FLC Nutrition Program Opens New Career Pathways

I always wanted to help people And so I really enjoy the preventative health aspect that nutrition has to offer and how much food can impact our health and just our bodies in general.

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So you can think of this program being nested inside of the nutrition major. And the accredited coursework is important because it’s this coursework that allows students to move on to the next stage or next phase of becoming a registered dietician nutritionist. You can think of it as three phases. Phase one is that you have the knowledge base, we refer to that as didactic. And then phase two is that you have the experiential base and so that’s your supervised practice experience. And then the third piece of it is the examination. So sitting down and taking the exam for the registered dietician nutritionist. Part of the focus with this program was one looking at need in the area. So with, you know, rising rates of diabetes, in the four corners area. Nutrition is critical and other chronic disease that impacts communities in this area. Nutrition is a critical piece of prevention as well as treatment

Instead of like a sick health approach to the way that medicine is, like nursing or something, nutrition is more integrative and you can teach people how to change their lifestyle. And then also cycling is really big in Durango and at Fort Lewis and it’s really interesting to see how nutrition affects performance.

I Left my job at the hospital. I was working as a physiologist assistant and my favorite part of the day was cooking food. So went to make food and became a chef. So I’m downtown here now in El Morro Tavern. And now I wanted to be able to help my customers with food, give more of a science base behind the food that we’re serving and the food that I want to serve. So that’s what really got me into it. This degree requires organic chemistry. So working with on the organic chemistry side, I’m able to look into the actual food of what’s going on in the sciences of blending an oil or blending butter or what happens to the reaction of cooking sugar at certain temperatures. You know, experimenting with that and being able to take that information and take it into the kitchen is really beneficial. I’m Native American so a lot of my family lives out in rural areas. So I think being here located next to a lot of rural places gives that benefit of having finding those clients.

I think that this program aligns with a lot of the needs of the area and the school and the Health and Human Performance Department. I think it’s really beneficial.

I would love to see like our future program graduates working for our area healthcare organization. So I would love to see them placed at places like with Common Spirit and San Juan Regional down in Farmington.

It’s a great program and I think everyone should try at least get some sort of class of nutritional knowledge. ’cause I think nutrition is the future, especially with food scarcity, stuff like that coming along. We need to know what’s more in our food and also to be able to grow it.

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