FNCE Report

A big takeaway from FNCE for me stemmed from the lecture by David Katz, MD, entitled “The Road to Health Is Paved with Good Inventions”. Katz’s presentation eloquently illustrated the fact that although we know what we need to do: eat less and move more, the global obesity epidemic is still spiralling out of control. If healthy eating options and more exercise opportunities are available in schools and work places across America, we’d be able to bridge the gap between science and common sense. As a wrap up to his presentation, Katz pointed to a number of inventions by him and his medical colleagues to create healthier lifestyles for Americans. He is the principal inventor of the NuValTM, a nutrition scoring system from 1 – 100 (the higher the score the better the nutritional quality), which allows consumers to see the quality of their food choices before they purchase it at the grocery store. Also, he is working to combat obesity and related diseases with his non-profit organization called Turn The Tide Foundation Inc., which is devoted to spreading knowledge and solutions for adults and children to prevent obesity. The Turn The Tide Foundation also supports an on-line forum for people who have tried but cannot lose weight called the National Exchange for Weight Loss ResistanceTM. Katz’s lecture inspired me to ask myself, how can each of us invent changes in our lives that will make a difference to our own health and quality of life?With advent of social media, registered dietitians are all over it and communicating their messages by combining new and traditional media. One of the sessions, “Engaging Your Audience with New and Traditional Media”, presented by Michelle Dudash, RD and Janice Newell Bissex, MS, RD, delved into the ins and outs of using your social media platform to garner TV and radio segments as well as increase your influence in the social media sphere. Some of the handy tips were to cross over mediums by using nutrition and food blogs to advertise television and radio work and vice versa. Cooking and nutrition segments can be imbedded into Facebook and Twitter postings, radio podcasts can be posted to your website for visitors to listen to at their leisure. Your food and recipe photos can be posted for all to view (and link back to your website) on hosting sites, such as the newly created HealthyAperture.com. As nutrition professionals we can increase our sphere of influence by combining all types of media – and enhance our portfolio and business, too.Victoria Shanta Retelny, RD, LDN, is the author of The Essential Guide to Healthy Healing Foods (Alpha Books/Penguin) livingwellcommunications.com.