Public Health Crusader, Writer and Mother uses Comedy to Advocate for Health and Breastfeeding

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Stephanie Pitsirilos-Boquin, founder of Zoe Health, is using comic relief to talk about serious health issues in the Latino community, from breastfeeding and obesity prevention to affordable housing and gentrification.

As the program manager for Choosing Healthy & Active Lifestyles for Kids (CHALK) and as a consultant with Zoe Health, she has helped businesses in Inwood (74% Latino) in northern Manhattan, NY, bridge commerce and community by modifying their services to provide healthier options for the past 10 years.  She is a public health crusader working to build healthier homes, schools and communities to reduce Latino childhood obesity.

In order to better develop health messages to resonate with Latinos, she is turning to the narrative.

“In order to be an advocate, I have to talk about it,” Pitsirilos-Boquin said.

Most recently, she is talking about the breastfeeding, the challenges and the triumphs of breastfeeding.

The following excerpt is from her creative non-fiction essay, Jaws, The Milk-drinking Kind, where motherhood, pop culture, mythology, public health advocacy, feminism, and humor meet.

“Think you are safe sleeping? I guess you never watched Nightmare on Elm Street. Just when you think Jaws can’t get to you on land, they invent Sharknado. Breastfeeding stalked me in my sleep. How I craved sleep because it was something suddenly snatched away from my life, but how I feared it because that’s when the milk machine went into hyperdrive, making (what I was convinced was gallons of) the bait that’d bring Jaws back. But it had nowhere to go! The clogged ducts, the pain of the factory working away making more, the pins and needles of let down that happen when you simply think about breastfeeding. Oh, it was that bad… I couldn’t look at Jaws without the pain starting and the milk oozing out.”

In order to reduce childhood obesity and improve breastfeeding rates, it is important to reduce social stigma and provide linguistically and culturally relevant breastfeeding support for Latina mothers.  Pitsirilos-Boquin is doing that through the narrative.

She has also written two fiction novels, one historical and one speculative, about issues affecting Latino health and is actively looking for an agent.

Read Jaws, The Milk-drinking Kind.

Learn more about Zoe Health.