Counseling Vegan Clients - Ten Helpful Strategies
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With the rise in curiosity for plant-based diets, there is a higher chance that a registered dietitian will be encountering vegan clients. Vegan is a subcategory of vegetarian, where someone abstains from one or more animal products. In a vegan diet, all animal products and by-prodcuts are avoided. This generally involves diet, but can also extend to clothing, beauty products, etc. depending on the various motivations behind the lifestyle shift. These are the ten most helpful tips when counseling vegan clients.
1. Know the type of vegetarian or vegan you are counseling. Some may consume fish, but no other meat. Some may avoid all flesh, but still consume dairy and eggs. Some avoid eggs, some avoid dairy. And vegans avoid all animal products.
2. Understand the vegetarian's motivations. A vegetarian/vegan may include one or more of these reasonings as motivators for their diet: health, animal rights, animal conditions, and sustainability are the most common motivations.
3. Build rapport and trust. It is important to know the specific types of diets in order to be able to recommend foods that the client will actually consume. It allows for good rapport building when a dietitian is already knowledgeable about a client's diet before they come to see them.
4. Use evidenced-based resources. The Academy has a Vegetarian practice group with evidence-based handouts and counseling information for vegetarians and vegans of all ages and genders.
5. Learn about vegan client's resources. It is a good resource to use and will help deter clients from referring to bloggers on the internet who are not qualified to educate people on vegan diets. Using evidence-based information will help dispel any incorrect information the client may bring to sessions.
6. Keep it simple. Using recipes with whole foods will provide vegetarian and vegan clients with proper nutrition and variety in meals.
7. Think outside the box to meet vegan needs. Eat smaller amounts of nutrients dense foods, more often. Address common concerns, misconceptions, and provide solutions on how to get the different nutrients needed from various plant based foods.
8. Focus more on serving sizes, less on calories. Recommended daily servings of food groups change for vegans. Recommended is 10 servings of fruits/vegetables daily to help compensate for the foods that are not eaten.
9. Check for other food restrictions. Personal over-restricting due to parent companies, company practices, and pesticides can lead to worse health issues than consuming the "bad" foods. Educate clients on this concept so that the abundance of proper nutrient intake is at the forefront rather than focusing on restricting.
10. Recommend a B-12 supplement. While some plant foods may be supplemented in processing or may contain trace amounts of B-12, but not enough to meet the 2.4 mcg requirement for adults, per day.
Even if a dietitian does not necessarily agree with the lifestyle/diet choices of a client, it is important to be well versed in vegan diets, as well as other diets since we are considered nutrition experts. It is also important to use the science-based background we have to educate our clients and to help them achieve the best nutrition possible, and to prove that we are in fact nutrition experts.
http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/1017p20.shtml
DU
With the rise in curiosity for plant-based diets, there is a higher chance that a registered dietitian will be encountering vegan clients. Vegan is a subcategory of vegetarian, where someone abstains from one or more animal products. In a vegan diet, all animal products and by-prodcuts are avoided. This generally involves diet, but can also extend to clothing, beauty products, etc. depending on the various motivations behind the lifestyle shift. These are the ten most helpful tips when counseling vegan clients.
1. Know the type of vegetarian or vegan you are counseling. Some may consume fish, but no other meat. Some may avoid all flesh, but still consume dairy and eggs. Some avoid eggs, some avoid dairy. And vegans avoid all animal products.
2. Understand the vegetarian's motivations. A vegetarian/vegan may include one or more of these reasonings as motivators for their diet: health, animal rights, animal conditions, and sustainability are the most common motivations.
3. Build rapport and trust. It is important to know the specific types of diets in order to be able to recommend foods that the client will actually consume. It allows for good rapport building when a dietitian is already knowledgeable about a client's diet before they come to see them.
4. Use evidenced-based resources. The Academy has a Vegetarian practice group with evidence-based handouts and counseling information for vegetarians and vegans of all ages and genders.
5. Learn about vegan client's resources. It is a good resource to use and will help deter clients from referring to bloggers on the internet who are not qualified to educate people on vegan diets. Using evidence-based information will help dispel any incorrect information the client may bring to sessions.
6. Keep it simple. Using recipes with whole foods will provide vegetarian and vegan clients with proper nutrition and variety in meals.
7. Think outside the box to meet vegan needs. Eat smaller amounts of nutrients dense foods, more often. Address common concerns, misconceptions, and provide solutions on how to get the different nutrients needed from various plant based foods.
8. Focus more on serving sizes, less on calories. Recommended daily servings of food groups change for vegans. Recommended is 10 servings of fruits/vegetables daily to help compensate for the foods that are not eaten.
9. Check for other food restrictions. Personal over-restricting due to parent companies, company practices, and pesticides can lead to worse health issues than consuming the "bad" foods. Educate clients on this concept so that the abundance of proper nutrient intake is at the forefront rather than focusing on restricting.
10. Recommend a B-12 supplement. While some plant foods may be supplemented in processing or may contain trace amounts of B-12, but not enough to meet the 2.4 mcg requirement for adults, per day.
Even if a dietitian does not necessarily agree with the lifestyle/diet choices of a client, it is important to be well versed in vegan diets, as well as other diets since we are considered nutrition experts. It is also important to use the science-based background we have to educate our clients and to help them achieve the best nutrition possible, and to prove that we are in fact nutrition experts.
http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/1017p20.shtml
DU
This post is helpful to me because I have come across vegetarian clients during my rotations but have not counseled a vegan client yet. I did not realize that servings of fruits and vegetables would be higher, but it makes sense; it was not something I had thought about until reading it. I thought the tip about considering the motivation for the client to change to this lifestyle was helpful because sometimes we want to jump right to the recommendations and skip the reasoning behind them. When we look at the reasons why people make a certain lifestyle change, we can really focus our guidance towards their specific needs.
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