Before we begin, you need to know the real basic food groups
(“real” refers to my own world, and it is common knowledge among my children and
grandchildren that I am weird) are:
Chocolate,
Peanut Butter,
Cookies, and
Coffee
You should also know that I have been “underweight” (within normal
range) my entire life, so few people want to know my advice on weight management [read weight loss],
even with my ability to maintain a stable, slightly below average weight for my entire adult life. At a
health screening at a technical college where I taught preNursing classes, the doctor reviewing the
results for me stated, “You're disgustingly healthy for a man your age” [at that time I
was in my late fifties], because I scored 98 on a scale of 1 to 100. It was a medical doctor
discussing the results of medical [wellness] testing, so I take it to be a ‘diagnosis’
that I am disgustingly healthy. When I took the “RealAge Test”
[RealAge®] I scored − 6 years compared to my calendar
age [at the time, mid 60's]. My advice on wellness, based on multiple degrees in Biology [BA, Botany,
Zoology & French, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS; MA, Botany, Columbia University, New York
NY; PhD, Biology (Ecology), University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN] and personal experience, may
be considered to be sound.
Throughout these lectures, Anything in this font style is
jargon and will be followed by the definition of the word as I am using it.
If you wish to succeed in this course, it is important to follow the
directions! You are expected first to read the lecture; then to take the quiz using the text and
other references (either in print or on the web) to prepare your answer [cite references other than
the lecture]. If you are unclear about what the question is, after trying to decipher it on your
own, ASK by e-mail to the professor. It has been documented, and
statistically confirmed, that there is a direct correlation between the effort you put into
the course work and the amount you can expect to Learn [& therefore
your grade, and I suspect that I don't have to explain what I
mean by ‘your grade,’ except that in the test population for the statistical confirmation
of the conclusion that effort causes grades, the grade distribution on the final paper was 74% B-
or better; no C+; only 2% C; no D; and 24% F]. This is what is meant by “independent
study” at the College level. If this sounds like a lot of work, you understand correctly; if it
sounds like more work than you are willing to put in, contact the Registrar about changing to an
in-class section of the course. I do NOT wish to scare you off; those students who have
‘stuck it out,’ report that they "learned more from this course than any other on-line
course [they] have taken!"
The premise of this course is that Health Care practitioners ought to be
engaged in promoting wellness, and that proper nutrition contributes to
wellness. My definition of “wellness” is that it leads to a longer life expectancy with
high quality life throughout the patient's life span. A more common definition involves concepts
such as “absence of illness.” Understand, I have no objection to the absence of illness.
As an aside, life expectancy is defined as the age at which 50% of an
even-aged population will die; while life span is the maximum age which
Humans can reach at death [probably set at least in part by genetics]. Currently the maximum
recorded [Guiness Book of Records] life span is 122 years and a few months, set by a French
woman who smoked for only 98 years [age 14 to 112], and who is the poster child for the French
Paradox: the French are well known for their bad habits, yet tend to avoid cardiovascular disease.
Another group famous for avoiding cardiovascular disease are Orientals who have few bad habits, and
who eat undercooked vegetables. You will hear more about these groups later.
The medical profession is just beginning to realize that it is possible to make money
on wellness.
Dentistry figured this out many years ago: rather than waiting for patients to develop caries, you
expect them to come in every 6 months to visit the Hygienist. Best practices for treating wellness
suggest that patients ought to have semi-annual wellness check-ups, complete with appropriate lab
work. Professors who teach Nutrition classes dream that wellness check-ups would be an excellent
opportunity for nursing education concerning nutrition. The role of nutrition and other life style
choices will be a recurrent theme through these “lectures.”
We shall review enough A & P to understand the Biology of nutrition. As we cover
the various classes of nutrients, you will gain knowledge which will assist you in your analysis of
an actual patient's diet for the final exam. Obviously, if you are going to analyze a patient's diet,
you will need data concerning the patient's diet. Here we are using diet
in the sense of a record of what the patient ate during some past time interval. You will collect
total food intake data for seven (7) consecutive days, although the software I asked you to buy
defaults to 3 days. Over short periods (such as 1 to 3 days) the patient will pretend that your
advice is not to be taken seriously, because “that's not what they normally eat.”
