Nutrition students offer free evaluations, community coaching

Nutrition and Food Science majors at MTSU will receive an opportunity to earn hands-on experience and also help the community in the next few weeks.

MTSU is offering free nutrition evaluations and coaching sessions starting this week and lasting throughout the month of April. Multiple one-hour appointments are available at 4:45 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Thursday March 31, April 7, April 14 and April 21.

The sessions will be held on campus at the Cason Kennedy Nursing Building and will be open to all students, faculty, friends and family members. Interested clients can sign up for remaining available slots here.

Ginny Bogle

Students will assist clients in finding nutrition needs and will go over things such as understanding food labels, portion controls and nutrition knowledge imperative to maintaining or losing weight.

Instructor Ginny Bogle, who organized the event, is excited to give senior dietician students a chance to put their knowledge to the test.

“This will be our third or fourth time doing this and we always normally have a good turnout,” she said. “This course usually serves as our capstone class. Students will use things they learned as sophomores to lessons they learned as recently as two weeks ago.”

Bogle will serve as the dietician for the event and will oversee and assist students in finding potential clients’ nutrition needs. She said she hopes that each of the students participating will have at least one client each session.

“We have 26 students, in all, participating this year, and we would love each to have at least one client per session with a chance to maybe have a second.”

Bogle said the course, NFS 4305: Nutrition Coaching and Counseling, has always been one of her students’ favorite classes, and senior Amanda Molinar echoed those sentiments.

“I’m really excited. I think this is a really unique opportunity that this program offers the Nutrition students,” Molinar said. “A lot of other schools don’t get this opportunity, so it kind of gives us an edge over those other programs.”

The Nutrition and Food Science program is offered through the Department of Human Sciences in the College of Behavior and Health Sciences. For more information about the program, visit www.mtsu.edu/programs/nutrition.

For more information about the upcoming free nutrition evaluations and coaching, contact Bogle at Ginny.Bogle@mtsu.edu.

— Steven Michael Johnson (news@mtsu.edu)