Daphne Oz – author, advocate, speaker, columnist and co-host of ABC's brand-spanking-new The Chew – can pinpoint the moment she decided to pursue her dream of convincing people to make health their priority, but not their obsession. It happened one day at Dwight-Englewood High School, during her junior year, when her father, Dr. Mehmet Oz, came to school and delivered a speech.

"The line that stands out, and my classmates can recount this for you even now, was that eating a piece of white bread or a cracker was the equivalent to your blood stream of eating a candy bar," Oz says. This is because of the quickness with which the body accesses the sugars in food products with no fiber, no protein and no real fat attached.

The Cliffside Park native speed-talks, laughs often and drives home her message. "After the talk, he saw not only the kids' responses, but also how strongly the parents responded. For the next week, he fielded calls at his office," Oz says. "It was shocking to our whole family that, even in areas where you'd think information would trickle down, from frequent doctors visits or access to the Internet or just general knowledge, that certain foods are better for you than others. There are ways to prioritize healthy eating, how little people actually knew about what was going into their bodies and how it was affecting them inside.

Thinking about this was the catalyst for what Oz does now.

"I'd always been the person people would come to. 'Oh, I feel like I have a cold coming on. What vitamin should I take?' or 'I have a big game tomorrow. What should I be eating?" Oz has had an interesting melting pot at home of Eastern and Western medicines, of conventional and complementary care – her mother is a reiki master and her grandmother is a nutritional expert. "I had all this information at my hands, and my friends would use me as their guru."

Smart, ambitious and determined, the teen Oz convinced Dwight-Englewood to provide better, healthier lunch options. And so it all began …sort of. Though she knew of what she spoke, putting it into practice in her own life proved to be the next challenge, as Oz wrestled with weight demons through high school. She eventually shed 30-plus pounds and, while applying to colleges, started to write The Dorm Room Diet. As Oz explains it, after having endured every fad diet and having tried to lose inches in a "fast and easy" way, she discovered that "there is no such thing." The Dorm Room Diet addressed how to achieve one's weight and health goals, and it did so in the voice and context of someone going through exactly what the reader is experiencing – and in the hopes of giving her generation a fighting chance to make healthier choices that would last a lifetime.

The Dorm Room Diet climbed the bestseller list in 2006, and Oz – who graduated from Princeton University in 2008 – found herself in demand as a speaker on college campuses. She took her message across the country and, at the same time, contemplated her options for next steps. Oz blogged for Oprah.com and other media outlets. And then, earlier this year, she landed an audition for The Chew. "Something clicked," she says. Oz believes she won her seat at the table there via a combination of factors: her relatability; the fact that she knows food, eats food, likes food, has struggled with it and even had it get the better of her before finding the right balance; her wealth of experience; and, yes, that brand name.

Oz says that her dad and her mom, Lisa, are "over-the-moon excited" by her success. But she also recognizes the cynics who grouse that her father's fame gave her a leg up.

"I ignore it, but you have to acknowledge why they say that stuff," Oz says, no anger in her voice. "My only response is that I have worked hard and everything I talk about is from an authentic experience of my own. I wouldn't have written The Dorm Room Diet or talked to students if I hadn't struggled with weight myself. More importantly than any of that, from a fiscal perspective, I would really hope ABC wouldn't take a risk on me if they didn't think I could carry my weight on the show. And I hope people will give me a chance to prove that to them."

And that brings us to The Chew. ABC launched the talk show in late September, controversially jettisoning the iconic soap opera All My Children, and it features Oz, chefs Mario Batali and Michael Symon, Top Chef's Carla Hall and entertaining expert Clinton Kelly as hosts. The program's stated aim is to focus on food from every conceivable angle. Each day, for example, The Chew crew will offer up two or more simple recipes, including ones that take advantage of local ingredients, that play to the skill sets of their trained chefs and that leverage Oz's knack for what she calls "health-ifying" recipes.

