Nutrition is a huge component of health and well-being. Our bodies are amazing machines that need fuel – the correct types in the correct amounts – to function, grow, and heal. My colleagues in dietetics and I have been working for decades to ensure that nutrition is recognized as a vital sign in assessing patient health and well-being and that it is incorporated into providing care, yet we haven't gotten very far. Why? Until recently, the dietetics perspective and the nursing perspective were not collaboratively integrated into day-to-day practice.
 
A goal of our editorial team at Nutrition Today is to encourage registered dieticians and nutritionists (RDNs) and nurses to co-author articles that will integrate clinical perspectives and treatment into the coordinated patient care model. This collaboration can provide effective, interdisciplinary means of resolving care issues, thereby improving patient outcomes.
 
To do this, first I encourage you to get to know our journal: 

•    Nutrition Today is a peer-reviewed journal focused on translating the latest developments in nutrition science and policy to health care providers.
•    Nutrition Today reaches key opinion leaders in the health professions and nutrition sciences.
•    Nutrition Today features authoritative articles on topics such as educating patients on conflicted science around butter, saturated fat, sugars, and meat. 
•    Continuing education credit is available in each issue. 
•    Our associate editor, Dr. Rebecca Couris, is both a clinical pharmacist and a nutrition scientist. Along with another colleague, she has developed a series in the past year on the management of Type 2 Diabetes and hypoglycemia, with pros and cons of medications and their nutritional implications. 
•    We enlist some of the world’s experts to write authoritative columns on hot-topic and timely items, for example, drinking raw milk, and how to explain the pros and cons to patients.
•    We cover a variety of specialties, such as gerontology, where a strong collaboration between nursing and dietetics professionals is essential. Nurses understand the importance of ensuring smooth transitions from acute care to chronic care, and the importance of avoiding or minimizing readmissions. 

Nutrition Today hopes to launch a series of articles where nursing professionals and RDNs collaborate to share their knowledge with one another and our readers. Examples include: 

•    Caring for older adults whose diseases or treatments have nutritional implications
•    Managing the nutritional needs of certain populations, especially older adults, pregnant patients, and children.
•    Transitioning patients with serious gastrointestinal or neurological problems to home care .
•    Decision-making with regards to tube feeding at the end-of-life.
•    Delivering care to pregnant women and infants at high nutritional risk.
•    Managing interprofessional approaches to care delivery. 
•    Treating individuals with chronic degenerative diseases that have dietary or nutritional implications.

We invite you to work with an RDN from your hospital, home health agency, hospice, clinic or nursing home to co-author a paper on one of the suggestions above or a topic of your choice. Feel free to send me an email at [email protected] so I can answer your query or help you develop your topic.  

We welcome your comments or suggestions on how to make our journal more helpful to nurses and the readers of our sister publications in nursing. 
 
Bon appetite!
 
Johanna Dwyer, D.Sc,RD
Editor, Nutrition Today