Dietitian

With the term Dietitian it is a protected job title for a medical or medical profession. Dietitians have special qualifications in the areas of dietetics and nutrition and are used in therapy, rehabilitation, care and health promotion. They treat both healthy and sick patients from a nutritional perspective.

What is the dietitian?

The officially recognized profession of “dietician” includes various sub-areas. A distinction is made between clinical dietetics and nutrition, catering management (guiding the kitchen, managing the diet kitchen, guiding the staff according to nutritional-therapeutic aspects), prevention and health promotion (public health) as well as teaching and research (support in the training of health professions, implementation of and participation in Studies).

Dietitians work together with the healthy and the sick to provide training and advice, as prescribed by a doctor, as nutritional-physiological aspects can influence many diseases. In addition, in the clinical area, they also care for the critically ill who can no longer take in food independently by means of the professional application of tubes. Accordingly, the area of ​​activity of the dietitian encompasses different topics: mainly the implementation of individual diets and qualified nutritional advice, but also the documentation and evaluation of findings, the creation of diet plans, nutritional value calculations and participation in visits in the clinical and inpatient area.

They are experts in all matters relating to nutrients in food and their effects on the body. Often dietitians specialize in areas such as diabetology.

Treatments & therapies

Diet can have far-reaching health consequences. Many diseases can be traced back to malnutrition or overeating. However, a healthy, balanced diet can also prevent or positively influence diseases. For this reason, dietitians are mainly active in nutritional advice, which they carry out on the basis of medical diagnoses.

Such diagnoses can be: diabetes, high blood lipid or uric acid levels, osteoporosis, food allergies and food intolerances, or health consequences caused by eating disorders such as anorexia. Together with the patients, they work out forms of nutrition that correspond to their specific disposition by providing information about foods and their properties, imparting recipes or giving advice when shopping. Often, a dietitian is about reducing body weight in a healthy way.

Since diet-related overweight and obesity with all its sequelae are among the most important diseases of civilization, the dietitian often starts here by calculating the patient's nutritional needs and providing advice on this basis. This can affect both groups and individuals. However, it is a mistake to believe that dieting is all about healthy weight loss, although this is a major concern of many people seeking advice. It is also conceivable that patients develop serious underweight as a result of alcohol or drug abuse, or that anorexia is the reason for a critically low body mass index.

Dietitians intervene in such cases so that a healthy body weight is built up again in a medically justifiable manner and the body is supplied with all nutrients. In the clinical area there are often patients who cannot or do not want to take in more food on their own. These can be people with anorexia, people who are in a coma or who cannot eat alone for other health reasons.

Dietitians are in demand here because they are qualified to properly tube tubes. Due to the facts described, this professional group is often active in clinics, rehabilitation facilities, etc., although there are more and more independent dietitians with their own practice who specialize in certain diet-related complaints.

Diagnosis & examination methods

If dietitians are called in on medical advice, the medical diagnosis (e.g. diabetes mellitus) is the basis for the further course of action. Various methods are available to the dietitian to determine the nutritional status of the patient. At the moment, the body mass index (BMI) is usually used first, although this is not without controversy as it does not provide any information about the exact distribution of fat and muscle mass.

In order to determine the proportion of water, fat and muscle in the body, there are special measuring devices that provide information and provide the dietician with important clues about the patient's condition. In addition, as part of the nutritional counseling, an actual state is first worked out with regard to food intake: What does the patient eat and how much? What would his need be? Which nutrients does he need in particular, which food components should he avoid? On the basis of the medical diagnosis and this current situation, a diet plan is developed that is ideally tailored to the person seeking advice and their psyche. Together with the patient, it is calculated what his optimal nutritional status would be and a concept is worked out how this goal can be achieved.

Often, after determining the BMI and the fat distribution in the body, dietitians use diagrams to help the patient understand what a healthy, balanced diet looks like (for example the "nutrition pyramid" of the German Nutrition Society). In the clinical area, this professional group sometimes works with tubes when independent feeding is not possible or is refused and the patient is in a life-threatening condition.

Enteral nutrition (placing a tube in the nose or mouth through the throat and the esophagus into the gastrointestinal tract) or parenteral nutrition, in which nutrients are administered directly into the blood via infusions, are conceivable here. Medicines can be added to these nutrient mixtures, but only doctors are responsible for prescribing them. Dietitians limit themselves to nutritional aspects. However, they often work closely with doctors, psychologists, etc.