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KARTA PURKH SINGH KHALSA: Thank you all very much for coming.
I'm really excited about this program because we were able to build it from scratch.
That's the great thing about starting fresh, is you can figure out
what's worked and what hasn't worked from other programs
and pull something together that meets the needs of the people
that we're expecting to be in the course.
So, this is me, and I'm the lead instructor.
I developed the curriculum for the course.
We have a number of other faculty members that are trained to teach
various of the weekends,
and they will be sprinkled in here and there.
I'll be doing most of the instruction,
but I'll be creating all of the, all of the curriculum.
Been in the natural healing field for 40 years
and I do a number of things,
have many various credentials and experience in different things.
I've been a dietician, nutritionist, for decades,
and so I participated in many nutritional therapy programs
and have designed curriculum for many of similar kinds of things.
I'm also an herbalist.
I'm the president of the American Herbalists Guild at this time.
So, I do a lot of work these days with industry;
consulting with manufacturers on regulatory matters
and international import/export laws,
and I'm up to my eyeballs in German legislation these days.
So, you know, a broad range of kinds of things like that.
I've had a private practice that entire time.
These days I don't do much in that.
I mainly teach and write, that sort of thing.
I've written or edited 30 books on these sorts of topics.
My specialty over time in this area has been the development of nutritional products,
so I've worked with a number of different companies to create...
it's in the hundreds, now...the products that you see on the health food store.
So I can usually walk into a health food store
and find at least one of my products that I've designed for somebody there.
So, I've had my feet in a lot of these different kinds of areas over time,
from working with people one to one to industry practices and legislation.
And, you know, I've managed to coexist with the FDA for 40 years.
So one way or another, I guess I've survived that, that battle.
I'm no longer in this position,
but for 30 years I was a senior research scientist and medicinal formulator
for Yogi Tea, the largest natural foods tea company in the, in the country.
And I founded Seattle's first holistic clinic. I founded that about...
well, let's see...1980, so that would be 31 years ago.
Now, we ran that for about 20 years and I'm no longer involved in that,
but that was a really interesting experiment
because it was an idea whose time had not yet come.
The idea of putting a bunch of natural healing professionals...
we had a medical doctor, a naturopathic physician,
massage therapist, acunpuncturist...just a team of people.
It sounded great on paper, but it was very challenging to get going.
So for 20 years we pulled that together and after, you know,
sort of leading the pack that entire time, are no longer doing it.
But now this idea is completely mainstream and you have these...
we just drove by a couple of them today on the way,
on the way in here and I noticed them, so...
That is where the future is going to be for many of you folks.
Those multi-disciplinary clinics are looking for qualified nutritionists,
and they call me and ask me, where can I get a nutritionist for my,
you know, for my programs.
So, there are people asking for people with the kind of credential
that you will be studying in this course.
So, let's talk about this course, and maybe we can fill in
some of the gaps with what Sheila was just mentioning.
So. Who are you, and why would you want to take this course?
This course is designed, as Sheila said, for adult learners.
It's for those who have a tightly packed schedule,
and we cram in all this material on the weekends.
They're pretty intensive weekends; two substantially long weekends,
college level material, and one weekend a month for the 12 months,
separated into the four modules for the four academic terms.
As Sheila said, you can take any of the...
you can take them in any order.
Theoretically you could take any weekend in any order
because you can attend each individual weekend,
but most people who want to get this credential would start
sometime during the year...Fall term, Winter term, Spring term...
and just continue right through until you'd rotated through the four terms necessary.
So there's no beginning or end to this program.
I've been teaching in this modular style for about 25 years now
and it's a little unusual to get used to.
It's not like taking Algrebra I and Algebra II and Algebra III.
But natural healing is such a wide ranging topic that there,
there's no good starting point, honestly.
Learning nutrition, yeah, you can start with a little chemistry.
But basically you have to dive in and start swimming,
and you always feel overwhelmed.
And then gradually you get a little more comfortable with the whole thing,
and everything relates to everything else so much in natural healing
that you've learned a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
and you build your knowledge base
and it's more like building a playground than a mansion.
