Mary Flynn is nutritionist who works for The Miriam Hospital, one of the Brown Medical School teaching hospitals. She works in human nutrition research and teaches courses in nutrition at Brown University in the undergraduate program and lectures on nutrition in the medical school. She starting teaching at Brown in 1998 and the courses she teaches are Principles of Nutrition, Diet and Chronic Diseases, and Nutrition for Fitness and Physical Activity. Her main research interest is how food can be used to prevent and treat chronic diseases or Food is Medicine. She developed a plant- based olive oil diet in 1999 and has been researching it since that time. She has used the diet for weight loss and improving risk factors for breast and prostate cancer. She used the diet to develop a 6-week cooking program for low-income food pantry clients. She showed that use of the plant-based recipes that include extra virgin olive oil for 2 to 3 main meals a week will decrease food insecurity, body weight, and fasting blood glucose while decreasing total food costs.