Nutrition and Dietetics University Course

The essence of nutrition and diet courses currently offered by domestic universities is to transform mature research results in the fields of public health and food science into daily diet decision-making tools that can be directly reused by ordinary students - it is by no means a "teaching how to cook and memorize recipes" in the stereotype of many people. The core goal is to help students establish scientific dietary knowledge, avoid various nutrition rumors on the market, and ultimately improve the health of themselves and their families.

To be honest, when I first started this publicly elective course, half of the students who came in the first class had small notebooks and planned to memorize "weight loss recipes to lose five pounds in a week." Some people raised their hands and asked if there was a vegetable salad test at the end of the semester, which really amused me. Many people have a deep misunderstanding of this course. Some even think that it is used by schools to collect credits. In fact, few people who actually learn it will say that it is useless.

When it comes to the design of course content, in fact, such courses in colleges and universities are now divided into two distinct schools, and sometimes teaching and research committees even fight over them. One type is taught by teachers with a background in the School of Public Health, and takes an evidence-based approach. All conclusions must be based on large-sample research data: Do you think drinking milk tea can raise blood sugar quickly? Directly put the oral glucose tolerance test comparison curves of milk tea, cola, and white porridge with the same weight; you said that you need to eat protein to keep fit? Directly list the protein intake thresholds for people with different exercise intensities. The excess eaten will either turn into fat or put a burden on the kidneys. Most of these teachers are very resistant to teaching Internet celebrity recipes. They feel that individual differences are too great and it would be irresponsible to recommend them casually. The other type is taught by teachers from the School of Food, the Sports Department, and the Logistics Department. It takes a practical route. The first class teaches you how to read the food ingredient list, how to make meals in the cafeteria to get the basic ratio of "one fist of staple food, one fist of protein, two fists of vegetables." They even teach you to use a small electric cooker in the dormitory to make a low-calorie meal that can be cooked in ten minutes. Last time, Teacher Li from the public health department of the Teaching Research Council argued with Teacher Wang from the Food Institute: Teacher Li said that you taught everyone to use zero-calorie syrup to make drinks. The impact of long-term drinking on intestinal flora has not yet been determined, and it cannot be promoted casually. Teacher Wang directly responded that it is impossible for college students to completely quit milk tea. Helping them reduce their daily added sugar intake from 50g to less than 25g is progress. It is better than drinking full-sugar milk tea. In fact, both ideas are correct. The evidence-based course is like a rigorous dietary instruction manual, while the practical course is like a portable toolbox, with different needs.

I have been taking the course for three years and have met too many students who really relied on this course to solve practical problems. There is an athletic student who practices sprinting. He heard from a fitness blogger that he should eat 10 eggs a day to build muscle. After three months of physical examination, the creatinine exceeded the standard. He was so panicked that he adjusted his protein intake to 1.8g per kilogram of body weight after class, and added the proportion of whole grains and dark green vegetables. After a month of reexamination, it was normal. There is also a girl who had amenorrhea for half a year in order to lose weight. She drank traditional Chinese medicine for a long time but was not cured. She slowly adjusted her caloric gap according to the diet plan in the class without taking additional supplements. After three months, her aunt returned to normal. There is also a student who used to follow an online health blogger to eat raw eggplant to "scrat oil" and had diarrhea for two days. After the class, he learned that if the solanine in raw eggplant is not treated properly, it can lead to food poisoning. He no longer dares to follow the Internet celebrity and take folk remedies.

Of course, not all such courses are reliable. I have also heard that nutrition classes in many schools still recite old PPTs from ten years ago, and even spread rumors that "eating fruit at night is equivalent to eating arsenic" and "drinking porridge is the best for the stomach" have been overturned long ago. The assessment method is to memorize the numbers from the dietary pagoda. After the test, students turn around and forget. No wonder everyone thinks it is a water class. This is also the most embarrassing part of this type of courses now: it is hard to get tickets for good courses, and you have to sit on the server when you want to get a course. For difficult courses, everyone just lowers their head and scrolls through their mobile phones during class, purely to collect credits.

At the end of the last class, a student sent me a message and said that in the past, nutrition was considered an IQ tax. Now when I go to the supermarket to buy things, I will subconsciously look through the ingredient list. When buying health products for my parents, I will check if there are blue hats first. I will not be fooled by salesmen into buying a bunch of useless collagen oral solution. In fact, this is the most practical meaning of this course - it will not make you become a nutrition expert all of a sudden, but at least it will give you a little more ability to judge right from wrong in this era of fragmented information, so you don't have to pay IQ tax for blind losses, and you can even help your family avoid pitfalls. Isn't this more useful than memorizing many knowledge points?