You don't start with a foundation and build on it.
You kind of put pieces together until it all comes together to,
in a congruent whole.
Many of you said that you're already healing professionals
of one kind of another and that would be,
I suspect, a big chunk of the people that we'll end up with.
In the past, these kinds of courses in other institutions have ended up
being about half people who were already licensed in some profession...
massage therapist, nurses, physician's assistants, naturopathic physicians...
and about half people who are looking to start their careers.
So, I know from experience that that sounds like a strange mix;
people who are accomplished kitchen cooks and want to learn
how to feed their families and learn what vitamins are
in the food they're, they're giving, and physicians.
But honestly they come to a meeting of the minds pretty quickly
because these people have all had different kinds of training,
and just a person who's read a lot of natural healing books
before falling asleep at night is often just as up on current thinking
in nutrition as a physician.
So we put all that together and help everybody get to the same place eventually.
This course is very practically oriented.
We're going to be talking about how to deal with real people in the real world.
The great thing about this course in this community college structure
is that you're not going to be delivering babies and doing brain surgery.
You're going to be learning about how nutrition functions in the body;
how we can determine if people are healthy; how to get them healthy;
and how to keep healthy people even healthier for a lifetime.
So, we can strip away a lot of the things that everybody has to learn in medical school
and then promptly forget, and we're concentrating on the things
that are really going to work for you in, uh, in real life.
So, those of you that are professionals, it will be one more additional credential,
but very practically oriented for your, however you're going to then use it in the future.
For those that are looking to start a career
and want to get into the health field, health services are in the top 10 occupations
for the next generation for people who are looking for employment,
and who are likely to be able to get a job.
So in today's economy, we're all concerned
about actually using something that we learn.
This kind of course is a tremendous bargain for the time,
energy and money that you're going to put into, into it,
in a nice facility like this, you're going to get a credential
that you can actually use to go out and make money immediately
if you choose to, uh, if you choose to do that.
And holistic health is at the very top of the interest curve of this whole new trend.
So, we have the aging baby boomers, this huge demographic bulge
going through the population, who are now about to become geriatric.
And these people are not willing to just quietly go into the sunset
and get sick and die.
They want to stay young forever.
And you're the kind of people that are going to see them.
Since I've been doing this for 40 years my clientele has mainly been baby boomers like
me who have advanced through their ages along with me.
So I haven't been treating a lot of elderly people, because that generation of people
was not interested in these ideas.
But baby boomers have grown up around these ideas, and expect to be taking vitamins and
herbs and doing dietary therapy. It's completely normal.
And now we're seeing their children as clients. Those people grew up with that in their parent's
homes and they're completely comfortable with those ideas.
So, the days of having to convince people that there's something to
this are over.
People have the idea that really it's, uh, it's going to work well for them,
and they expect it to meet their needs,
and they're not arguing with you about whether or not there's validity.
Instead of asking if it will work, they ask how it will work, and what can I do.
How can I make broccoli and carrots work for me, and what vitamins should I take.
Many people think this course...not because they're interested in a career, per se...
we are orienting it toward career folks...
but we usually find that about a third of the class are there just for their own interest.
Maybe they have a collection of chronic health problems.
Maybe they just wanna stay healthy. Maybe they're, it's their hobby.
Maybe they watch Dr. Oz a lot and they want to get involved in,
you know, those kinds of ideas.
But that's, this material will be very applicable to your situation
and you can learn to apply it and stay healthy and, you know, remain healthy.
What's even more common is people that want to become the health practitioner for their
clan;
grandma, who wants to be able to take care of all the grandkids,
and all the aunties and uncles, and all the people on the block.
Like people used to do. If we go back three or four generations in our culture,
and still in every other culture in the world, there's some wise grannie in the family,
who learned from her grandmother who learned from her grandmother,
who knows all the healing tricks of that culture, and helps keep everybody in line.
And she...little Johnny wakes up with a cough,
she knows what to throw in his pancake batter.
We've lost that in our culture, but we're on the cusp of regaining that
as people like us, you know, learn about that.
