Welcome to Nutrition and Diet Therapy

• Health

  The extent to which an individual or group is able to realize aspirations and satisfy needs and change or cope with environment. It is the complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
• Nursing

  A caring profession; practiced with an earnest concern for the art of care and science of health.
• Major Goals in Nursing


  • Promotive - actions or measures designed to support behavior conducive to health
  • Preventive - actions or measures designed to protect individuals, families, groups, communities from harm to their health
  • Curative - actions or measures designed to correct or remove disease or any illness
  • Rehabilitative - actions or measures designed to restore health and promote recovery from any alteration of health
• Roles and Responsibility of a Nurse

  • Caregiver - helping clients promote, restore, and maintain dignity, health and wellness
  • Communicator/Helper - central role of nurses in identifying needs of the client
  • Educator/Teacher - involves nursing activities, health promotion, the primary concern
  • Counselor - providing emotional, intellectual and psychological support
  • Manager/Coordinator - manages the nursing care
  • Change agent - assists client to modify behavior
  • Leader - influences other to work together towards a mutually envisioned goal
  • Clinician - use of technical expertise to administer nursing care
  • Advocate - promotes what is best for the client, protects the client rights
  • Researcher - participates in scientific investigation; uses research findings in practice
  • Collaborator - initiates nursing action within the health team
• Abraham Maslow - Hierarchy of Basic Human Needs

  • Physiologic Needs
  • Safety and Security
  • Love and belonging
  • Self-Esteem Needs
  • Self-Actualization Needs
• Physiologic Needs

  Oxygen, Fluids, Nutrition, Body temperature, Elimination, Rest and sleep, Sex
• Virginia Henderson - identified fourteen (14) components of basic nursing


  Postulated that the unique function of the nurse is to assist the clients, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery
• Faye Glenn Abdellah - identified twenty one (21) nursing problems


  Key nursing problems related to health needs of people
• Dorothy Johnson - identified seven (7) behavioral subsystem

  Ingestive - taking in nourishment in socially and culturally acceptable ways
• The benefits of good nutrition – health, happiness, efficiency and longevity
• To promote the health of the individual and prevent the occurrence of illness, the nurse must assist the client in meeting's his nutritional needs
• The primary role of nutrients is to provide the building for the efficient functioning and maintenance of the body
• The human body cannot exist for a long time without enough nourishment from food. We eat food to sustain life, to enable us to grow and be healthy so that we can carry out our task at work and at play
• Digestion

  The process by which foods are broken down for the body to use in growth, development, healing and prevention of diseases
• Absorption

  The process by which digested proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals and water are actively and passively transported through the intestinal mucosa into the blood or lymphatic circulation
• Metabolism

  The complex chemical process that occurs in the cells to allow for energy use and for cellular growth and repair