Nikki's heart to Hart 'I'M GRATEFUL FOR MY STUTTER'

The popular nutritionist is using her voice to help others overcome speech problems

- Fleur Guthrie

No one is more surprised than Nikki Hart, 56, that she's ended up in a public speaking role, simplifying nutrition advice for New Zealanders through the media.

With a stutter since childhood, the registered nutritionist of 30 years has regularly appeared on our screens, sharing ways to ensure realistic, lifelong positive changes in our eating.

The bubbly Auckland mum-of-two daughters (Amelia, 20, and Elyse, 17,) shares with the Weekly that she has a no-nonsense approach to food.

Yes, she drinks blue milk because “you cannot milk an almond” and only had three rules for her children growing up: no eating standing up, no eating in front of a screen and no eating in a car so food didn’t become a mindless activity.

Tell us about your journey with stuttering. I was a great little talker until about four. Because my parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland, I had an Irish accent too. Speech therapists thought my stutter was a developmental thing, where my brain was going faster than my mouth, but I wonder if it was also because I sounded a bit different to the other kids at Playcentre? Having a stutter is exhausting and frustrating. I was teased quite a lot when I was younger because I basically stuttered on every word.