The emergence of dietitian profession is to meet the needs of social health. Nutritionist is a comprehensive profession, which combines the characteristics of chefs, health professionals, medical practitioners, practitioners of Chinese medicine, psychologists, marketers and administrators. They are not only experts in food, but also experts in nutrition detection, nutrition fortification, nutrition evaluation and other fields to help people get healthy. The professional requirement of dietitians is to focus on health professional services.

Career profile

National nutrition and health status is an important indicator reflecting the economic and social development, health care level and population quality of a country or region. Good nutrition and health are the foundation and goal of social and economic development.

With the sustained and rapid development of China's national economy, the dietary nutritional status of urban and rural residents in China has improved significantly since 2003, but at the same time, China is also facing the dual challenges of nutritional deficiency and unbalanced nutritional structure. Diseases closely related to dietary nutrition, such as hypertension, diabetes and coronary heart disease, are increasingly threatening people's health. Therefore, it is a very urgent task to vigorously carry out nutrition work and guide Chinese residents to participate in and improve nutritional diet collocation in combination with the specific situation of food resources in China.

The work of a dietitian is very important. They promote people's health by scientifically and reasonably distributing people's diet, reduce the occurrence of various chronic diseases, and improve the nutritional awareness of the whole people by popularizing nutritional knowledge to the whole society, so as to achieve the purpose of enhancing the physical fitness of the whole people.

In the United States, the treatment of hospitalized patients must be attended by nutritionists. In Japan, there is one nutritionist for every 400 people, and the number of nutritionists is 2.4 times that of clinicians. According to the ratio of Japanese nutritionists to the national population, that is, every 400 people are equipped with/kloc-0 nutritionists, there is a shortage of nearly 4 million nutritionists in China. At present, there are less than 654.38 million nutritionists in China, and there is no special nutrition major in colleges and universities. The training of professionals related to this profession can't meet the needs of society at all. Compared with developed countries, China is very short of nutrition professionals.

Therefore, nutritionist, a new profession, has matured in response to social needs. The official establishment of this profession by the state will play a positive role in standardizing the professional behavior of this profession, improving the professional ability of practitioners and building a team of nutrition professionals in China.