About Trisha

Trisha Howell MSH, RD, LD/N, IFMCP

Trisha is a Boston native who relocated to Florida for sunshine, beaches, and palm trees. Her passion for nutrition ignited after the birth of her first son realizing there wasn’t valuable nutrition resources available for new Moms wanting to raise a healthy child. This was no easy feat since the internet didn’t exist 28 years ago! This fueled her to enroll in a nutrition class and was hooked! She left the world of fashion design and embarked on a new career with endless possibilities.

She went on and earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in clinical nutrition and registered dietitian didactic training ready to heal others with food as medicine.

Yet, life was to pivot once again when her son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at eight years of age. This unexpected event inspired her even more to learn the “why” because the only answer provided by the medical staff was we have no idea but “there is hope that there would be a cure in his lifetime”. This unsettling response left only one option, find the healthiest solution beyond carb counting and insulin injections for her son and others! Destiny would soon reveal that this new path would ultimately lead her to a career of healing the gut microbiome.

Her continual passion and pioneering led to multiple opportunities and collaborations in health promotion and prevention with the University of Florida, Jacksonville Jaguars, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health, National Diabetes Prevention Program, nonprofits, and multi-county school systems implementing programs she created for youth in urban, rural, and underserved communities faced with high rates of childhood obesity and diabetes.

Still in search for answers, she discovered functional medicine in 2012, a root-cause approach to chronic illness, and enrolled in a highly specialized physician training with the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM); the gold standard in the industry. Upon completion in 2014, she became the Manager of Nutrition Services and founding dietitian for the world’s first functional medicine center at Cleveland Clinic collaborating under the leadership of Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Patrick Hanaway, and Dr. Dirk Parvus. In 2017, she became board certified in Functional Medicine with IFM.

Her journey continues today in private practice as CEO/founder of Smart Wellness^® leading with love, purpose, and passion serving the needs of patients that are in perpetual search of finding someone to help them understand their digestive, autoimmune, or cancer-related chronic inflammatory illnesses associated with their gut microbiome as traditional medicine model fails to have the answers. She becomes their functional medicine CSI detective and partners with them to get to the root cause of their illness to achieve optimal health and wellness. Additionally, she also consults with various companies and provides functional medicine nutrition presentations and clinical support to physicians, clinics, corporations and the community on a variety of topics relating to the prevention of diet and lifestyle related disease using evidence based-science.

She serves on the board at the Center Achievement with the distinct vision to help support the nutritional needs of today’s families by providing innovative holistic health and wellness approaches to the complex health problems often faced by at-risk youth and their families. She also is a volunteer for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) helping families of newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetic youth and adults understand the journey ahead while helping to connect and support them. She is also an ArtSmart World Ambassador for ArtSmart World Foundation whose mission is supporting and advocating for early childhood arts education.

She enjoys outdoor adventures of hiking, biking, zipping, and traveling to beautiful nature-filled destinations with her husband and two millennial sons.

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