Over a longer time frame (such as 7 days), the patient cannot pretend that this is not what they
normally do. Also, if you would consider asking a patient to track their food intake [say for weight
management], you need to know first hand just how annoying that becomes after a few days; and why
patients in weight management programs that require accounting for food consumption over months to
years tend to lie, then fabricate their accounts, and finally stop showing up!
You will have 25 daily “quizzes” (typically two per week). The quizzes
are designed to provide the students with opportunities to learn and to apply Liberal Arts college
skills such as Critical Thinking and application of knowledge to “new” situations
[translated to English this means that the answers are often (or usually) not in the lectures nor the
text]. Other quizzes will be assignments which will give you hands-on experience with the lecture topic
(in education terms this is called the discovery method wherein the
students discover the answer for themselves; and underlying approach to learning/teaching is called the
Constructivist method). Either way they will count as quizzes for grading
purposes. The quizzes are in webpage format, so you will not be able to answer the questions on-line.
You will have to retype the question on your reply, answer it and then e-mail your answers to [professor@twooldguys.com] as an attachment. For the more computer literate among
you, you can highlight the question, press Ctrl-c to copy it, then move to your Word document and press
Ctrl-v to paste it into your document. If you don't have Microsoft Office on your computer, and don't
want to buy it, you can download a free word processor, spreadsheet (and
other Office-like programs) from Open Office [this is the suite
of ‘office’ programs I use]. You may find my quiz questions to be confusing at times; this is
intentional because one of the first steps in answering a question using Critical Thinking (a skill
generally accepted as important in a Liberal Arts education), is to determine “what” the
question is. In an interview of Albert Einstein, genius, the interviewer asked, “How can you come
up with answers to such difficult questions?" Einstein is said to have replied, “I don't. I find
simpler questions.” If you still don't know what the question asks, you can always ask me what I
think I want as an answer, and I will try to guide you toward the answer.
The twice weekly “lectures” are webpages of text written in my lecture
sytle. It was my intent in writing the lectures as I did to give you the feel of attending an actual
lecture, but without the exchange of student comments and questions. I am looking into the technology
needed to provide the interactive aspect of the lecture, but have not yet implemented that feature on
my website. You may, of course, e-mail any questions to me [professor@twooldguys.com] at any time
during the course. My answer to any questions which I believe are of general interest to the class will
be sent to the entire class, while those I beieve to be ‘private’ will go only to the person
asking the question (because the reply will disclose the name, & email address of the person asking
the question. You will find my lectures to “stray” onto tangents, seemingly unrelated to the
subject; this is part of the Constructivist approach to education. Applying Piaget's Theory of How
Humans Acquire knowledge requires the instructor to cause just enough confusion in the students to
motivate them to learn the material (into Long-Term memory); if the students are not confused, they
will (according to Piaget)erroneously conclude that they already “know” the material and will
not invest the intellectual effort necessary to learn it [More Liberal Arts curriculum basics]. In
memory-courses, students hold knowledge in Short-Term memory until they need it (for the tests), then
promptly discard it from memory. My course is designed to move the knowledge into long-term memory
(more often than not, without the students realizing that they “learned!”
The required text, Brown's Nutrition Now, is intended as your primary source of knowledge, while the lectures are intended to assist you in identifying what to concentrate on while reading. The suggested texts, Roizen & Oz's books can provide a very readable discussion of wellness issues and strategies for the general population [You, the owner's manual]; for the adult population with weight issues [You, on a diet]; and for the older adults concerned with quality of life in their senior years [You, staying young]. I suggest that you use the text which best covers the population you hope to treat when (not “if”) you complete your Nursing degree and Board exam [but remember that even fetuses and new born children are Humans with nutritional needs].
See QUIZ 1 [week 1 day 2] for details.
Select a patient... (patient confidentiality requires that you do
not disclose the patient's identity to me)
Obviously, it will take 7 days to collect 7 days worth of data. Therefore, this assignment will not be due until week 3.
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