Cole Hanson
I'm a registered dietitian and freelance journalist in Saint Paul. I work a cardiac floor and adult mental health units at Abbott Northwestern. I bike to work. I grew up in Cambridge Township. I'm a dad. These things are not unrelated.
Growing up, food was complicated in ways we didn't always have words for. That's what pointed me toward nutrition: not a passion for meal prep. My upbringing taught me that what people eat is often determined long before they sit down at the table. I became a dietitian in 2020. A year at Hennepin County public health, then four years with UMN Extension, going into communities and libraries and rural spots where the nearest grocery store was a long drive away. What I kept seeing wasn't a lack of information; people knew what to do. It was a lack of options, treated by the system as a personal failure.
The journalism came later and from the same direction. I ran for St. Paul City Council in 2025, which I cannot recommend enough. That turned out to be useful. Knocking on close to 12,000 doors teaches you things about a neighborhood that no amount of data can replicate. I came out of that race with better questions and better sources, and I started figuring out what to do with all of it.
Abbott Northwestern's cardiac and mental health units are not easy places to have strong political opinions. People come in having followed the best advice they could find, and sometimes that advice was wrong. Sometimes they did everything right and the food or healthcare system still failed them. Whatever brought them in, my job is the same.
A friend told me something last year that stuck: first this, then that. It's a way of holding acute stress without being consumed by it. It works at the bedside. It works in journalism too. I do cardiac care and adult mental health, which means a lot of time with people at their most troubled: nobody wants to be in the hospital. It keeps my writing grounded. It's hard to get abstract about a policy when you're sitting with someone living inside it.
Cambridge Township, then Minneapolis, then Saint Paul. Half my life was horses and gravel roads; the other half is bicycles and the Green Line. I love rural Minnesota, most of my family still lives there, and I get frustrated when people in the city write it off. I also think it's a little silly when folks back home consider Coon Rapids the Twin Cities. I live somewhere in between and I'm happy to catch everyone up to speed.
The beats I cover connect because the same people are getting hit by all of them at once. A cardiac patient isn't just dealing with what she ate. She might also have a landlord who won't fix the heat, a bus route that was cut, a grocery store that closed years ago, and medications she can't afford. The clinical picture is never only clinical.
Being a dad sharpened that. A better world has to be something you actually work for, not something you believe in. I write from inside what I know and I try to be honest about where I don't.
"I'm an overly curious neighbor trying to document the world clearly enough that people have what they need to make good decisions."