That means maintaining taste while still getting as many health benefits as possible, like paring down on fat, without losing the sensation and the emotional feeling that food evokes. "All of us at The Chew want that to be our number-one priority. So what we're trying to do is encourage people who are like I was a couple of years ago, afraid of the kitchen, to get back in there and feel comfortable," Oz says. "I grew up vegetarian. I learned how to cook from my mom and just from being around her in the kitchen, but I didn't eat any meat, so I didn't really know how to make steaks or roast chicken or any of that. Being a part of this team and doing research on my own has really taken the fear out of the kitchen and put the party back in, which is our goal overall."

ABC touts Oz as "the Fresh Face of Healthy Living," and she likes the sound of that. "It's a perfect way to sum up my own individual take on health, which is that health should always be a priority, but never an obsession," she notes. "A lot of the time we butt heads with ourselves because we want to live this healthy life, we want to take care of our bodies, this precious vessel we get one of, but at the same time we all, once in a while, want to go out and have a fabulous mac and cheese or a delicious piece of cake to celebrate a friend's birthday. We allow ourselves to mess up the relationship between eater and eaten, and my philosophy is that there are very positive, very powerful ways to re-establish a healthy relationship with food."

Oz is bringing usable, bite-size, easily digestible health information, but also helping the chefs look for ways, in their own recipes, to make them a bit healthier and to give people at home a chance to follow along and have fun. And, hopefully, she'd like to start bringing in some more hard-hitting health information, too. "How are you and I, as everyday eaters, voting with our wallets to make healthy food accessible and meaningful for us in our daily lives?" Oz asks. "Because, right now, it can be quite expensive to try to eat healthy."

A secondary task for Oz on this show is to be the practical tipster.

"I'm newly married . It was a year in August. I'm learning how to craft that husband-wife relationship. I'm learning how to build a home. I'm learning how to do first holidays and first occasions with in-laws and all of that. My role is to go to Mario and Michael, Carla and Clinton, and say, 'You guys have been doing this in a professional capacity for so long. Don't forget about us little people who don't necessarily know all the professional, insider tips and tricks, but want to learn from you. How do we make this something that's practical for everyday living?'"

Oz resides in Manhattan these days, but her parents are in Cliffside Park. And, to hear Oz tell it, her heart is still in Bergen County. "I've become so nostalgic," she says, laughing wistfully. "I went to school at Dwight-Englewood, and I'm sometimes in Englewood to pick up my siblings who still go to school there or just to get some food. Driving on East Palisade Avenue, down that hill, it's memory lane for me." Oz notes she's been been eating at Baumgart's in Englewood forever. "My very first day of first grade, my mom and I went to lunch there with a couple of girlfriends and their moms. I remember, distinctly, the flat wide vegetable noodles. To go back now and sit in practically the same booth is amazing." And she and her husband visit Bergen frequently. "Every time we do it on a Sunday, we have a tradition of going to the Binghamton Bagel Cafe (in Edgewater). My belief is that Bergen's Best Bagels, which is now defunct – which is the saddest thing ever – had the best bagels in the world. But Binghamton Bagel Cafe is where I go if I'm craving a really wonderful New Jersey bagel."

Looking to the future, Oz is hoping for a long run on The Chew. She's also preparing several product lines and digging into a new lifestyle book about "trying to have a good life without going crazy," which should be out in late 2012 or early 2013.

Contemplating all that she's accomplished already, it's hard to fathom that Oz is only 25 years old. And so it's fair to ask this final question: What does Daphne Oz aspire to be when she grows up? "I want to be a great wife and a great mom," she replies. "I want, from a television perspective, to be someone people like to have in their home, someone they want to sit down with every day, and someone who people care about what I have to say because they know I care about them and what they think and need and are looking for. I hope I can be a good vessel to capture all the useful information, filter out the stuff you shouldn't care about and give you information that's actually going to make your life better every day."


Photographed by Anne-Marie Caruso
Photographed at Myriad Restaurant Groups Centrico in New York City, September 2011
Fashion styling by Heather Zwain Hair by Liz DiStasi, David Michael Hair Studio, Paramus
Makeup by Elena George, eggorgeous@msn.com;
assisted by Diandre Tristan, Diandre.Tristan@gmail.com
Daphne wears Brunello Cuccinelli jacket,
Neiman Marcus, Garden State Plaza