I have three adult children. They all grew up with these kinds of ideas.
No kinds of issues about would they eat their spinach;
they've been eating their spinach since, you know, the day they knew what spinach was,
and we've never had a fight with any of them about eating a vegetable.
They take herbs and vitamins. They have their whole life.
It's a part of their life and they know that.
And now that they're beginning to have children, those children
are beginning to be, are, uh, living their life using these same kinds of ideas.
So we're gradually restoring this, you know,
sort of wise elder nutritionist for the clan idea.
So, if that's what you're thinking about, perfect for you.
So, some details about this, this program.
Let's talk about where you can go with this program
and what kind of career might be in store for you.
Most people that take this course initially are thinking
about some sort of private practice.
They're going into a wellness counseling situation.
I overheard as I was being...glued together,
the kinds of things that you were interested in,
and I think that many of you will find that being able to apply these principles
to your private practice will be be very appropriate.
People are seeking out nutritional therapy.
There's more demand than there is supply of nutritional therapists.
There are plenty of so called nutrition experts running around out there,
from the minimum wage high school kid in the health food store
where you, you know, go buy your vitamins, to someone who sells supplements
and took a weekend course, to people who are truly qualified.
And you folks are going to be one of those truly qualified people,
and we're going to give you professional level material that you can,
the day you walk out of class, you can begin to establish a practice
and gradually build a viable living for yourself.
And I've seen dozens and dozens or hundreds of people now
who have been able to do that.
And some people are very, very successful in private practice.
For others of you, private practice isn't going to grab you
and you're going to look to somehow use this
as ancillary to your career in some other way.
You can certainly get into education on the level of a, you know,
working with the dietiticians at a grade school,
or putting together menu plans for a hospital, or educa-,
teaching classes for people, teaching community college classes.
But the area of education is wide open.
I've been doing this, as I said, for 40 years.
We know it's possible to do because I've been doing it
and making a living doing that the whole, the whole time.
Retail is certainly very available. Retail stores that sell supplements
and foods are on the lookout for qualified nutritionists
to maybe run the nutritional supplement department,
or be the local nutrition experts that's on call
for when people want to know whether they should eat broccoli or carrots.
Or this new dietary rating scheme came out; how do I interpret that.
So, retail is always an area where we can sort of funnel people in.
And if that kind of thing grabs you, those, those kind of careers
are going to be opening more and more as people get more serious.
The last generation, health food store owners were pretty much
looking to just put some warm body in that position
and somebody they could pay minimum wage.
Now they're realizing that actually you will come back to their store
and patronize their store if they have somebody there
who knows what they're talking about and will help you out.
And maybe even will send you to another store rather than try
to sell you whatever they have on special.
You're going to really think that that store is someplace that you wanna patronize.
And that idea is finally penetrating, and stores are looking to hire credentialed people.
So, you're going to have, you know, Alice Smith,
board certified in holistic nutrition, on your shingle in the store.
That's exactly where they want to go with these, with these ideas.
You also might look at a career in industry
where you're the technical expert in some situation.
Maybe it's a manufacturing company. A distributor.
Some sort of a somebody who deals in these commodities of food or nutritional therapy.
Or maybe you're the person, the nutritional technical expert, for a grocery store chain.
And they just want to have somebody on hand to answer customer questions,
or to deal...to make sure their signage is correct, or that they,
you know, just all the technical aspects of those kinds of things.
And more and more, we're seeing people with these kinds of credentials
being slotted in those kinds of jobs.
The potential is tremendous for this kind of idea.
When I said I was up to my eyeballs in German legislation I wasn't kidding.
It's a small world now, and companies are dealing, you know, very much internationally.
And I doubt that this news penetrated with you
but the German government tried to ban cinnamon last Christmas season.
And of course the public just went crazy because, in Germany,
cinammon Christmas cookies are what everybody, you know, wants to eat.
And so it ended up not happening, but it was a whole,
ultra technical discussion about the properties of cinnamon,
and a bunch of lab rats, and it was, you know,
it's exactly the kind of thing you'd be perfect for.
