Dietitian - Introduction

I noticed that one of my post will come out in the list when google it. That surprises me, coz it mean that not much people is writing about it.

SPM and STPM results are just reveal recently, and I believed many students out there are busy searching information about courses to be taken in the future. Well, I think may be I can share a little bit about my job here, so that more people get to know it. I still remember during the time I chose my course, I didn't really understand what is it all about. May be a little bit of sharing can help the others.

I had posted one blog Dietitian Vs Nutritionist which I share about the difference of dietitian and nutritionist.

Well, so what is Dietitian all about? What does dietitian study about?

The subjects for this course including :

Structure and function of human

Biochemistry

Psychology and Behavioural Science

Food Science

Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Research Methodology

Nutrition in life cycle

Principles of Food Preparation

Principles of Nutrition

Basic Pharmacology

Food Analysis

Dietetics Skills

Nutrition and Disease

Diet Counseling

Principles of Diet Therapy

Therapeutic Diet Preparation

These are the subjects to be taken during my time, I don't know whether there is any changes nowadays. But I do believe they won't simply change the core subjects.

All the thing that we learn from dietetics is basically about diet and diet therapy. They are all about how the diet and disease relates to each other, how to eat healthily, how to improve nutritional status and how to prevent and treat nutrition-related disease.

I always say this : If doctor prescribes medication for patients, then dietitian provides diet menu and education for patients. Easy for people to understand what a dietitian is doing.

Apart from learning the diet therapy, we need to learn about how to modify menu and food as well. There is one subject I like the most --- Therapeutic Diet Preparation. In this subject, we learn about the theory behind all the diet therapy and we modify the food or menu accordingly, and PREPARE it!!! Yes, it is like Master Chef, interesting and challenging!

Cannot get it? Well, a simple example here, we know that curry with coconut milk is not so suitable for those who have high cholesterol due to high saturated fat inside the coconut milk. So we need to think of ways to reduce or modify the curry so that curry intake can be continued. 

You can choose to reduce the coconut milk amount, that is the most direct way, but meanwhile, you can choose the replace the coconut milk with low fat milk. What I did was, I changed the coconut milk into asam keping in order to control the saturated fat intake and to improve the taste of the curry. 

After the cooking session (yeah, you need to cook it), there will be a session for food tasting for evaluation purpose. Well, you still need to make sure the taste can be accepted by public after all the modification, right?

These are come of the photo I took last time during the cooking time. 

Spaghetti with the sauce made from fresh tomatoes instead of the processed sauce. 

Kid's meal with smaller portion and all the colourful decoration.

This one is vegetarian high protein diet if I am not mistaken, tauhu as main dish, peanut in the soup, and 1 glass of milk. 

This therapeutic diet preparation is only one of the subjects to be taken in dietetics course. Some people might be asking this question : I don't know how to cook. Can I be dietitian? The answer is YES! This subject is to equip yourself with the knowledge of therapeutic diet and diet modification so that you can share with your patients in future.