About Healing Gourmet
At Healing Gourmet, we combine the power of nutrition science with real food people actually want to eat — so you can prevent disease, boost energy, and live your healthiest life.
Before you decide whether Healing Gourmet is right for you, ask yourself:
Do you want to prevent — and even reverse — disease, so your later years are spent traveling, staying active, and enjoying time with the people you love?
Do you want to shed excess fat and maintain a healthy weight, without giving up the foods you actually enjoy?
Do you want to feed your family real, nourishing food without spending every dollar at the store or every hour in the kitchen?
Do you want to use the healing power of food to slow the aging process — keeping your mind sharp, your vision clear, and your body strong?
If you answered yes to even one of these, you’re in the right place.
Who We Are
My name is Kelley Herring, founder of Healing Gourmet.
I’m a biochemist by training — with graduate work in immunology and biochemistry and an M.B.A. — and I’ve spent more than 25 years at the intersection of nutrition science and the kitchen.
Healing Gourmet exists because I believe those two worlds, rigorous research and real food people actually want to eat, belong together, not in separate camps.
My Story: Why Healing Gourmet Exists
My interest in healing started the day I got a Fisher Price doctor’s kit as a five-year-old. I immediately began checking my parents’ temperature, monitoring my sister’s “vital signs,” and diagnosing imaginary ailments. From that day on, I told anyone who’d listen that I was going to be a doctor. Twelve years later, I was enrolled in the pre-med program at Florida State University, majoring in biology and chemistry.
Before college, I barely thought about my health. I was a varsity cheerleader and gymnast, and I competed in dance almost daily as a teenager. I had energy to spare.
Then, at the very beginning of my sophomore year, everything changed.
A crushing, unrelenting exhaustion came over me — I could barely lift myself out of bed. I assumed it was the stress of a rigorous pre-med course load. Then the symptoms turned physical: what started as a sore throat progressed into open sores that trailed the entire length of my esophagus. I needed a numbing spray just to eat without crying. My weight dropped to 85 pounds.
I did what anyone would do: I went to doctors. More than a dozen of them.
I was put on antivirals, antibiotics, corticosteroids.
I was diagnosed, in turn, with strep throat, hay fever, and eventually “chronic fatigue syndrome” — which usually just means a doctor has run out of answers but needs to write something down.
Not one of those doctors — not a single one out of more than a dozen — ever asked me what I was eating.
Looking back, I understand why. Most physicians are trained to manage symptoms, not investigate root causes, and most receive only minimal formal education on nutrition’s role in disease.
So I did the only thing left to do:
I started treating myself like a case study.
What had actually changed? I was skipping my mother’s home-cooked meals for vending-machine snacks and processed food, living on caffeine through the week, and drinking beer most weekends.
I cut all of it — the processed food, the bread, the alcohol.
Within weeks, the sores began to heal. My energy returned. A few simple dietary changes had done what more than a dozen doctors and a fistful of prescriptions could not.
Years later,
real testing confirmed the cause.
A nutritionally oriented physician finally ran real testing and confirmed what I’d found through trial and error: sensitivities to gluten, yeast, chemical preservatives, and malt.
To this day, more than a few sips of beer still brings the sores back.
It would be years after that, working with a geneticist, before I understood the deeper mechanism tying it all together: amines, compounds concentrated in exactly those foods.
I finished my degree in biology and chemistry — but I no longer wanted to spend my life treating symptoms with an endless rotation of drugs. I wanted to help people understand their own bodies well enough that they’d rarely need a doctor at all. So I set out to bring Thomas Alva Edison’s vision to life:
The doctor of the future will give no medication but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
— Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931)
I went on to graduate work in immunology and biochemistry, then an M.B.A. In my final class — entrepreneurship — I wrote my thesis on a collision I saw coming: an aging Baby Boomer population, skyrocketing rates of chronic disease, and a class of compounds that had only just become possible to study — phytonutrients. Technology like HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) was finally giving researchers the ability to identify the thousands of bioactive compounds in food — not just vitamins and minerals — and prove their mechanisms of action in the body. For the first time, I saw a way to combine my scientific training with my lifelong love of cooking.
So I built what didn’t exist yet: a database connecting foods, their nutrient compounds, and the specific health conditions they influenced, filled in study by study through research pulled directly from the National Library of Medicine.
That thesis became the blueprint. Healing Gourmet was founded to bring it to life: combining nutritional biochemistry with real culinary skill to help people heal through food.
I partnered with the Moffitt Cancer Center, working on a grant for “Phyte Breast Cancer,” an education initiative on the phytonutrients shown to help reduce cancer risk.
