Communicating Nutrition

   

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I really want my message to be after I graduate with my Nutrition Communication degree. What do I really want to teach people? How will I do it? I am learning so much about food, health, nutrition, and the lifestyle that will encourage longevity, that I feel like I have so much to share. How will I as a nutrition expert get the point across? Well first, I have to have a point to make. It was not until I started working on a presentation I have to make about nutrition that it all really started to come together. How do we teach people who "live to eat", to "eat to live"? Well you can't. As a nutrition student and food lover myself, I have realized that it is not poor eating habits that are making people sick and overweight, it is their love of food. I totally get that. I love food and I would not be to accepting to the idea of someone telling me I cannot eat what I like. This is where the communication part of my background will come into play. It is all about delivery. If I am going to be educating people on nutrition, I have to be able to relate to them. I can relate to their love of food and at the same time share my knowledge on good vs. bad nutrition. If you think about it, a bowl of ice cream, a double bacon cheeseburger, even alcohol, is all nutrition. It is food that you put into your body and is then converted into energy. There it is: nutrition. What I want to teach is the good vs. bad, not tell people what to do. No one likes to be told what to do and it will most likely close them off to any kind of information I have to share. There is no one single definition of nutrition, in my opinion. It is the way I will communicate with people, relate to people and empathize with people that will really get them to open up and ultimately welcome changes to their nutritional choices, from bad choices to good choices. Or at least somewhere in between, which would be knowledge; at least they will have that. Just communication alone will help open peoples' minds to what nutrition really is. From one foodie to another: it is possible to eat to live while also living to eat...I do it every day.