Jennifer Jensen was, for many readers of the HIV community, a wise and compassionate woman whose knowledge of the importance of diet and its effects upon the immune system and those weakened by HIV made her the first lady of nutrition awareness. She received more e-mail than any writer who has written for A&U magazine, past or present. Perhaps her talent for entertaining and educating at the same time can be best explained by simply remembering some of her best "lines" of nutrition advice.

Food Freshness: "Frequent trips for food may be a good idea. You could get into reading labels, clipping coupons and doing other little market chores. And you can read the tabloids while you're in line--forbid you should be caught buying one!" (from October 1996)

Safe drinking water: "I often tell people to think about the safety of water and ice cubes. Picture a fresh-water pond with lilies floating, crickets cricketing and birds singing. And algae. Some people believe that you ought to eat algae. But I think that after you look at it live and in person, you won't want to." (from November 1996)

Empty eating: "Salad greens are packed with water--held tightly by fiber. Sort of like crunchy water. Eaten before a meal, a green salad is kind of like drinking a glass of water before the main event." (from December/January 1997)

Insuring nutrition: "Your health insurance, if you have it, will pay for your hospital stay and medication, plus medical treatment after your heart attack. Eventually, it will pay for your bypass operations. It could even, down the road, pay for your heart transplant. But it will not pay me one dime to tell you how to avoid all of that because insurance doesn't pay for nutritional care." (from December 1997)

Eating as Digestion: "Nutrition Power says chew your food (this is why we have teeth). Eating is not a race; slow down you BPM (Bites Per Minute). Hint: sips of 'safe water' or other fluid while chewing can help a lot, because they moisten the food, enabling good chewing behavior. Advisory: Count your chews; if you're not to thirty, you're not done. This action alone could relieve enough intestinal gas to fill an army tank; 'the passing of wind' (a.k.a. farting) would be very infrequent--and if the occasional 'poofer' should extrude, those few 'events' would smell something like rose petals. (I am making that up--it's actually more like gardenias!) When in doubt, count!" (from May, 1997)

Such were just a few of Jennifer's gems. In Jennifer was a nutrition writer who could essentially talk about taking your vitamins without first putting you to sleep. After all, so much health writing is deadly--oftentimes, it seems worse than the disease it is about. Jennifer's unusual approach to nutrition counseling was often flavored with her own brand of off-beat humor. Take for example her classic advice for including exercise in your prescription for successfully living with HIV: "One of the best disguises for malnutrition is obesity. Appearances can be so deceiving! If you're in the club, resign. You don't have to diet and get a better body; you just need to exercise and add muscle to the one you're already living in." (January 1998)

Jennifer's Health and Nutrition Awareness for persons living with HIV was always a humanistic approach to living with a disease that affected so many of her friends and colleagues. Throughout her brilliant career, she advocated for the self-reliance of thousands of HIV-positive Americans. Because empowering oneself through nutrition is what it's all about.

-David Waggoner - Publisher & Editor-in-Chief