How culinary nutrition is changing dietetic practice

[Music] Welcome to the Dietitian Connection podcast, a show about nutrition, dietitians and their success stories. Through our conversations with nutrition leaders we aim to inspire you, to connect you with like-minded colleagues, to innovate and push you out of your comfort zone, to create robust debate, to encourage lifelong learning, and to empower you to create more impact as a dietitian. Dietitian Connection acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters this podcast is recorded on. Welcome back to the Dietitian Connection podcast. I'm your host, Brook Delphino from Dietitian Connection and I'm an accredited practicing dietitian. Today we're diving into an exciting and evolving field in dietetics, culinary nutrition. Our guest is Sharon Croxford, an experienced dietitian and award-winning academic, whose 30-year career spans clinical practice, teaching and research. Sharon is also a trained chef who's passionate about bridging the gap between nutrition and dietetics and food and cooking. She spent more than a decade living between London and Istanbul, where she opened a cooking school dedicated to Ottoman and Turkish cuisine. Since returning to Australia, Sharon has focused her research on dietary acculturation and embedding food, cooking and culinary nutrition into nutrition and dietetics education. In our conversation, we'll explore how coloring nutrition differs from other approaches to food and cooking, what it takes to work in this space, and how dietitians can better understand the role of culture and cuisine in shaping dietary patterns. Welcome to the Dietitian Connection podcast, Sharon. Thanks, Brooke, lovely to be here. Sharon, for those who might not know you, can you start by briefly telling us a little bit about your career, which does spend 30 years, and how you can't focus on culinary nutrition? Absolutely, and I think if I've introduced some of that already, but I guess I was always interested in the food side of nutrition and I remember being in secondary school and studying, I think, one of the sciences and having a project that was at the time on the five food groups, and just really, for some reason, really being excited by food and the whole food story. I went for studied nutrition science, did the at the time, as you suggested, a little while ago now, it was a graduate diploma in dietetics, and started practicing, but I really felt that there was sort of something missing in my toolbox. I loved the food chemistry side at uni, but I wanted to understand more about that kitchen chemistry, about what's happening to food in the kitchen, and being able to use that in creating really good food, and then talking to people as a dietitian, working with people around dietary change. So you've already mentioned that I studied as a chef. Now I was 32 when I did that in London. Funny thing was about that cookery school. It was three trimesters, and they, on the back of the fact that I was already a practicing dietitian, they gave me recognition of prior learning for that first semester, which I found was a bit of a chuckle because at the time, dietitians weren't really engaged in the culinary arts. We were on that trajectory away from food to nutrients. Anyway, I took that recognition of prior learning, and I did my six months, and then it was what was next. How can I bring those two things together? And I think that was probably the start of this journey into the real journey into what we call in culinary nutrition these days. That's so funny isn't it, because I feel like it's almost assumed that dietitians would have interest on knowledge or background in cooking, and like, you know, I'll lot do, but it's quite funny that they recognise that that is sort of part of your education and training when it probably wasn't at all, but you take it. Indeed, I kept pretty quiet. I said thank you. Culinary nutrition is often described as a new field. Can you tell us what makes it distinct from other areas of dietetics, or different from traditional approaches to food prep and kind of just general cooking skills? Maybe before I come to that question in itself, I suppose a little bit more about my background, as I spent a long time in community and public health dietetics. And so have spent lots of time in either the development, the delivery or the evaluation of various food preparation and cooking skill components, as either core parts of programs or parts of larger programs. So I was using, I was doing, I was following a, I guess, a model of nutrition education that I'd certainly learnt as a student and then in my early years of practice. So that side of things is not new, and I think when we look through the history of dietetic practice, not just in Australia, but internationally, we see that parts of what we call colour and nutrition have just been practiced for quite some time. But you know, we already mentioned that we shifted to that clinical sort of nutrient perspective. But I think there was always the food was there at it gone silent and in a way, but there was always work being done and I think a lot of that was in the community and public health space. And I guess it's new, but it's not new, that the food is medicine movement, which is very large in the United States. I mean, that movement started to reposition food again as key in the prevention and management of disease more than two decades ago. So again, it's not new, it's been there, it's been bubbling under the surface. But I think what we're seeing now is this very rapid and very fast progression into a different way of practicing. And I guess for me, I think there's some confusion around, and I think we see this a lot in practicing in research around terminology. What does it mean? I've just mentioned there the food is medicine movement in the US, but that's also referred to as food as medicine and we're still trying to tease out, well, what is the real difference? And you'll get people that describe the models similarly, but with a different title. And I think we've had a bit of that with colour and nutrition. Now in my view, the practice of culinary nutrition really has to elevate the position of food preparation and cooking. So from that mechanism for delivering nutrition and health goals, to the focus of the goals themselves. So that to me is one of the key things where we need to move forward with this practice of culinary nutrition. It's not what I was doing as a community and public health dietitian running cooking classes for elderly gentlemen who are now widows in an effort to support their health. It is, but it's not in the way that we structure the programme. We need to really be heroine that food preparation and cooking. And really, like I said, I mean, the best way I think to describe this, elevating