May 3, 2012

Today in class we had another speaker. Her name is Heidi and she works at WellWorks. I think that her career path is actually pretty interesting. She went to undergrad for nutrition and then went and got her masters and internship to be a registered dietitian together. After becoming a registered dietitian she then went to work for a WIC program. She worked for 2 different WIC programs and then she came to work for WellWorks. Here at WellWorks she doesnt do what the typical RD does, instead she uses her masters degree for her current job. At WellWorks she works to help educate the community and she plans all the events that WellWorks has. I found it to be very interesting what she does because it shows that the nutrition background that she has also helps her in her current role with educating on nutrition and doing cooking demos and things like that. Also, since she works for WellWorks, her job has the same mission and purpose as Francie Astrom's job does and they are both funded the same way. However, Heidi's job is evaluated based on the comments people make or the turn out that they get at these events. I think it would be very interesting to do event planning but while using the nutrition background. I think it would be a very neat job to be able to plan events and host cooking demos and things like that. I also found it very interesting when she talked about the CHIP diet. There has been a lot of controversy as to which RD's like the program and which do not. Heidi who has actually gone through the program decided that she did in fact like it. She said it helped her (even though she was healthy overall) to decrease her blood pressure, and cholesterol. So I found this to show that you can't just always take someone's advise on things. You will never know if something is good or bad until you try it yourself and then make your own opinion based on your own experiences. This is especially true for dietitians because their clients will come up with these new fad diets and we can't just automatically think something is bad unless we know by past experience that it is.