As the life style has been changed and the population of the aged increases, the chronic degenerative diseases are also increasing, bringing about the poor quality of life and the drastic rise in medical cost. More and more people become interested in nutrition aging society. As a result, the demand for clinical nutrition dietitians who have the highly advanced knowledge on clinic nutrition is likely to be continuously increased.
In hospitals, the clinical nutrition dietitian will play a role to cure the patients from the aspect of nutrition with other medical staffs. Nowadays, most hospitals are recognizing the importance of nutrition service. So they will hire more clinical nutrition dietitians to provide the nutrition services such as food selection, cookery guidance, nutrition consulting and education with not only the patients in hospitals but also out patients. In addition, considering that health diagnosis centers, fitness centers, and weight management centers are being established, more clinical nutrition dietitians is likely to be needed for nutrition education and consulting.
The food-originated disease such as obesity, chronic degenerative diseases are increasing due to the change of our dietary life. Accordingly, the importance of nutrition improvement is widely recognized among people. In response to such trends, National Health Promotion Law and Local Public Health Law was enacted to prevent disease and to promote people's health. The government is planning to deploy dietitians in 225 public health centers and 17 public medical centers around the nation. In addition, the branches of the public health centers will also need dietitians.
As more and more women are working these days, the demand for school meal service is also increasing. The school meal service is likely to be provided in more elementary, middle and high schools in the near future, which needs more school dietitians.
Staring from 2006, the nutrition teacher system is being run in schools. The nutrition teacher provides meal service, and plays a role as a teacher who helps students to form the right eating habits, to correct the unbalanced diet habit, and to teach the table etiquette. In addition, the nutrition teacher will also play a role as a leader who improves the dietary life of communities, while keeping close relation with Mother's Class, School Food Service Committee, and giving counseling to parents and other teachers.
In industry, dietitians shall engage in providing meal service, and guiding the eating habits, and nutrition consulting for workers. As more companies emphasize the health management education for their workers to prevent the chronic disease, the role of dietitians will be more important.
As the number of meal service provider is increasing, more competent dietitians will run their meal service business by themselves. In addition, more people are enjoying their eating-out and outdoor events are increasing. So more dietitians can work for the lunchbox catering companies, family restaurants, and other food service companies. And the role of dietitians in those areas will be getting more important as a meals service manager or nutrition consultant than now.
With much interest in healthy life, the business like health food catering service, and wellness restaurant are enjoying a boom. Those businesses are run based on membership system. As a result, dietitians will check their health and complication, their reluctant food, and calories used a day to make the healthy menu for them, providing the nutrition consulting.
Nowadays, department stores, supermarkets, and shopping centers tend to provide the information on health, food, and nutrition as their marketing strategy to customers. Accordingly, the demands for dietitians will be increased. In addition, more food companies will need more dietitians who can take charge of research, education and consulting for consumers, new product development, sales, and product promotion.
As various kinds of functional foods makers and sellers are increasing, many shops and drugstores is likely to need more dietitians who provide the proper information with explanation on the nutritional property of the new food products with customers.
With the strong support from government, welfare centers, day care facilities and other special-purpose facilities are much interested in improving the nutrition status. Those facilities need more dietitians to provide meal service and nutrition management. In addition, the more day-care facilities and nursery homes will hire dietitians as the government support for those facilities was expanded. With the aging society and strong welfare policy for the aged, asylum for the aged and other welfare facilities for the aged are increasing these days. In addition, the medical treatment centers like geriatric hospitals which attend and manage the chronic patients are also increasing. As a result, those facilities will need more dietitians who provide meal service and nutrition counseling service.
The central government offices including the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Education & Human Resource Development, and Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, municipal governments, and many education offices need dietitians in relation with their food and nutrition-related policy and projects, and food sanitation controls.
The research projects in relation to food and nutrition are increasing in the food and nutrition-related institutes. So those institutes will require for the Dietitian's License for their staff. In addition, there are many dietitians professors. And universities allow the hopeful dietitians, who want to be a teacher for home economics, to take the teacher training course.
Dietitians can also give their help to individual and group by providing nutrition-related information. It is expected that more dietitians will work for this field.
As the information on health, food, and nutrition becomes more important in mass media, more dietitians will advance to this field.
It is necessary to deploy dietitians in army to provide the quality meal service and nutrition management for 600,000 soldiers.
Along with the effective settlement of clinical nutrition dietitians system and the increasing demand on nutrition service, it is recommended to open the private nutrition counseling office in connection with the local hospitals. The counseling office will be involving in nutritional counseling for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and the chronic patients with obesity, diabetes, high pressure, and cardiovascular disease.