that so that when we actually look at designing programmes, the goals are very much in that culinary art space at the same time as intending to achieve health and wellbeing outcomes. I think for too long we've been focused on those nutrition goals, whereas what we really want to see is that those culinary goals are really important in order for people to really develop those skills and be able to look at different ways of addressing any sort of health and wellbeing issues. Does that kind of make sense? It does and it's a really interesting point because I think you've nailed it where you said it's not new necessarily. It was always there, but it was kind of overtaken by this really strong clinical approach of nutrients and the health goals. And that's how I've talked about nutrition for so long. And it's kind of getting back to talking about food, but beyond that, as you mentioned, incorporating that into the goals with clients and patients and the public. So it's a great way to reframe it because it's not this new definition necessarily, but certainly talking about it a lot more and it's great that we are, but it's reframing kind of the way that we practice as dieticians and the way that we engage with our clients, our patients and the community as well. What does someone need to practice in culinary nutrition or in culinary medicine? Is it skills, is it training, is it a mindset, is it a combination of all three? Can you talk us through that? It's a timely question, Brooke and my colleague Emma Sterling and I, along with a couple of colleagues in the US, we've got Olivia Thomas at Boston Medical Centre and Dave and Ison Berg at Harvard University and the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative. We've just worked together on a piece of research where we brought together 10 international experts in culinary nutrition and culinary medicine. And we had them participate in a nominal group so that we could come to consensus on a competency framework for interprofessional practice for culinary nutrition and culinary medicine. And we presented that at Fencey, the US Academy of Nutrition and Diathetics Conference in Nashville last month and we were fortunate enough to work with you. when a Council of Future Practice first place. So we're very excited about this research that is helping us to understand what it is that is needed to practice in that space. But coming back to your actual question, it is skills and that's partly what a competency framework helps to describe. It's the individual, but across an interprofessional team, because it's really, I mean, practicing in this space and working with individuals and groups, the group of professionals that come together are not always going to be the same. They're going to come with different skills and experience. So the idea is that you actually evaluate what skills and experience you have across your team, what additional skills and experience you might need to get so that you can actually maximize the benefit of your sort of culinary nutrition, or culinary medicine intervention. So it's skills, it is a mindset though, because we've already talked about this being a different way of thinking about what you're doing. So really thinking about your practice, what works, what doesn't work, and thinking deeply about different ways that you can work with people, we call that reflection and reflexivity. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, I think. As dietitians, we're very good reflectors, but we're not really practiced in reflexivity. And again, we'll talk a bit more about that later. But it is a combination of both. You need some skills, but again, it's about reframing the way that we've been doing things, but also bringing in other ways that we know we need to practice, which is that much deeper reflection around what we do, how we do it, and then sort of outcomes for participants or patients, or whatever it is that we're calling the people that we're engaging with. Congratulations on the award. I mean, I think that would have been such an interesting presentation. And as you mentioned very timely, so I'm glad that we were able to bring this to a wider audience who might not have been able to get over to Nashville for that big, big, big conference that they have every year. Let's talk about your research, because you have researched hiring cultures and the role of a culture in diet. How do you see the balance between retaining cultural food traditions and then adapting to new dietary environments? There's a few things to unpack their book. And one is tradition. That's a really interesting concept. And I think if we talk about migrants and talk about tradition, and in Australia, we've had waves of migrant communities from different countries over the last 100 years or so. And you'll find that you'll get a group. Say it's the Greek community. We've got a, particularly in Melbourne, Australia, we've got a large Greek community that, and many of those Greek migrants arrived around the same period. And they will have a vision of view, somewhat romanticized, perhaps, of what they were doing, what their home country was doing at the time of that migration. And so they migrate to Australia and they hang onto that, and they may have been here 30 or 40 years and they still have a view of culinary culture back home. But what is kind of missing in that sort of romantic view of history, recent history, is that in Greece, things have moved on. There will still be people, perhaps, that are adhering to those older, star ways of food preparation, cooking, what have you, their culinary culture, but it will have moved on. So tradition, we have to think of tradition as old and new at the same time, and that there is always going to be some movement in a culinary culture. So I think that's really important for people to understand when you're working in this space. Now, when thinking about tradition and traditional diets in quotation marks, now it is this idea of tradition as old and new, what I was particularly interested in, was looking at, well, what are the health protective elements of that traditional or older or home country way of eating preparing foods, for example. And it's understanding that how can we support our migrants to retain those health promoting or health protecting elements at the same time as being able to integrate into the new community, the new country. There's a couple of other things I just want to perhaps mention there. I use the term integrate on purpose because in Australia, in particular, our policies around migration sit very, very firmly in the integration space. So in that case, what we're talking about is a migrant being their host and their home culture so where they came from and where they've arrived, that culture is valued and maintained. So they're