About
Four decades of wellness education — on the radio, on the conference stage, and one conversation at a time.
late 1950s
Bonnie was raised by parents who had adopted a holistic way of living decades before it had a name — well enough known for it around their small Ohio town that people called them health pioneers. That is where this project takes its name. It was not a career choice so much as the water she grew up in.
1978–82
From 1978 to 1982 Bonnie hosted The Bonnie Jarrett Show on WRNG 680 AM — three hours, live, with the phones open. WRNG was the first exclusively talk radio station in Atlanta, and the first broadcast home of Neal Boortz and the Southern humorist Ludlow Porch. Long before health podcasts existed, Bonnie's was the only show in Atlanta — and one of the first in the country — devoted to holistic and integrative medicine.
Over those four years she interviewed nearly every early figure in the field. Not on a stage, not from a lectern — in conversation, taking questions from Atlanta listeners eager for up-to-date, accurate information on an emerging field. She also served as the station's community liaison for public appearances and lectures.
thirteen years
During the same period Bonnie founded the North American Preventive Medicine Association, a non-profit built on an argument that sounded eccentric in 1980 and obvious now: that nutrition science, environmental medicine, fitness, and psychological and emotional support belong in one model rather than four separate ones.
Out of it came Health by Choice — an annual conference she presented for thirteen years in Atlanta and once in Minneapolis, and a cable television programme of the same name. She also organised wellness retreats and expositions, among them the Spa Vacation Showcase at Atlanta's Lenox Square Mall — the first major national exposition of vacation spas in the United States.
25+ years
For more than twenty-five years Bonnie has been the product educator and public face of Ecological Formulas, a practitioner-channel supplement company founded in 1981 and known for its specialised, niche formulations. The company is responsible for a number of major product introductions, among them Monolaurin, Magnesium Taurate, CDP Choline, sustained-release Melatonin, and Allthiamine, the TTFD form of thiamine. The work takes her to integrative medical conferences across the country, teaching clinicians rather than consumers. She holds a health coaching certification from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
today
She kept the recordings. The conference keynotes, and some of the radio shows — an audio record of a movement made by the people who made it, much of which exists nowhere else. Cataloguing it is what the archive is for.