5 Serves of Emerging Information from the ICD

A student’s perspective of the ICD- in Retrospect

To prevent my brain from exploding, I would like to dish out five newly acquired facts from the ICD onto your plate.

1. It has been found that 85% of children that live in Ireland eat potato chips every week and the average intake is 410g per week!

2. The rates of food insecurity in the far north reserves of Canada is extremely high- approximately 75% of people don’t have access to enough food at certain times of the year. Indigenous Canadians are a particularly vulnerable group. This is mainly a result of ‘winter roads’ which are only open 6-8 weeks each year.

3. Has anyone heard of the proteus effect? I hadn’t until I attended ‘Weight loss using the web: evidence and opportunities to advance practice’. Apparently this situation occurs when an individual operates under a ‘digital persona’ in virtual world. It has been found that an individual’s behaviour (in reality) is likely to conform to this digital self-representation. For example, if a person sees their own virtual avatar running on the treadmill or filling their shopping trolley with fruits and veg, they are more likely to undertake this behaviour in real life. Confused? Check out http://cluboneisland.com/ to learn more about this online virtual world of weight loss. 

4. I have been trying to wrap my head around ‘nutrigenomics’… and I am still processing this. Hence, I went straight to the DAA website to find out:

“Nutrigenomics uses a persons’ unique genetic information to reveal their risk of disease and can be used to develop individualised eating plans to lower disease risk and improve health.”

Our old friend Sylvia Escott-Stump (one of the authors of Krause) delivered an extremely detailed symposium of this, which brought me back to the days of biochemistry.  This technology is currently available in the USA will be available to dietitians in Australia in the future. Using this tool will give us the opportunity to personalise eating plans to meet an individual’s GENETIC needs, thus preventing diseases long before they occur. Welcome to the future.

5. Alright kids, there is now an established link between sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs), salt intake and risk of obesity is children. This mechanism is thought to function through increased salt intake in a child’s diet, causing a rise in plasma sodium levels, leading to thirst. Kids these days are more and more likely to quench this thirst with widely available soda, vitamin water, fruit drinks and the rest of them (pretty much everything BUT milk and water), causing increased energy intake and promoting fat storage. This has been found in studies conducted in Australia, the UK and the US. One study found that 64% of children consume SSBs everyday. With every 1g salt consumed in a child’s diet, there is a 32g increase in SSB consumption.

INNOVATING! Thoughts?

Holly Harris

Student Dietitian