Louise Robertson Specialist Dietitian Louise is a Specialist Dietitian working with adults with inherited metabolic disorders, with PKU being her biggest cohort of patients.
Welcome to our new column in Network Health Digest. What an honour to be asked to take this over from Neil Donnelly who has entertained us with his Final Helping over the years. We hope we can live up to his standards. Enjoy your retirement Neil! Sarah Howe and I teamed up to write our blog Dietitian’s Life back at the beginning of 2015 with the aim to promote good nutritional messages and the life of a dietitian over social media. "Thank you" to NHD’s Editor, Emma, for asking us to spill a little of our blog over into this column here. In June, I volunteered to man the BDA stand at the Summer Good Food show at the NEC in Birmingham. It’s a great fun show; the NEC is just down the road from me and when I have been before, there has been a lot of nutrition nonsense spouted! Having a dietitian drop-in clinic was sure to bring some nutritional credibility to the show. The stand was situated in the Eat Well corner, next to the Healthy Kitchen stage. We were opposite Coeliac UK, and a fermented food stand, but also next to a stand promoting detoxes! It was a slow start (at 9am), we handed out the BDA Eating Well, Living Well magazine to passers-by, trying to encourage them onto the stand. By midday, people were queuing to sit down and talk to us. People had all sorts of questions for us and the advice ranged from cholesterol lowering, eating with a hiatus hernia, unable to lose weight and gut problems, such as constipation and irritable bowel syndrome symptoms. One lady wanted advice after she had been to a nutritionist who had told her that she should be on a low-carb, sugarfree diet to lose weight. This included cutting certain fruits out of her diet such as apples. She moaned to me about not being able to take an apple to work every day. The first thing I said was, “Have your apple, as there is no need to cut fruit out of your diet.”
At 1.15pm, I managed to escape and run over to the Healthy Kitchen stage to watch gut specialist dietitian, Dr Megan Rossi, give a talk on fermented foods. She demonstrated how to make kefir (a fermented milk drink) and kombucha (fermented pineapple drink) to produce probiotics for good gut health. She did a great job, we need more dietitians on the stages, especially as the other talks that day on the Healthy Kitchen Stage included how to make sugar-free raw cakes with ingredients including rice malt syrup and coconut sugar! After our stint on the stand, we were then free to look round the rest of the show. I love tasting the food and drink and looking for new gadgets. Fellow dietitian Claire and I stumbled upon a salesman selling Palmyra tree blossom sugar at a great price. We heard the lady next to us ask for three bags, telling the salesman that she had cancer and she couldn’t eat white sugar. No wonder the public is confused, we were trying to get our evidence-based nutritional messages across one side of the show and in other parts, sugar ‘alternatives’, raw, clean eating and detoxing are being touted as normal and healthy! As dietitians and registered nutritionists, we need to be the source of honest nutritional messages so that people don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen as much as they are doing and compromising their health - or indeed wasting their money! Nevertheless, I had a great day volunteering at the Good Food Show and would recommend other dietitians to take part in the future. Louise
www.NHDmag.com August/September 2017 - Issue 127
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