Diabetes Action Canada’s (DAC) Director of Patient Engagement and Knowledge Mobilization, Linxi Mytkolli, is one of 16 home cooks competing on Season 9 of MasterChef Canada.

Linxi is making history as the first person living with Type 1 diabetes to compete on a MasterChef franchise anywhere in the world.

For Linxi, entering the MasterChef kitchen was more than the pursuit of a culinary dream. It was an opportunity to challenge the stigma surrounding diabetes and food, an issue that sits at the intersection of her lived experience and professional work.

“People living with diabetes are constantly asked what we ate, what we should stop eating or whether we are ‘allowed’ to have something,” Linxi says. “I wanted to show a fuller story, one in which a person with diabetes can approach food with creativity, cultural pride, skill and joy.”

Food, blame and diabetes stigma

Food is often discussed in diabetes through the language of restriction, risk and personal responsibility. Individual choices can become evidence used to judge whether someone is managing their condition “well,” while the many biological, cultural, financial and social factors that shape diabetes and food are pushed aside.

For researchers and health policy leaders, this is more than a communications problem. The way diabetes is framed can influence the questions researchers ask, the outcomes health systems prioritize and the policies that receive support. When food is treated only as a clinical variable or personal choice, culture, access, disability, family life and joy can disappear from view.

At DAC, Linxi works with patient partners, researchers, healthcare professionals and decision-makers to bring lived experience into diabetes research, policy and knowledge mobilization. Linxi explains that this work shaped how she understood the significance of appearing on MasterChef.

“Meaningful representation is not only about including someone with diabetes in a conversation about diabetes,” she says. “It is also about seeing us everywhere else: leading research, travelling, cooking, competing and taking creative risks.”

From the ICU to the MasterChef kitchen

Linxi was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 25 after becoming critically ill and being admitted to the intensive care unit. Food, which had always represented family, culture and care, suddenly became tangled with calculations, fear and survival.

Cooking helped her find her way back.

As a first-generation Albanian-Canadian, Linxi grew up in a family where food was an inheritance, hospitality was a language of its own and recipes carried memories across borders. She learned in family kitchens and around crowded tables, then began combining those traditions with the flavours and techniques she encountered through travelling.

Those experiences followed her into the MasterChef kitchen, along with her insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor. Throughout the competition, she managed the stress, physical demands, unfamiliar foods and changing routines that can all affect blood glucose.

“Diabetes did not disappear when the cameras started rolling,” Linxi says. “I had to compete while doing the additional physical and mental work required to manage a chronic condition. That work is often invisible, but people with diabetes carry it into our careers, families and ambitions every day.”

Linxi hopes her appearance will help expand what people living with diabetes, particularly those who are newly diagnosed, believe is possible.

“We often talk about helping people with diabetes live well,” she says. “Living well has to mean more than achieving a number. It should include having dreams, taking risks and experiencing joy without being reduced to a diagnosis.”

MasterChef Canada Season 9 premieres Tuesday, September 22 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CTV and streams the following day on Crave.