Vanessa Rissetto, a registered dietitian and NBC’s “Today” contributor, is pushing Culina Health’s remote nutrition support and telling lawmakers that food debates should stop—because chronic disease and health literacy gaps are hurting people far beyond polit
Vanessa Rissetto doesn’t raise her voice when she talks about food. But when she describes how Americans argue over it—on cable, online, and now in policy—her tone shifts.
On Capitol Hill, the registered dietitian tries to cool what she calls divisive rhetoric around meals. She’s doing it with the urgency of a working clinician and the lived pressure of illness: in May 2023. Rissetto was diagnosed with breast cancer. and her treatment included 14 rounds of chemotherapy and 20 rounds of radiation.
She also carries a clearer message about what she believes is being lost in the noise. “Can you not be divisive around this thing that is so important?. Because many people don’t know,” she said. “The country is already divided. People are literally dying. chronic diseases on the rise.” She added: “What is the one thing that we all do as a collective thing?. We all eat.”.
The push comes as the political temperature on health and nutrition rises. Rissetto is now part of a broader American health care circuit that includes the dietary agenda being pursued by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose approach seeks to “revolutionize dietary behavior.”
Rissetto’s mission is rooted in numbers that don’t care about talking points. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly half of all Black adults in America battle a form of cardiovascular disease. Rissetto. who is Black. is focused on improving those outcomes by offering nutritional options that are easier to access for more people.
She shares health tips on NBC’s “Today” show and, alongside her work on Capitol Hill, she co-founded Culina Health. The company was named among Time magazine’s most influential companies of 2026.
Culina Health is built around connecting patients with providers for remote dietary support. Rissetto and co-founder Tamar Samuels launched the virtual health service in February 2020, just before the pandemic reshaped how care was delivered. That July, the company saw its first patient.
A dietitian drawn into a louder fight
Rissetto’s rise in the public conversation has been fueled in part by her relaxed style on national television. During a “Today” segment in January hosted by Jenna Bush Hager and comedian Matt Rogers, she recommended animal protein over plants.
“I’m not mad at you if you want to get it from plants, but when we get it from animals, we tend to stay full for longer,” she told the hosts.
Last July, she also pushed back on a common claim that fruit is too sugary. “Please, be quiet,” Rissetto said jokingly to the “Today” hosts.
But in interviews, she has warned that the political framing of food can do real harm—especially when public understanding of health basics is already fragile.
“There are a nationwide lack of health literacy,” she said, and the politicization of food makes her “nervous.”
Her concern isn’t abstract. According to the National Library of Medicine, nine out of 10 adults struggle with health literacy.
Rissetto’s own family story makes the gap tangible. She used her father, Michel Arteaga, to describe how people can be smart and still be missing the nutrition context.
“My father is the smartest person I know. He is a mechanical and a chemical engineer. He speaks seven different languages,” Rissetto said. Yet she described a disconnect: he doesn’t fully understand nutrition.
“He thinks he’ll lose weight if he eats a salad without dressing or drinks more pressed fruit juice. but he doesn’t understand the nutritional benefits behind his choices. ” she said. Her point is that patients don’t just need generic guidance—they need personalized plans that account for how their bodies respond.
That personalization is central to Culina Health, which works with over 90 providers and more than 10,000 patients. Still, reaching people remains a challenge, and Rissetto keeps coming back to the same practical barrier: not every American gets a fair shot at speaking with a dietitian.
SNAP and policy strain
Food disputes are also playing out in federal programs tied to nutrition. Marion Nestle. a New York University nutrition professor emerita and an expert on American food policy. said the current political environment has led the Trump administration to enforce stricter conditions on billions of dollars in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding.
Nestle said the government is doing everything it possibly can to purge people from receiving SNAP aid: “Most people on SNAP are White, but White people look at SNAP as being something for poor Black people, and there’s very little sympathy for poverty.”
Rissetto has been engaging this broader landscape not from a distance but from her role as both educator and clinician. Her focus is on moving people away from conflict and toward care.
“The detection deepened her mission to broaden entry to care,” the company’s story is now closely tied to her personal recovery.
Before breast cancer entered her life, Rissetto was already pursuing the path that brought her to where she is now. In 2004, she decided to pursue her work in medicine after she sought a dietitian. She trained as a dietitian and then worked for five years at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. New York City.
“I believe in the science, I want to work the science, I want to understand the science,” Rissetto said. “And then I want to impart that on other people.”
What her approach looks like day to day
Rissetto’s message for patients is built from straightforward choices and access to guidance that can “help people cut through the muck.” She encourages patients to cut back on alcoholic beverages and points to food access as an everyday problem.
She also favors small, achievable changes—for example, purchasing frozen fruits and vegetables from the dollar store.
But the heart of her argument is that health literacy isn’t just an issue of willpower. It’s an issue of time, language, and support. Rissetto says she’s able to read studies, understand what they show, and have real dialogue with her physicians.
“I saw – because I can read studies, I understand things, I can have real dialogue with my physicians – that I am well,” she said. “I don’t think many people get that chance.”
That’s why her work keeps landing back on the same line: whether lawmakers argue over diets or cable hosts trade opinions, people still have to eat—and they need nutrition help that reflects their actual lives.
Rissetto says the focus can’t just be on who is “poor and brown and live in rural communities,” because health consequences don’t stay inside any one category.
“That is the reason why I believe, like, you really have to focus on the food because it’s not just hitting people who are poor and brown and live in rural communities,” she said. “It’s all, it’s everybody in between.”
Vanessa Rissetto Culina Health NBC Today Capitol Hill health literacy SNAP Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cardiovascular disease breast cancer nutrition policy remote dietary support