dietitian online

This week, thanks to Alex Steffan’s Worldchanging post, I discovered a real gem to help broaden and deepen my nutrition knowledge and take it well beyond its usual geographic and professional interest boundaries. The Weblog is: 

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

A good place to begin exploring the blog is on the About page. Then, as dietitians, we probably will want to check out the posts in the Nutrition, Organic Agriculture, Cooking, Fruits & Nuts,  Vegetables, and Nibbles.

I’m working my way through the nutrition archive today. Here is a sample of well-written posts on various topics: 

Food is good
Kids eat more if fruit and veg are home-grown
School gardens
Heirlooms are better for you

Today, when one of my colleagues asked me to define podcast, I began to wonder what food and nutrition podcasts are currently available, particularly for dietetics students and practicing dietitians who might want to design their own summer school curriculum. One of the benefits of a podcast is you can download the course or show to your iPod or other MP3 player and listen to it while you run, cycle, hike or just lie on a blanket under a shady tree.

 Here is a beginning list I put together after doing a quick selective Google search.

Introduction to Human Nutrition (UC Berkeley)

Food, Ethics and the Environment - This five-part conference held at Princeton University in 2006 featured Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser as speakers.

All You Can Eat, the podcast of journalist and foodie Don Genova, whom you may already know from his CBC Radio features.

At this year’s Dietitians of Canada national conference, we scanned the horizon and learned what the future holds for dietetic practice.

My brain is brimming over with information that needs to be processed, my dining room table is groaning under the weight of handouts and product samples, and my inner drive is revved up with inspiration–all of this requires me to do some blogging!

 Posts to come on: (1) Silken Laumann’s keynote presentation, (2) the vision of our future practice, (3) the power of PEN, (4) vitamin D, (5) the inaugural meeting of the Vegetarian network.

“An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.”

Nutrition courses are available from these Consortium members:
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Tufts University