I sent my manuscript to hundreds of publishers and got a yes from the one whose books had taught me the most: McGraw-Hill.
McGraw-Hill published my four-book series: Eat to Fight Cancer, Eat to Beat Diabetes, Eat to Lower Cholesterol, and Eat to Boost Fertility.
Eat to Fight Cancer even made a cameo on Walter White’s nightstand in Breaking Bad, sitting at his bedside in Episode 5 as he faced his own cancer diagnosis.
Not long after I received the book deal, I was offered my own show on The Healthy Living Channel. Along the way, I ran into another gap: the USDA’s food database simply didn’t include many of the newer, healthier ingredients I was using and recommending in my own recipes. So I built my own — the foundation of what is now our Best Brands™ database.
That same period put me in direct collaboration with doctors from Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Cleveland Clinic, and the University of California, as well as representatives from major public health organizations and Michelin-star chefs. I have deep respect for the individuals who contributed to that work. It also gave me a close, sometimes uncomfortable view of how much mainstream nutrition guidance is shaped by outdated science, institutional inertia, and misaligned incentives — rather than what actually helps people get well.
Everything I built in those early years — the research-to-recipe database, the food-as-medicine framework, the conviction that healing starts with understanding your own biology rather than a one-size-fits-all diagnosis — became the foundation of Healing Gourmet. Years later, it would also become the foundation for Meal Genius®, the personalized nutrition platform I built to take this same science further.
I never got my six-month follow-up appointment. I didn’t need it. I’d already found my answer — and I’ve spent every year since making sure other people don’t have to wait six months, or a decade, to find theirs.
Your Fate is On Your Plate
In most cases, your risk for chronic disease has far less to do with family history than it does with the decisions you make every day — the foods you eat, the toxins you’re exposed to, and how you move, rest, and manage stress. While chronic conditions look very different on the surface, most trace back to the same five underlying drivers:
Inflammation
Glycation
Oxidation
Depletion
Toxification
Every one of these can be influenced by what you put on your plate. That’s the foundation of everything we build at Healing Gourmet — and, later, of Meal Genius®, the personalized nutrition platform I developed to take this same science further.
Turning Research Into Recipes™
Our approach is simple: rigorous nutrition research is always the starting ingredient.
We start with the science — how specific compounds in food affect the body and disease risk — and combine it with real culinary skill to create recipes and meal plans that deliver on both taste and nutrition. Over more than two decades, that’s meant dozens of books, free guides, and hundreds of articles built to help people achieve real, lasting health with the least sacrifice and the most enjoyment possible.
We take that responsibility seriously. Food isn’t just calories — it’s information that shapes gene expression, fuels your cells, supports your immune system, and drives hormonal balance. Eating well is one of the most powerful levers you have for your health, and we don’t take that lightly.
Eight principles guide everything we create at Healing Gourmet:
- 1. We Prefer Mother Nature’s Packaging — Whole foods, not GMOs or ultra-engineered “Frankenfoods.”
- 2. We Pass on Pesticides — Reducing exposure to estrogen-mimicking chemicals while supporting biodiversity.
- 3. We Go Wild for Fish — Only wild, sustainably harvested seafood, to limit mercury and PCB exposure and protect marine ecosystems.
- 4. We Pick Pastures, Not Pens — Humanely raised, grass-fed and pastured meat, poultry, and eggs, with fewer growth hormones and better fat profiles.
- 5. We Keep Chemicals Out — No artificial additives, preservatives, sweeteners, colors, or hormones.
- 6. We Forgo Fake Fats and Optimize Omegas — No trans fats or fat substitutes; only healthy fats in the right ratios.
- 7. We Cook for Blood Sugar Balance — Every recipe is gluten-free and low-glycemic, including our desserts, which use natural, zero-glycemic sweeteners.
- 8. We Have Refined Taste, Not Refined Foods — No ultra-processed ingredients, ever — because protecting your health and protecting the planet go hand in hand.
These principles aren’t a restriction. They’re how we make sure the right choice is also the delicious one.
Meal Genius®
Everything I learned building Healing Gourmet — and everything I lived through in my own health journey — eventually led me to build Meal Genius®, a personalized nutrition platform that takes this same food-as-medicine philosophy and makes it fully individualized: adjusting for your specific triggers, labs, goals, and preferences, and extending it into clinical practice through MealRx™ for physicians and functional medicine providers.
Healing Gourmet and Meal Genius share the same foundation — food as medicine, backed by real science — built for two different parts of your journey: one to educate and inspire, the other to personalize and execute.
Work With Kelley
I also work directly with a limited number of organizations and individuals each year through corporate consulting and 1:1 coaching.