Nutrition and Dietetics University Courses

The nutrition and diet courses currently offered by domestic universities, whether they are public elective courses for all students or basic courses for food, public health, and nursing majors, are essentially "practical courses to combat health anxiety" - neither a test-oriented course that requires you to memorize knowledge points, nor a vocational training that can quickly make you a registered dietitian. The core goal is to help ordinary people establish dietary decision-making logic that suits their own conditions, and avoid the various diet rumors on the Internet.

Last year, when I was helping a teacher of a public elective course at the Food College of an agricultural university organize final assignments, I came across a particularly interesting assignment: a girl from the Chinese Department attached a diary of her dysmenorrhea for three years. She said that she had followed the online guide and drank two large cups of brown sugar and ginger tea every time she came. The pain was so painful that she broke into a cold sweat. The situation was not relieved at all. I tested my blood sugar tolerance in class and discovered that I have a body with a high blood sugar response. The added sugar in brown sugar will actually aggravate the body's inflammatory response. After switching to a magnesium supplement + whole grain breakfast, the score of menstrual pain dropped directly from 8 points to 2 points in half a year.

Nowadays, this kind of courses in domestic colleges and universities actually follow two completely different ideas. No one is right or wrong, but the groups they target and the focus are different. One type is taught by teachers with backgrounds in the public health system. The core is anchored on the universal standards of the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents". The lectures are very down-to-earth. They like to use the dishes in the school cafeteria as examples: for example, the Kung Pao Chicken Rice Bowl at the second window only has 100g of vegetables, which is still 200g short of the daily minimum standard. After eating, it is best to go to the cold dish window to order a cold spinach. ； There is too much salt in the free soup in the cafeteria. Drinking one bowl is equivalent to eating 1g more salt. If you are afraid that the sodium exceeds the standard, take two sips less. The other type is taught by teachers in the field of clinical nutrition and sports nutrition. They emphasize individual differences and will not impose uniform standards on you. I once took a public elective course at a medical university, and the teacher directly put my grandmother's diabetes diet record on the big screen: "Don't believe the Internet that says people with diabetes cannot touch fruits at all. My grandmother eats half a kiwi at 3:30 every afternoon, and her blood sugar has not fluctuated for three years. The core is that you need to understand your own blood sugar response and control the amount and time of intake."

Some people have always said that this kind of class is a mixed-credit course. I met a boy from the computer department before. When he chose this class, he really took it for the credit. He was prepared to fish in class and submit a paper at the end. However, in the first class, the teacher asked everyone to record three days of food records in advance, and faced the camp on the spot. When he used a calculator to calculate his macronutrient intake, his habit of three bottles of iced Coke a day was discovered on the spot. The teacher did the math for him: one bottle of Coke has 35g of added sugar, three bottles is 105g. In one year, just drinking Coke alone has consumed 76 kilograms of added sugar, which is heavier than the weight of his entire suitcase. This guy went back and directly changed his usual Coke to sugar-free sparkling water. At the end of the semester, he specifically told the teacher that his face, which had always suffered from acne before, was now mostly healed.

Controversial diets such as ketogenic, vegetarian, and intermittent fasting, which are currently popular on the Internet, are rarely beaten to death as soon as they are introduced in class. When I was in class before, the teacher directly posted two opposing studies from core journals: One was a study from Peking University Public Health, saying that a short-term ketogenic diet can help obese people quickly lose weight and improve insulin resistance. ； Another article is a clinical follow-up by Union Medical College, saying that people who maintain a ketogenic state for more than a year have a 23% increased risk of cardiovascular disease. There was no standard answer, so we were asked to discuss in groups, and in the end we only gave a reference conclusion: There is no perfect diet in this world, there is only a plan that suits your current physical condition and living habits. If you are preparing to lose fat in a competition recently, you can try ketosis in the short term. If you have gallbladder disease, don’t join in the fun.

The biggest change for me after taking this kind of class is not that I have become an "eating obsessive" who counts calories every time, but that I finally no longer have to be carried away by online health anxiety: before, I always thought that healthy eating meant eating salads and grass. Now I know that my daily protein needs are 60g. I eat an extra boiled egg in the morning. I don't eat high-sugar cookies when I'm hungry in the afternoon. I switch to a handful of plain almonds. During this year's physical examination, my LDL dropped directly by 0.3mmol/L. These are small changes, but they are much more effective than following the online guide.

Oh, by the way, many schools now add offline practical sessions to these classes. I went to our school’s practical class last week. The teacher taught us how to read food ingredient lists. He also brought his own baked oatmeal cookies without additives, which are more delicious than those sold outside with a bunch of non-dairy cream added. There was also a boy from the Department of Civil Engineering at the scene. He said that after finishing school, he would cook a fat-reducing meal for his girlfriend who was losing weight, and he would no longer have to be scolded, "You're just going to eat this boiled vegetable for me?" 」, anyway, after all, this course never teaches advanced nutrition knowledge, it just teaches you how to eat well and don't be cut off by random rumors.