So you would work for a company who was, you know,
maybe a cinnamon importer, or something like that, and, you know,
go head to head with the attorney general of the,
the Bavarian state in Germany, something like that.
But you can see how there are a lot of niches for technical experts
in these, you know, in these areas.
Industry in general is looking for people that are qualified in nutrition
to not only create products,
but also to do many other technical aspects of their specific industry.
What kind of machinery to buy.
How to verify that their machinery is, is creating the proper tablet size.
It's just, you know, the technical aspects of this are, are mindblowing.
So you're not going to be a mechanic,
but you're going to be the person that comes out and says, alright, you know,
this particular capsule has to have 100 milligrams of this substance in it.
How do we, you know...the guy running the machine
doesn't even know what a milligram is, so you're the person
they're going to turn to to answer these kinds of technical questions
on an even more sort of, you know, ground...boots on the ground kind of level.
Another area that's getting increasingly important is regulatory compliance.
As the FDA tightens up nutrition and nutritional therapy rules...
they just put out a new draft, draft a guidance document
about a week ago about nutritional supplements.
I don't know, have you seen at your local health food store
got email blast alerts about, you know,
don't let the FDA take away our nutritional supplements, that sort of thing?
But it's definitely a hot topic these days.
So, regulatory compliance is critical for companies.
I deal with the FDA on a regular basis.
And they need to know that their policies are being handled properly.
And they kind of do a company, and they dig back into the records,
and they walk up to a file cabinet and open up a drawer at random
and pull out a folder and, you know, take a look.
So, everything has to be in order. And this kind of education is ideal:
a broad spectrum nutritional education that will help you know the law
and help companies understand what to put on their boxes,
what they can say in their advertising, what they can say that will educate people
and go right up to the edge of what's allowed but not go over,
and it's an area that is very much in demand.
Very few people have the specialized ability to do that,
and you're going to be getting the broad spectrum education
that will allow you to be successful in that kind of a position.
Food regulation, even a little bit more kind of technical
and governmental kind of area.
Professional associations, like herb manufacturing associations
and food distributing associations, need regulation experts
to help them navigate this maze of the law and the FDA and, and commerce.
So, a long ways from sitting over a table, eyeball to eyeball with a sick person,
but equally a part of what nutritional therapy is all about,
and you'll have the credentials to be able to find that kind of a job
if that sort of thing is where your talent lies.
Quality control, always an important area.
So, we all want to make sure that, that one batch of nutritional supplements
is equal to the next batch, is equal to the next batch.
Or, the herb that comes in off the loading dock is the same herb every time.
Or that the active ingredients are consistent.
Quality control is, every company has it.
Everybody has to have it. We want them to have it.
Again, an area with a lot of potential.
So, the whole professionalism of this industry is ratcheting up;
partly because the public is getting more sophisticated about knowing what they want,
and partly because laws and regulations are becoming tighter.
So, as the whole industry matures, things like very tight quality control
are going to be necessary.
And the FDA just instituted what's called good manufacturing processes..
practices...which has been in the works for...17 years, and they finally initiated it just
now.
And they're going around to every supplement manufacturing company
in the country and making sure that their facility meets those needs.
So all of a sudden these companies are scrambling and saying,
hey, we're going to have the FDA in here in six months, we better,
you know, know that our processes are proper and our record keeping is proper.
So, there's a whole category of jobs right there that are waiting to be filled,
and these companies need qualified, qualified people.
Of course, basic R&D: creating actual products.
How, you know, some scientist makes a breakthrough,
looks great in lab rats, looks good in human studies,
but then how do we make that transition into actually going into the health food store
and creating a product that's going to work for people in the proper dose,
the proper price range, that sort of thing.
So, I've been in R&D for 40 years, and that's, you know,
generally speaking kind of the main crux of, of what I do.
I know there's demand for it, know it's possible to make a living doing that.
Import and export is another area that's going to be very important.
Most of the nutritional supplement ingredients and, in fact,
a good share of the food we eat in the United States is imported,
and we export also our share of many of those kinds of things.
So, just being able to read a label or understanding what a nutritional ingredient is,
or why one banana would be better than another,
is necessary in these kinds of situations.
