clinical nutrition

Today, we're going to look at who doctors are currently prescribing these medications for, how to use them while protecting nutrition, muscle, and overall health, what to make of microdosing and online prescribing, how to evaluate headlines about possible new uses, and what happens after someone reaches their goals.

To help us sort through all of this, I'm delighted to welcome back Dr. Vijaya Surampudi, an endocrinologist, chief of clinical nutrition, at UCLA Health.

Viji, welcome back to Medically Speaking.

I'm so excited to be here.

Ever.

Correct.

Um, have, have GLP-1s changed the way medicine, especially, you know, your field of endocrinology and clinical nutrition, how we're understanding obesity?

I think so.

You can educate people about what to eat and how to eat.

You just can't cross over into medical nutrition therapy because which means that you can't tell people what to eat for a specific medical disease condition or issue.

And also the other piece of it is we can't cross over into medical laws.

So that's what medical nutrition therapy is as well, where you can't provide nutrition as a treatment for a medical diagnosis because that requires a license.

So the reason why we have to deal with all of this is because there are these laws that say that only certain people who meet certain qualifications can do certain things.

But the good news is that as long as we don't cross over into the practice of dietetics in certain states where it's restricted, and we don't cross over into the practice of medicine or nursing or any of the other licensed medical professions, you are free to help people.

Now, what that means, though, is that you still can't violate the laws of other states.

So even if your business is based in Arizona, where I'm located, you still have to follow the laws of the state of Ohio, let's say.

We have Dr. Robert Kushner, who is professor emeritus of medicine and medical education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and former director of the Center for Lifestyle Medicine in Chicago.

He finished his residency internal medicine at Northwestern University And then he went on to complete a postgraduate fellowship in clinical nutrition and earned a master's degree in clinical nutrition and nutritional biology from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

He's a past president of the Obesity Society, the American Society for Parental and Internal Nutrition, and the American Board of Physician Nutrition Specialists, and a founder and first chair of the American Board of Obesity Medicine.

He's written tons of articles, books and books chapters, been involved in nutrition and medical education.

It's basically a two-hour online lecture that you just listen to and then give a little bullet summary, and then you're done.

Clinical nutrition is, is 10 years of education.

It's not...

It's very in-depth, right? It's not just general calories in, calories out stuff.

In fact, some diets are used as part of medical treatment, and that's what I'm covering today.

So I'm gonna cover what a therapeutic diet is, what medical nutrition therapy means, and some of the different dietary approaches you may have heard about, including gluten-free, heart-healthy, diabetes, renal, low FODMAP, and low sodium diets.

Now, these are very different from typical commercial diet plans that somebody is selling on Instagram or in a book.

The purpose is different, the goals are different, and sometimes the consequences of not following a therapeutic diet can be very different from simply not losing weight, th- not losing the weight you hoped you'd lose.

Or it might be to reduce the risk of complications from a disease.

And weight may or may not change along the way, and that's not necessarily the point.

And so this is where medical nutrition therapy, or what we call MNT, comes in.

Now, medical nutrition therapy is an evident- evidence-based approach to nutrition that uses individualized nutrition recommendations to help manage specific health conditions.

She sucked it down in a couple minutes flat and was ready to go to sleep.

Erin Kendrick is the clinical nutritionist at the National Zoo.

She had stocked up on elephant formula just in case, and Lin Mai was drinking it up, a good sign.

But after a few days, things started to change.