional Pathways to Health and Healing Conference for First Nations People in Edmonton, Canada, and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

In recent years, she has given presentations on the health effects of genetically modified foods (also known as genetically modified organisms or GMOs) and on how to buy Regenerative Organic food for optimal health. She was trained by the Institute for Responsible Technology to speak about GMOs and served as the Speaker and the Director of Education for the GMO Free Project of Tucson from 2011-2013. In May 2013, she gave the keynote rallying speech before roughly a thousand people at the Tucson March Against Monsanto. In 2016, she co-founded Toxin-Free Pima County and serves as one of its speakers.

Melissa is a veteran health journalist and was a regular contributor for the nationally distributed magazine Better Nutrition from 2008 - 2021. Her work as a nutritionist and author has been written about in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Woman's World, First for Women magazine, New Zealand Woman's Weekly, and on WebMD and Celiac.com.

Melissa combines the investigative research skills she honed in journalism school with her nutrition training and more than 28 years of clinical nutrition experience to stay up to date on health and nutrition research and provide clients and readers with timely nutrition information and personalized nutrition advice. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Arizona, earned a diploma in nutrition and Graduate of the Year honors from the American Academy of Nutrition, and received advanced nutrition training from the Designs for Health Institute.


Press Kit
For media, conference planners or others seeking information about Melissa

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