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About us

Real family. Real kitchen. Real food.

Diets Meal Plan is a family recipe project run out of a home kitchen in Wayne, New Jersey. Damla cooks. Ugur films. Andrea and her mother Mirian bring Ecuador into the mix. Every recipe gets tested until it tastes like the original before it goes on the site. That’s the whole idea, and it’s the reason we started this in the first place.

The family behind the site

We’re not a content farm. There’s no office. There’s a kitchen, a small camera setup, and four people who cook together most weekends.

Damla Sengul, Food Editor and Recipe Developer

Damla started this site because she kept making healthier versions of her favorite dishes and the family kept eating them. Nine years in digital food publishing later, she’s still doing the same thing, just with better lighting. She grew up in Hatay, Turkiye, which UNESCO named a City of Gastronomy, and she cooked there for most of her life before moving to New Jersey. Hatay is the kind of place where a neighbor drops off fresh zaatar in the morning and no one thinks twice about it, and that food-first upbringing shaped everything about how she approaches a recipe today.

She isn’t a Registered Dietitian and she’d never claim to be. She’s a home cook who reads a lot, tests everything, and doesn’t publish a recipe she wouldn’t feed her own kids. When a dish involves anything beyond taste and technique (a diabetes-friendly swap, a claim about a nutrient, guidance for pregnancy or a specific condition), she hands it off to the credentialed team below.

Ugur Gulaydin, Publisher and Videographer

Ugur is Damla’s brother. He runs the site, films most of the videos on our YouTube channel, and answers a lot of the reader email. Marketing executive by day, camera guy by evening.

Andrea, Latin American Recipes

Andrea is Ugur’s wife. She develops the Latin American recipes and runs quality control on anything that touches sofrito, plantain, or fresh cilantro. If a recipe from that side of the site tastes right, she’s the reason.

Mirian Montalvo, Traditional Latin American Cook

Mirian is Andrea’s mother. She spent 60+ years cooking and baking professionally on the Ecuadorian coast, and she’s still the toughest critic in the room. When we say a recipe is grandma-tested, we mean Mirian tried it, and Mirian doesn’t hand out compliments.

How we actually build a recipe

Recipe development here is stubborn. It has to be. Most of the recipes on the site are lighter, lower-sugar, or lower-calorie versions of something people already love, and the whole point falls apart if the new version doesn’t taste like the thing it’s replacing. Here’s the workflow, in the order it happens:

  1. Find a dish worth fixing. Something we or a reader want to eat regularly but don’t feel great about after. Desserts, pastas, comfort food, holiday dishes.
  2. Replace the ingredient that broke it. We identify what’s driving the sugar, calorie, or refined-carb load, then find a natural substitute that behaves the same way in the pan or the oven.
  3. Cook it in the Wayne kitchen. Every recipe on the site was actually cooked here, in this kitchen, and photographed on this counter. Not stock photos. Not AI. Ingredients come from local stores and farms.
  4. Taste-test with the whole family. All four of us try it. The average recipe takes about three attempts before it passes. If the taste isn’t within striking distance of the original, we go back to step two.
  5. Publish only if it earns it. A recipe goes on the site and often on the YouTube channel. If it doesn’t pass the family taste test, it doesn’t go up. That’s the rule.

You can see the pattern in action across our sugar-free desserts, where a lot of the R&D time gets spent. Desserts are the hardest category, because sugar isn’t just flavor. It’s structure. Pull it out and things collapse, brown wrong, or turn grainy. A recipe that works on paper often fails in the pan the first two times, which is why the three-attempt average is what it is.

Once a recipe passes, we shoot it. Same counter, same natural light from the same window. If we film it for the YouTube channel, readers get to watch us make the exact version we published, in real time. That accountability is a feature, not a bug. Viewers will tell us in the comments if a step doesn’t match the written recipe, and we go back and fix it.

Our credentialed team

Damla and Ugur handle the food side. The health, nutrition, and medical side is a different job, and it belongs to people with the training to do it. These are the experts who write, review, and fact-check the health content on this site.

Registered Dietitians

Nutritionists

Medical Reviewers

How we handle health content

Anything on this site that touches your health gets treated differently than a recipe. Recipes get taste-tested. Health content gets sourced, reviewed, and dated.

Every nutrition figure we publish is cross-referenced against the Nutritionix database and the USDA Dietary Reference Intakes. When we write about a diet, a condition, or a nutrient, we pull from peer-reviewed research and government health bodies like the FDA, NIH, and CDC, plus major medical organizations. Franco Cuevas, MD leads medical review on YMYL (your money or your life) content before it goes live.

We also make mistakes. When we find one, or when a reader flags one, we fix the page, update the modified date, and add a correction note if the change is substantive. Comments on the YouTube channel keep us honest too. Viewers tell us fast if a recipe doesn’t work.

What we won’t do

A few lines we don’t cross, because the whole site depends on them:

  • No AI writes our recipes, health content, or nutrition data. AI helps us catch typos and rephrase clunky sentences. That’s it. It doesn’t develop dishes, it doesn’t calculate nutrition, and it doesn’t write health guidance.
  • No AI photography. If you see a plate on the site, that plate existed on our counter.
  • Advertisers don’t influence our editorial. We’re a Mediavine publisher, and ads pay the bills. They don’t pick the recipes, they don’t shape the health content, and they don’t get review copy.
  • We don’t publish recipes we haven’t cooked. If it’s on the site, one of us made it in Wayne.

How to reach us and how to report a mistake

Email us at social@dietsmealplan.com. Corrections, questions, recipe requests, whatever. Ugur reads the inbox. If you spot an error on a page, tell us what you saw and we’ll look at it. Substantive corrections get logged on the page itself.

Diets Meal Plan is part of Five Buttons LLC, a small digital publishing company headquartered in New Jersey.

Information on this site is educational; consult your healthcare provider for personalized guidance.