And that industry is only growing as we, you know,
as our culture becomes more, more global.
So, it's not just becoming nutritional therapists to sit in a room
and deal with people that want to know what kind of granola to eat.
It's a wide range of possibilities for a career.
And every one of these areas is expanding
and has demand from the employment sector looking for people,
credentialed people, to be able to, to hold a job like this.
So you're competing against five other people in the nutrition industry,
and you have a credential as a nutritional therapist,
and you're board certified in holistic nutrition,
it's going to give you the advantage employement-wise.
Alright. So, this particular program Sheila was mentioning
that we just got approved by the National Association of Nutrition Professionals,
which is the professional organization that represents the interests
of professional nutritional therapists in America...it's like the AMA
is for medical doctors...and that would be the organization
that you would, you would like to join that organization
and then have them be your advocate.
Plus they offer a lot of nice benefits to you as a member
that would benefit you in your profession.
So, as Sheila said, once you graduate, you qualify to sit for the exam.
You'll have no trouble passing the exam. We've taught them extensively.
We will have exams in our classes; if you pass our exams,
we're very sure that you'll do fine in the, in the board exam.
And then ultimately you'll be called "Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition"
and you're off and running.
So, this course is 12 weekends. We mentioned that.
Sheila was talking about assessment, which is one of the weekend of the 12...
it actually comes up this Fall...is how do you know what a person's nutritional status
is?
Are they well or are they sick? How do you figure that out?
So we'll be discussing things like labs tests, and physical signs
and symptoms, and dietary analysis; all those kinds of things we do
to figure out how people, how well people are, and how to bring them
to wellness, or how to keep them well.
So that assessment piece is a big part. If you don't know what you're...
what needs to be done, then you can't figure out what to do.
We'll talk about how to assess a person's diet and how to determine whether or not
they have adequate nutrients in their diet, what needs to be shifted around,
what needs to change.
And we all know the dietary situation in America, so this is a place
where there's going to be a lot of emphasis and a lot of need in our culture.
Food therapy is one of the parts of this program that people usually
don't think of in our culture because food as therapy is a new idea here;
the idea that you can actually eat things to make yourself healthy.
We're not just talking about eating a healthy diet.
We're talking about using the bio-chemical product, uh, processes, ingredients,
properties of specific foods to help you treat particular illnesses.
So, a person has chronic gastritus or ulcers or, you know,
inflammatory gut disease of some type, we use things like cabbage juice
and carrot juice to treat those things and help actually treat their condition.
So we'll dive into those things using actual specific food to treaet particular illnesses.
Most of that information comes from other places because the United States
hasn't been very focused on those kinds of ideas until quite recently,
but there are rich traditions are using food to treat specific diseases in Ayurveda in
India,
in Chinese medicine, and European naturopathy; all those things are available to us now.
So we'll learn how to treat many specific diseases...
treating insomnia with celery juice...hundreds of examples.
So some of this information will come from traditional Chinese medicine,
from Chinese food therapy. Some will come from Ayurveda.
Those two systems, Chinese medicine and Ayurveda,
the holistic healing system from India,
are the two most sophisticated dietary program on planet Earth,
and they just looked at every possibility of what it's like to be human
and how to adjust that using diet.
So they're both very complex systems, Ayurveda being the,
sort of the pinnacle of this idea of complexity put together in a way...
it's complex on the level of a therapist, and yet it's simple enough
that grandmas master it and can use it at home.
Little Johnny has a tummy ache, they know what kind of a meal
to feed him to help his, his tummy ache.
So those complex...you know, you go to an Indian restaurant,
you never sit down to a salad or a bowl of steamed green beans.
Every dish has, you know, 40 ingredients.
And that's because those were originally herbal medicine therapies
that have been made edible... Not edible, but they've been made
delicious by adjusting the proportions in various kinds of spicing
so that people can eat for health and not just sort of, you know, randomly.
In our culture, you know, diet, our daily diet, is just sort of whatever
we bump into or feel like we might want to eat
or whatever tastes good or feels good when we eat it.
