I told you so….
These are not the nicest words to hear but that’s how I feel about a good friend now.
Let me explain
Is a university nutrition degree useless?
A friend of mine told me when we first met that she was doing Dietetics at Sunshine Coast University. We started out exchanging the occasional word and then grew into a strong friendship, so when she told me this, I said she should study with me at The Nutrition Academy when she is finished or forget the degree altogether and come study with me.
She told me she wanted to get a degree.
5 years later, over $30,000 spent and she is angry that she did her degree.
She told me in the last five years she has done three subjects in nutrition, her last subject before she graduates will be medical nutrition. It will ‘teach her’ protein limits for kidney patients and counting carbohydrates, protein and fats for tube feeders, and then she will be watching the hospital system feed sick patients ultra-processed foods.
She must now do three years in what she calls “the system” doing something she totally disagrees with. She is a mature aged student and thinks that the next three years is a waste of her time as she doesn’t even agree with anything she has learnt throughout her nutrition degree. She has not learnt anything about metabolic nutrition, leptin our master hormone, she has done nothing with regards to ghrelin except in biochemistry. The citric acid cycle and Kreb cycle mean nothing to her. She has not learnt about mitochondria, ketosis, gluconeogenesis, apoptosis and other important things to know about the body and nutrition.
She asked me the other day if I’m still educating on nutrition, which I told her I was.
I feel disappointed for her.
Who has the right to speak up on nutrition?
On top of this I have been following a dietitian in Noosa who believes that no one has the capacity to advise on diet but dietitians. She says she bases her advice on years of university education, clinical training, ongoing professional development and the best available scientific evidence. I, too, have 6 years of university behind me, clinical training, 46 years of ongoing professional development and the best available scientific evidence, yet I disagree with her.
When I go to the dietitian’s post I see what she was probably taught at university. She talks about all of the narratives that were introduced to the Australian psyche in 1982: the dietary guidelines, vegetable oils are healthy, salt and saturated fat are bad, cholesterol should be lowered etc.
I know what she has been taught. I did much the same training as her: calorie and macro counting, margarine is better for the heart, salt is bad, meat causes cancer. She believes and has adopted these assertions into her thinking. I questioned everything, I was not a wide-eyed 19-year-old believing the narrative I was taught. And neither is my friend. She is in her 50’s and sees the mistake she has made, she told me she was in classes with wide-eyed young women and sees that they believe everything they are taught without question.
Being curious about education and statements made is one of the most important attributes of The Nutrition Academy. It asks you to think for yourself, guided by philosophy and historical perspective of how we ate in times past without the degree of chronic disease we now see in all age groups.
As I always say if you do what everyone is doing you will have the same results as everyone has, by being curious and thinking and acting differently then you have a chance to be healthy, have healthy children and be out of a system that knows how to diagnose and treat the symptom but not necessarily how to get to the root cause.
Before dietitians there was mothers, there was culture, there was traditions. We knew how to prepare food that was available in our region, we knew what sustained us and what made us sick (poisonous plants).
I could just teach people how to cook, ferment, dry, process all the natural foods around us, but I knew with the degree of chronic disease that this was not good enough. I had to teach metabolic nutrition, philosophy, historical perspective, the immune system, the digestive system, diet-based solutions to chronic disease, eating through the generations, microbiome, hormones, the importance of salt, sugar, fat and so much more. You see, we’ve lost our cultures and traditions and we are sicker than we have ever been.
What I did to get people well in the 1980’s (put them on a real food diet) is not working anymore. Allergies, food sensitivities, autoimmune disease, digestive system issues, dysbiosis and so much more has meant we have to do some metabolic diet plans to help people to heal so that they can get back to a seasonal, local real food diet where food can be enjoyed not just tolerated.
If you don’t want to spend over $30,000 for your degree and then spend three years and even more money in a system that is making people sicker, not better, then perhaps consider our nutrition courses.
Why study with The Nutrition Academy?
You can begin with The Introduction to Nutrition course, this course is $275.00 and you will not learn what I teach doing nutrition course at university in this course. You will learn how to understand food labels, why the nutritional label is a waste of time and how ingredients are more important. You will learn about ingredients and how they are made and what they do to the mitochondria and human health. You will learn the things they don’t put on a label that are causing dysbiosis and destruction of the microbiome. As well as why cholesterol is good for you and important for every hormone in your body. How are supplements made, what do they do to your health. Is the body black and white, low iron, take iron? Is this the correct thing to do or is the body a system of minerals that need to be taken into account?
The Introduction to Nutrition Course will help you delve into the food industry and then it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be part of a giant food experiment. Education is what gives you choices.
Online Nutrition Education course
Diving deeper into Nutrition is our Functional Nutrition Essentials course, a 400 hour internationally certified course with the outcome of becoming a Functional Nutrition Consultant with scope of practice guidelines. That means you look for the root cause of the issue, rather than just treating the symptom. For example, low iron is a symptom of something. The body is an innate intelligence. There are reasons iron may go low and cholesterol will be high, but do you treat those aspects or does the system need to be fixed and then the body iron or cholesterol will stabilise. It’s a different way of looking at nutrition and the health of the body.
Short online nutrition courses for chronic diseases
We also have a business course, if you would like to go on to start a business in Nutrition Consulting, as well as postgraduate studies in the microbiome.
We have stand-alone courses like the Hormone Course which will help you understand that you are just not oestrogen and progesterone but a system of hormones (messengers) that work synchronistically together. To treat low oestrogen with oestrogen then puts the whole messenger system into disarray. Just like the low iron and the high cholesterol dilemma, we need to look at the root cause and the whole system to help the body.
We also have a course in Mental Health. In the last decade mental health statistics are rising. Traditionally this has been treated with cognitive behaviour therapy (talk therapy) and medications. But the science is glaringly there to show that brain metabolism and gut health and changing that metabolism and diversity of the microbiome can help with anxiety, depression, bipolar, ADD, ADHD, Autism and other mental health issues that have skyrocketed.
When we educate ourselves, our choices change. If we watch television and the marketing and advertising of food and medications we begin to believe marketing and not science. The Nutrition Academy is based on science and philosophy and historical perspective, these have been powerful guides for me over the past 46 years. What I love is that I have been teaching much the same thing for over four decades and now the science is catching up….it’s a ‘told you so’ kind of feeling and I’m so happy to be helping people find their new career or their health and that of their family. And I sure hope I can help my friend find her love for nutrition again.
Cyndi O’Meara
Functional Nutritionist.
