Jimmy Louie

Well, to start talking about dietetics, I think I better start with asking a question,

“Why do you want to study dietetics or be a dietitian?”

If the first answer come up in your mind is “help people to lose weight”, then either you should seriously rethink about dietetics, or you actually are not suitable for the dietetics career.

As mentioned previously, dietetics does not simply equal to slimming. It aims at promoting healthy eating habit among the population, as well as providing good nutrition knowledge and support to those with clinical conditions, e.g. diabetes, cancer, etc. Losing weight is ONLY one of the fields in dietetics , though its importance is increasing due to our changing lifestyle.

So having made you to rethink about dietetics, I will talk about the paths to dietetics career in the next entry.

As some of you may have known, nutritionist and dietitian refer to different professionals in western countries, where the title “dietitian” is under regulation by law.

However, in Hong Kong, there are lots of confusions about these 2 titles, not only because we don’t have a law to regulate the use of the above titles, but also because we usually use Cantonese to communicate, and the translations of the above two titles are quite confusing.

Making the situation even worse, as mentioned previously, there is currently no law to regulate the use of the titles Dietitian/Nutritionist. Therefore even a BA/BEng graduate can claim himself/herself to be a dietitian or nutritionist! And it happened most that some of the “Nutritionists” have only passed a short course or a certificate course in nutrition. Have a look in the job ads hiring a nutritionist. Most of them only require the applicant to have completed Form 5. How much nutrition knowledge would you expect a F.5 graduate to have?

After such long paragraphs, what are the differences between dietitian and nutritionist then?

Basically, dietitians are professionals that, besides basic nutrition knowledge, trained in medical nutritional therapy and have passed clinical dietetic placement. Nutritionists, are professionals that are trained with sound nutrition knowledge, but they did not pass a clinical dietetic placement. As an FNS student/graduate, one may present himself/herself as a nutritionist after graduation, but not as a dietitian.

In the sense of “slimming”, which is one of the most popular careers that FNS graduate may pursue, dietitians and nutritionists should have similar level of knowledge. However, if the client is complicated with medical condition, a nutritionist would not be able to modify the prescribed diet according to his/her needs and may result in severe consequences. Also, it is unlikely that a dietitian would prescribe a diet that causes harm to the clients’ health, while you can find quite a lot of news about so called “Dietitian” prescribing a diet that is problematic.

Therefore, if your ultimal goal is to help people to lose weight, you don’t really need to further your study in dietetics, because what you have learnt from your Nutrition Bachelors degree should enable you to do so.

This information is valid for both who is still studying in HKU or who have already graduated.

To become a registered/accredited dietitian (referred as dietitian afterwards) and be eligible for employment by the Hospital Authority (HA), you will need either a Bachelor’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics, or have finished a postgraduate course of dietetics or related discipline. Both of them should include clinical placement not less than a semester length.

There is currently no bachelor’s level dietetic curriculum offerred by the local universities, and the only way to become a dietitian locally will be pursuing the postgraduate diploma/Master of Science in Human Nutrition and Dietetics offerred by the HKUSPACE. However, due to lack of clinical placement offers from the local hospitals, the College had changed the course structure. All applicants for the PgD Dietetics have first to be enrolled in PgD Human Nutrition, and ONLY after satisfactory performance in the PgD Human Nutrition the student could transfer to PgD Dietetics and then MSc Human Nutrition and Dietetics. What is the implication for this? Obviously, you are NOT guranteed a dietetic degree/diploma after enrollment into PgD Human Nutrition.

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