What is the difference between what dietitians do and what nutritionists do?
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The key difference besides the licensure of RD that everyone else has mentioned is that Dietitians are legally allowed to provide medical nutrition therapy, which essentially consists of nutritional prescriptions for chronic/acute conditions while a nutritionist can only provide much more broad advice and would need to defer to an RD for something like that
Nothing, except the dietician completed a degree in nutrition to be able to give good nutrition advice. The nutrititionist *might* be giving good nutrition advice … but you lack any way of judging their reliability.
It’s like if you wanted to hire a mechanical engineer. You’d probably try to find one with a degree, because that degree means they studied the relevant coursework, and also demonstrated their knowledge of that coursework to hold the degree. That’s pretty much the point of a degree. Of course, you could hire someone without a degree who claims to have engineering knowledge – but you lack any way of determining whether they’re competent.
And, notably, because mechanical engineering degrees *do* exist, then if someone has a working knowledge of mechanical engineering, but doesn’t have any certification of that knowledge, it’d be reasonable to ask why that person did not pursue certification of some sort to demonstrate the knowledge they claim to have. So too, you have to wonder why a nutritionist does not pursue a degree in nutrition if they know about nutrition – it’d let them list themselves as a dietician, and not be confused with all the pseudo-scientists who call themselves “nutritionists”.
This is all very interesting to me. I am a licensed social worker and in most US states now “social worker” is title-protected and you cannot call yourself one without an accredited degree and passing a certification (bachelors level) or licensing exam (most masters). Other “human services (totally unregulated curricula) or criminal justice folks get very upset when social workers point out these are not all the same. But I’ve supervised teams with certified social workers alongside somewhat adjacent professions (all doing the same job), and there is a difference. Of course there is variability and overlap w/skills and professional framework, but in general there are obvious differences.
So I think after reading this I can get where it’s coming from.
I’ll throw another question, why is it that in the US the licensed profession is called dietitian, while here in Brazil, there is only nutritionists(europe too, i think ?). The term dietitian here is quite shunned among professonals(nutritionists)…
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