In Ayurveda, every meal is an opportunity to get in healing herbs,
and every opportunity to taste healing herbs is opportunity
to make them taste good by using nutritious foods.
So particularly in Ayurveda, but also in Chinese medicine,
there's no stark dividing line between food and medicine.
Here we wait til we get busted, we go to the fix-up guy,
we get something that, that you know, fixes us temporarily,
and then we go back to doing the very thing that got us sick
and made us go to the fix-up guy in the first place.
The idea is to help educate our clients about how to stay healthy
and use these things for therapy when they get off track.
So nutritional therapy for wellness, of course, is the bottom line
for all the things we're, we're going to do, using things like dietary supplements
and food to, even if people aren't having diseases, to be able to get well and stay
well.
A good share of our class material will be nutritional supplements.
So we'll go through a large variety of vitamins, minerals, amino acids,
those sorts of things, and just sort of A to Z learn those details
and how to be actually apply[ing] them.
One of the great things about our program is that everybody,
all the faculty are clinicians.
They're not somebody that works with rats in some ivory tower;
they're people that actually have worked with real people in real life
and have helped people get well, and they understand the concerns that people have.
Modern life, we're not going to spend all day in the kitchen,
yet we wanna have the benefits that come from
having grandma in the kitchen all day cooking for us.
So, how are we going to cross that divide and make it practical.
So we'll dive into all that in terms of nutritional supplements,
and cooking, and food for therapy.
We have a unit on each of the three...the big three, we call them...
the three main systems of herbal medicine in the United States;
the first being western herbalism, which is what most of us are familiar
with from the herbalism of North America co-mingled with that of Europe.
So, if you walk into Whole Foods, most of the herbs on the shelf
are going to be western herbs administered in a way that western herbalism uses them.
But we'll spend equal time discussing Ayurvedic herbalism from India,
an entire weekend on Ayurveda where we'll dive into the Ayurvedic world view,
food therapy, herbal medicine, like that, and an equal amount of time
spent in Chinese medicine; another whole weekend devoted to that.
We want to make sure that we don't just create a bunch of great technicians,
but that we train well rounded people who actually can make this work in real life.
I tell students every year that your success in this field
is about 10 percent being a technician and about 90 percent everything else.
So you can be the greatest nutritional technician that ever, you know, graduated,
but if you can't do things like figure out to set up your practice,
get people to come to their appointment, pay your taxes,
get your wastebasket emptied, and, you know,
deal with your attorney, you're still not going to be successful.
So we want to teach you about all those things so that you walk out
with a bag of tricks that is not just some book learning about vitamins,
but understands what real people do in the real world
and how to help them actually through those blocks to getting well
that are, as I said, 90 percent of your, your success.
So, it actually kind of works the other way too.
Many people with very successful practices aren't great technicians,
but they've developed all those other kinds of skills.
So, we'd love for you to be a very well educated technician
and also have things like counseling skills.
You might have great knowledge of technical, nutritional kinds of ideas...
you can draw chemical diagrams on the board all day long...
but you can't have an eye to eye conversation with someone
about their, you know, about their food.
We don't want to let you walk out the door with that kind of situation.
We wanna give you the skills that you need.
So we'll dig into the whole counseling skills situation.
We'll talk about how to take a health history, how to get,
pry information out of people, how to help, how to, uh,
conduct an interview so that you get the information
that you want in an efficient way. All those kinds of ideas.
We also need to talk about your business skills, and after all,
you're going into some kind of a business.
If you go into individual therapy you're going to be an entrepeneur
who runs your own business,
and you need to have some basic business skills to be able to do that.
But even if you end up being employed by some other entity,
you want to understand the basic business practices
that companies follow to be successful in your field.
So we'll dive into some of those kinds of business ideas.
One of the challenging things about nutritional therapy as a career
is that it doesn't have a career, a well-defined career path.
You know, if you graduate from medical school you...it's amazing,
you get your diploma in one hand, you walk out the door
and the red carpet is right there in front of you,
and you're just ferried right into your residency, internship residency,
and then a gold plated office on top of *** Hill,
and you're a multi-milliionaire in the first year. [laughter]
Nutritional therapists, a little more humble.
