Welcome to your FNH 370 course!

Nutrition assessment lies at the foundation of setting evidence-based public nutrition policy, supporting people in regaining their health, advocating for community-based food security initiatives, and much, much more. Without accurate measures of nutritional status, how would we know where to set the nutrient requirements? How could we reliably diagnose a condition? How could you design an appropriate treatment plan? How could progress be monitored following the implementation of a nutrition care plan? How could we provide targeted nutrition education to specific individuals or populations? Take a moment to think about the context of your life and generate your own list of questions that are relevant to nutrition assessment as it applies to you or your community.

In this course, we will be learning about nutrition assessment through the lens of 5 methods: Anthropometrics, Biochemical, Clinical, Dietary and Environmental (commonly referred to as A, B, C, D, and E methods). Although not as well researched and beyond the scope of this course, some researchers also include F (family, friends) and G (gender) methods in their work. For example, how do we determine appropriate nutrient cutoffs for transgender people? While there are many questions about nutrition assessment, we will cover the A, B, C, D, E basics in this course. However, I encourage you to independently explore F & G methods and ask any questions that you have.

I will provide an orientation to the course on Thursday, September 4. It is your responsibility to carefully read and understand the content in the course syllabus. More details about the course are available in my welcome message and on Canvas. It is a good idea to take a few minutes to read through the course documents and enter key dates into your calendars now. If you have any questions, please reach out to any member of the teaching team.

FNH 370 will be delivered in-person. I will use multi-access You will be required to preview documents or pre-read research articles before certain classes, but with the mix of learning activities, it is my hope that you will enjoy them, the guest speakers, and the course content as you learn to value the need for accurate and reliable assessments when determining the nutritional status of people.