Have Registered Dietitians Lost Their Usefulness?

The registered dietitians in the United States are certainly following the rest of the world. In Australia and South Africa, dietitians have restrictions on what they may teach and it is not low-carb/high-fat. Many areas of the world have it worse than we do because we have free speech. Many countries do not have this guaranteed and people who oppose what the Dietetic Associations are promoting are being punished for their opposition.

We all remember what happened to the registered dietitian in Australia – she was terminated from her position and stripped of her title.

Dietitians globally have long sought to appropriate to themselves a monopoly on diet and nutrition advice. It’s as if they’ve always believed their degrees confer a divine right to tell others what to eat and drink and an omniscience by osmosis on optimum nutrition. Doctors have colluded by deferring to dietitians, and referring patients to them for weight loss, diabetes and other serious illness.

Government regulatory bodies globally, such as the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), have effectively sanctioned dietitians’ stranglehold on dietary dogma and input into official dietary guidelines. These guidelines are still in place in SA, and have been shown to be without any scientific foundation whatsoever when they were unleashed on an unsuspecting public globally 40 years ago.

The dietary guidelines finally published by the USDA show that science takes a back seat to political policy. Read this by Adel Hite. It is a shame that science is ignored and that the same garbage is promoted as healthy, when we know that obesity is continuing to get worse because of these guidelines.

Then there’s the global phenomenon of ‘cozy relationships’ many dietitians and their associations have with the food and pharmaceutical industries, especially sugar, soft drink and cereal companies. Yes, the dietitians are proud of their conflicts of interest and promote what they are requested to promote.

The global dietitian mantra hasn’t helped its own cause with dogged adherence to the now thoroughly discredited diet-heart hypothesis, including the demonization of saturated fat and the belief that low-carb, high-fat (LCHF, aka Banting) diets are a danger to the public, especially children, and that sugar and soft drinks can be part of healthy, ‘balanced’ diets, despite growing and compelling scientific evidence to the contrary.

For those of us with diabetes, we need to bypass the dietitians and use our blood glucose meters to discover what works for us and what the dietitians cannot teach us.

Finally, I urge you to read the following reference.