As long as what you feel you are doing is education based and you could give the same educational lessons to other people, yeah, I think that's okay. What I think gets trickiest is intake, I think becomes very tricky. I don't, I want you to think about, don't do the lengthy intake that you probably think of for most programs.
You need to be able to answer questions without knowing every single one of their history pieces. So that's kind of what you can think about because. In a lot of the practice exclusivity states, what they are looking at is does it involve any level of individualized assessment or consultation and taking all of that information in and then even if you're making kind of educated statements after the fact, you know, just based on what you.
That counts as assessment. So in that way, if somebody comes to you and they say, I'm having gut issues. I need you to teach me about the low FODMAP diet. Okay. There, you can provide education on that. If they say to you, you know, I need your help interpreting all of these symptoms that I am having and tell me exactly what's wrong with me.
Now, can you possibly make that more vague and say, sometimes these symptoms are related to this. My personal view on it is, could you put it on the handout, the information that you're giving, could you possibly give it to other people without it being like Danielle's protocol that she has to follow. If that's the case, it probably is going to fall.
More in line with medical and from, excuse me, nutrition information, as opposed to medical nutrition therapy, where it falls, I think, and gets trickiest for a lot of people is if they are focused on a particular nutrition situation, like that is related, like for those folks who are dealing with like.
renal disease or PCOS or things like that because those are automatically attached to a diagnosis, right, even a lot of the gut stuff is so in that regard that's where you have to be more careful. If you're just doing things that are like general healthy eating. Weight loss, you know, trying to figure out like what kind of supplements you need.
I think that those all generally fall under typically what would be non medical nutrition information. It's if you came to somebody and you said, okay, you're going to get labs done. You're going to show me where they are. And then we're going to do the following things. And you're going to show me where your labs are.
And I'm going to make additional recommendations. I can do a lot of stuff, but I cannot make that not medical nutrition therapy. Like I, I want to be able to do that. Like if you're teaching people how to interpret their own labs, that might be one thing. But as soon as you start making recommendations based off of whatever their symptoms, concerns, that type of thing are, I think that's really where it gets.
I don't think the lines hazy there. I think the lines pretty clear as to where you're falling and that's when it would matter where they're located for licensure purposes. Yeah. And you I love the way you addressed about can it be put on like a handout. So, like, for example, if an individual had questions about blow.
Could you turn it into, hey, here's the top three causes and things you can do for blow and then give it to everybody. So 1 person could ask it, but if you have a way to then translate into more general advice that you could use for everyone. And that's what, like, in our society program, everything, even like, you talk about initial assessment, we have them set up forms and different intake and things that so it's like the same for everybody.
So it's not doing individualized, customized things within the within the program. So she's asking what department of the state can we look into for our specific state requirements regarding m and t? Is it the sec, is it the Secretary of State? Or different? No, there's gonna be, usually, I would say check with your board first, because almost every state that I've looked into, if you go to the board website, it will have links to the statutes.
Because typically you're gonna find, in most states, you're gonna find two things. Number one is a statute. And the statute will usually define who needs to be licensed, who and what exceptions there are. The exceptions are usually the place that you want to look because that will say, the following things don't count as needing licensure.
That's the really important one. So like if you go into Ohio, you'll see where they've defined this non medical nutrition information is, doesn't count. Then you will also see. a regulation section and what often happens in the statutes is the statute will empower a board to be named and then the board makes rules.
So the regulations are the rules that are coming from whatever the state licensure board is. I know the academy has that great map that makes things really easy to look up if you're not familiar with it. Like I, I use it regularly with clients. I'll put the The link in the reason I like the map is because not only is it easy and color coded which is great, but if you click on the states, it will usually give you links to whatever their statutes and regs are so that just a little less Googling.
And I'm all for a little less Googling. So that's usually where I start and then that will tell you because there is one, I don't remember it's somewhere like. In the top. I don't remember which one it was, but it was like, they don't even call dietitians, dietitians, they call them medical nutrition therapists.
So it's like a really specific thing but they will say, you know, you can't do the following you can't do this. And that's really where it's. helpful because you can say, okay, I know I can't do the following thing. So as long as I am not doing what that says, I've probably created something that doesn't fall into the definition of MNC.
And that's why we all like the educational pieces so much, because that is the best way to reach as many people as possible.