So, there's no well-defined career path.
You know that the statistics for chiropractors...
now that's a field that is considerably more advanced...
the chiropractic is about 100 years old and it's now legal in all 50 states,
but it was a hundred year fight to get to that place.
All your insurance pays for it now,
but it was the outside 100 years ago like nutritional therapy is now.
And chiropractors of, of the...those that start chiropractic school, 50 percent graduate.
Of those who graduate only 50 percent actually ever even start a practice.
Can you believe that, spending $150,000 for an education
and then not ever even practicing?
Because they just can't get over the hump of renting office space,
figuring out how to start a practice, going through all the paperwork,
actually steeling themselves to deal with real sick people in the real world.
So now we're down to 25 percent of the people who enroll,
and then of that 25 percent, only 50% actually make a viable career out of it.
So, even a career as established as chiropractic,
that everybody's insurance pays for and is legal in 50 states,
only 12 percent actually, you know, by the end of their career
are still practicing that field that they enrolled in originally.
So, there's a lot of, sort of momentum for you to deal with.
So, the people that do well in this course are sort of self starting people,
entrepreneurial minded self starter people who want to blaze their own trail,
do things the way they want to do it.
But the beautiful thing about it is that it's a developing field
that's not restricted by a bunch of regulations that are sort of, you know,
locked into stone now over 100 years.
We're going to make history.
We're going to decide how this whole field develops;
how it gets legalized, how it gets credentialed, the government regulations.
And we're going to do that through professional associations
like the NANP who are going to advocate for us.
So, if you'd like to get in on the ground floor
of a tremendously promising career where you set the agenda,
these kinds of para-professional developing careers are the way to go.
Alright, so anyway, business skills, and then we'll help you develop
your career as you get into the profession.
So this term, starting Fall 2011, we have three weekends, three classes.
The first is nutritional assessment. So, well, it's fitting that we start
with the class that helps us determine what needs to be done.
So we'll look at a wide variety of ways to figure out that person in front of you,
how are they doing, from dietary questionnaires to dietary, um...journals.
Lab tests. Like that.
Food therapy. So using actual food to treat real disorders,
that's an entire weekend coming up Fall term.
And then our third weekend is life cycles, which is where we deal
with particular population groups in our...in the people around us.
So, pediatric nutrition, geriatric nutrition, and nutrition for women
compared to men. Various age groups. Various other life stages. Ethnicities.
You know, populations with particular, you know, kinds of issues.
Maybe ethnic groups that have certain kinds of genetic this or that.
Anyway, these kinds of, focusing on these kinds of groups
and how they need to be handled differently.
So an entire weekend discussing that whole situation.
So, weekends 1,2,3, you've got the first module.
Remember, you don't have to start any particular place, even though
the courses starting with the Fall, that's kind of a natural place
to start an academic course, the school year starts.
But that's not...there's no particular place you have to start.
There's another weekend of food therapy coming up later in the year.
They're not sequential. They can be taken independently,
and any of these things can be taken independent of any of the others.
So, the reality is just that, you know, again, it's not like learning algebra.
It's something that you can learn pieces of and put together,
and your understanding sort of builds in a kind of a holistic way;
rather it's not like staircase, you know. It's more like a, operating a farm.
I don't know how many metaphors I can come up with for this
but I think you get the idea. [laughter] Alright.
So, there we are. That's in a nutshell what we're all about.
We'd love to have you join us. I think it's going to be a great, real exciting program.
The nice thing about taking this course at PCC is that my experience
with PCC is that it's been a top notch experience for me.
It's a school that, you know, Sheila runs an excellent department.
It's a tight ship here. They do great work.
They've got numerous awards for their excellence in education.
And CLIMB is specifically about enhancing professional studies,
so you're not just kind of lost in the bureaucracy.
You're in this little kind of sub unit run by excellent administrators with great facilities.
So I think you'll like just being in the environment of it
and dealing with the people that you, that you deal with.
And of course our faculty is top notch.
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