April 2-A Glimpse into Community Dietetics

Today, two speakers came into our class. The first is Francie Astrom, who works for Wellworks at Ohio University. She explained the role of the registered dietitian (RD) working in a wellness program. This program is supported partially by University wellness funds, and primarily by merberships fee. The aims of this program include providing wide variety of programming, helping people to reach optimal health, improving people's health status, and reducing risks of diseases. Types of services and programs include fitness center (Ping Center in OU), massage, personal trainers, wellness coaching, worksite wellness, blood pressure and cholesterol screening, and other screening for preventing certain diseases such as cancer, response to requests, nutrition programming, body composition, heart works, family and coummunity programs such as pumpkin fest, and risk reduction. Any OU faculty or staff member and their dependents, OU retirees and their dependents could join the program for free. Community members and corporate members could join the program at low prices.

Nutrition programming at the wellworks is very important. As Francie said, the RDs are integral to success of wellness program, they provide date nutrition information such as diet magazines, they review and interpret current literature. The Wellworks program provides both individual nutrition services and group nutrition activities. For individual nutrition services, individuals could get ntrition education or counseling at very low prices ($15 for 30min), easy access (convenient parking), disordered eating, computerized dietary analysis. For group nutrition activities, Wellworks provides presentations to offices, departments and corporate members, cooking and nutrition education programs, grocery store tours, and Five-A-Day the wellworks way.

I would like to be a volunteer someday because joining the program could bring lots of benefits to me. It could broad my understanding of the role of nutrition and health promotion, give me chances to know variety of individuals and make contribution to nutrition education among individuals or groups, deepen my knowledge of nutrient content of foods throughout dietary recommendations. I believe that practicing is the best way to understand knowledge I learn from class.

And "wellworks" program is very helpful for keeping OU faculty and their family healthy, because it is totally free for them. But one limit of this program is that it may miss lots of undergraduates. As reported by Francie, this program is not totally free for undergraduate students, for those who do not have adequate money for living, this program may make them lose the good opportunity to get better health.


The second speaker was a very beautiful young lady-Heidi Anderson. She states that she is not a traditional RD. She works in Wellwork program of OU now. Her work is focusing on health coaching, health education, coordinating presentaions, marketing, quarterly newsletter, and planning in groups. I think she really act more like a epidemiologist than RD. Her education background explained this-she is a MPH. Well, this is so similiar to me. I was major in public health for undergraduate, and stepped into nutrition area now. In my opinion, nutrition is a branch study of public health. What nutritionists do everyday are mostly what epidemiologist should do. Nutritionists play very important roles in controlling diseases, especially in the primary and secondary preventions. For example, telling people how to prevent diseases by adjusting their diets before getting diseases is primary prevention, screening cancer, obesity by testifying blood pressure and cholesterol of potential patients before syptoms appear is secondary prevention. Planning, organizing, directing, controlling, coordinating are five functions of epidemiological managers and administrators. Heidi acts mostly like a epidemiological manger in her daily work. I got evoked by Heidi's career experience. I believe my education background in public health could benefit me much in my nutrition career in future.