Brenda Winiarski
When we first held our daughter in our arms, my husband and I became a family. She looked just like the Gerber baby – chubby and the picture of health – and we were walking on air. Six days later we fell, and fell hard. We received a phone call from the Inherited Metabolic Disease Clinic at Westchester Medical Center. Her newborn screening tests had indicated that there was a problem, and we needed to come in right away. It was a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, but someone, we were told, would be waiting for us – never a good sign. We were told that our baby had phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic metabolic disorder, and that she would need to be on a medically restricted diet for life – or she would suffer brain Read more...
Malathy Ramanujam
Malathy Ramanujam has a son, born 1984, with Homocystinuria. She moved to the United States in 1989 and started formulating various baking mixes to prepare meals for her son. Since 1994, she has been teaching families with similar metabolic condition how to prepare special meals. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bachelor of Arts (Liberal Studies major) from Cal State, Dominguez Hills in spring 1999 and pursued a Master's degree in Nutritional Science in the Fall of 2000. She started her company, Taste Connections in 2003 with just two kinds of mixes, TC-Bread Mix and TC-Multibaking mix. When she started her company she had 4 main goals- to make Just Add Water kind of mixes that are easy to use; Read more...
Virginia Schuett
Virginia Schuett, MS, RD, started working at the Waisman Center for PKU in Wisconsin before she founded National PKU News in 1989. She published the National PKU News newsletter three times yearly for subscribers in more than eighteen countries. This newsletter was the key organizing tool of the PKU community for decades, and published countless scientific articles, recipes, and stories of people living with PKU. She is also the author of several books, including Low Protein Cookery for PKU and Apples to Zucchini: A Collection of Favorite Low-Protein Recipes, with Dorothy Corry. Read more about her work with PKU here.
Amber Gibson
My name is Amber Gibson. I attended culinary school where I met my husband. We both graduated in 2010. I graduated with a pastry arts degree and I have done some cake decorating in the past. I worked as a cook and supervisor at a restaurant called Champions in a downtown Indianapolis Marriott hotel for eight years. While working for Champions, it gave me opportunities to grow as a chef by helping design the menus, organize and prepare food for parties, and placing orders. While I have had special dietary requests from guests of the restaurant, nothing would challenge me more than the special diet necessary for my daughter. Samantha was born in June of 2015 with Homocystinuria. Similarly, to PKU, she has to have a protein restricted diet. Read more...