By Ron Karten
Smoke Signals staff writer

Mary Yuse-Miller is a dietitian, nutrition coach, presenter focusing on corporate wellness and, since October, the Grand Ronde Tribe’s dietitian.
With March being the American Dietetic Association’s National Nutrition Month, Yuse-Miller has been busy promoting this year’s slogan, “Nutrition from the ground up,” as a basis for nutrition talks tailored to different audiences.
Most recently on Wednesday, Feb. 17, her subject, “Color Your Day Energetic,” provided insights into exercise, as well as eating well and the value of eating locally produced food to the Grand Ronde community.
Earlier in the month, her presentation focused on the needs of an AARP group in Lincoln City, and the eating and exercise challenges of an older community.
“Interaction is the vital part,” she says at each of her presentations, and in an interview at a McMinnville coffee shop, where the only thing she consumed was water.
“I want to find out the areas where people can most benefit, and where they most want results,” Yuse-Miller says. “I concentrate on the first thing that’s going to make the difference.”
She mentions skipped breakfasts as an example of activities that will make an almost immediate difference. That is, she adds, it is important not to skip breakfast because it tends to cause people to overeat later in the morning.
Everybody has his or her own special issues, Yuse-Miller says, and in tailoring her recommendations she focuses on providing specific answers for specific problems for specific patients.
She had a mother and child in recently, she says, and the child had some food intolerances. It was important, on the one hand, for Yuse-Miller to recommend places to buy special foods.
“We talked about labels, but we also talked about how we can help each other,” she says.
Another part of the effort was to include the Tribe’s pre-school cook in the plan. “The mother might begin buying food for the pre-school cook as a way to help solve the issue” at school as well as at home.
One part of the long-running national health care debate has focused on prevention and that also has been a longstanding focus of Tribal health care efforts. Likewise, Yuse-Miller emphasizes the prevention end of the nutrition puzzle.
“It may be easier than getting stuck in the insurance maze,” she says. “And the Tribe is very open to alternative therapies -- using food and exercise before drugs, for example.”
For any of her advice to be useful, she says, it is very important that she be trusted as an information provider. And in that regard, she is open about her life and interests.
Thin and fit today, Yuse-Miller commiserates with people who are overweight because when she left Eastern Washington University years ago, she was 30 pounds heavier.
She turned to more vegetarian foods. She continued a long life filled with exercise that has included cross country skiing and triathlon training. She added yoga to her regimen.
“Yoga naturally slowed my eating down,” she says. “I started taking more time to enjoy it, to taste the food.”
Over the years, Yuse-Miller also has learned and taught the role that emotions play in overeating, even with seemingly unrelated issues.
“I used to have an unrealistic list of jobs to do during the day, and thought if I could rush through my meals. … What happens then, though, is the brain doesn’t get the message that you’ve had enough calories, so you keep on eating.”
Yuse-Miller lives with her husband, Keith, a landscape contractor, in a log home in the Sheridan foothills. Their mixed breed dog, Josie, is named after Wyatt Earp’s wife. The name comes from her and Keith’s longstanding interest in Wild West history.
She has long been active in the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Sheridan, where she sings during services and is part of the fundraising committee.
She has worked as a nutritionist for more than 20 years at nursing home and assisted living facilities, including Rogue Valley Manor in Medford.
And she mentions that perhaps her interest in nutrition comes from her father, once a Trappist monk in Utah, who ultimately had to leave the order because “the greasy food they served there made him sick.”
Today, feel free to contact Yuse-Miller at the clinic or through her business e-mail mary.yusemiller@grandronde.org for quick questions.
Better yet, she says, make an appointment (503-879-2002) for an hour appointment and a thorough evaluation with personally tailored recommendations.

Photo by Michelle Alaimo