CHANGE IS COMING

JUANA MANAHAN-YUPANGCO believes in the healing power of knowing what you eat, sharing that knowledge and your blessings with others, and the timelessness of sticking to your passions

- CAROL RH MALASIG

An interest in the arts, a solid experience in publishing, and a healthier nation as her advocacy. Juana Manahan-Yupangco is many different things rolled into one beautiful woman with a huge heart.

Her non-profit organization— Mesa ni Misis—has been around for a couple of years now, promoting a healthier, plant-based diet for Filipinos. It’s a diet that heals, nourishes, and won’t break the bank.

“In 2016, my husband [Rick] had a health scare,” Juana shares when asked when she started her plant-based journey. “It was a cholesterol-related issue and my husband was ordered to take meds. We didn’t want to so we went on an all-organic diet,” she said.

This helped her husband’s cholesterol levels but Juana noticed how expensive it was to stick to an organic diet in the Philippines. Around the same time, their driver who’s been working for her family for 30 years contracted diabetes due to an unhealthy lifestyle.

“We thought we were going to lose him,” Juana says. “But he changed his diet to mostly local vegetables and he’s back to being in great shape. He drove me here today,” she adds while getting her makeup done for the shoot. He didn’t go fully-organic but he did switch to more local vegetables, mostly leafy greens.

It got Juana thinking about what we have here locally and how her helpers would make healthy food and soups for her back when she was breastfeeding her newborn son. “There has to be something there.”

LOCAL IS THE WAY TO GO