almost existing between two cultures. That is what we would term a successful migration and success from an acculturation perspective. We certainly don't aim for assimilation, which is a word you'll often hear in their space. And in that case, what the expectation is, is that the migrant kind of sheds their home values and culture and really are only expected to embrace their new environment. I'm referring to a sort of a framework of acculturation that was first described by a psychologist, John Berry, in the '90s, but it's still really relevant for today. So I'm certainly in the integration camp and I'm certainly around supporting migrants to be able to maintain culture, but also navigate and manage their old culture and their new culture. That's where the retaining the cultural traditions and adapting to the new environment sort of sits with me, particularly. It's such an interesting and very thought-provoking kind of conversation, isn't it? Especially when you say that with immigrants, they often kind of romanticize and almost get stuck where they left their previous country and culture. And you can see all the challenges that would come up arise from that. But then also with integration, it's almost having these like almost two identities in a way because you're holding on to traditions and cultures and it's so much intertwined with that. But then also learning new things and new skills and taking on parts of that. So already my mind goes to some of the real challenges and barriers and struggles that you can see happen in these population groups and the role that, you know, not just to traditions, of course, but community plays to kind of move through those and support these people. So it's just a really thought-provoking conversation. I'm glad that we're talking about this. Do you see clients who are lactose intolerant? Lactose-free options like Ziml are the perfect way to enjoy the benefits of dairy without discomfort. For over 20 years, Australians have loved Ziml and their entire range is lactose-free and fog-map friendly. Their range includes milk that's perfect in coffee or smoothies, creamy-flavored milk that's ready to drink, cream for curries or pastas, and indulgent customs for dessert. Ziml makes dairy that everyone can enjoy. Learn more by visiting the Paul Ziml website via the link in the show notes. I want to move in to talk about cultural humility. Can you explain what is cultural humility? What role does it play in dietetic practice? So as dietitians, what can we do here, especially when we're talking about culinary nutrition? Cultural humility is as sort of practitioners. We've talked about things related to culture for a little while now, and a lot of that conversation started in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander space. But we've come to realise that it's appropriate for all situations, actually, because the really important thing for us to understand is that unless it's our only lived experience, we will never be able to fully understand another person's culture. And this is where we've evolved from the idea of being culturally competent. So for a long time, we talked about developing cultural competence. If you see competence as a journey rather than endpoint, then yes, that's okay. But the idea around cultural humility is that we don't make assumptions about anybody else's culture. Again, like I said, unless it's your own personal lived experiences, and that we are constantly learning through our interactions with other people who have got a myriad of different life experiences, and that we are open to that. So there's a few things that have to go on there. The other thing that's really important is to be able to really understand yourself who you are, what you've been influenced by, digging deep to understand. We are absolutely open. product of our upbringing, our environment, our background, our heritage. We like to think probably that we are free spirits and we have arrived at who we are through all of this self-determination and that's absolutely not true. You know, and this is where we talk about inherent and sort of overt. There are so many things that make us who we are unless we truly stop and think about all of that history will never be able to be culturally humble. So thinking about that from a culinary nutrition perspective, obviously people practicing will be metting people and working with people from a multitude of backgrounds who are different from their own. So it's about being able to have done that deep thinking, knowing who you are and then knowing how to engage authentically and openly and being willing to learn alongside the people that you're actually working with. So understanding that it's going to be an exchange rather than a uni-directional learning experience and then really understanding sort of the power dynamics of situations and being able to shift those power dynamics because the one thing that happens when you know you're the dietician or the nutritionist or the culinary nutritionist already that sets up a pair of imbalance because you are going to be an "I'm using inverted commas with my fingers here even though this is a podcast so that doesn't really make sense." You'll be seen as the expert in many ways, but it's around saying, "Okay, I'm expert in this, but these people who are coming to me, they're experts of their selves. They've got this whole other story that is part of this interaction. We take students and other people on experiences to barley and to row. A people who come to those experiences and I'm fortunate enough to have taken people to both of those locations for those programs. So everyone comes with their own identities, beliefs, biases, prejudice, some will be inherent, so unconscious and others perhaps not so. So to get the most of those experiences traveling deeply into another culture, you need to be culturally humble. You need to be able to say, "Okay, I'm here to learn. I come with all of those biases and prejudices and ideas and it's just fascinating for me to watch people start to unpack who they are, what they thought and it can be uncomfortable but ultimately liberating, I think, to challenge all of those things. You might not think that would happen in places like barley and Rome because as Australians we're pretty familiar with the Italian culture, aren't we? We're pretty familiar with barley. What Australian hasn't been to barley? I mean, we are responsible for a large part of the problems in barley but that's for a podcast another day, Brooke. But you know, it's really great to see people go, you know, they start with, "Oh yeah, well Italians are this and that." And then they actually come away going, "Wow, every single Roman is different because and they have this real shift in just a few days." You know, we take people away for two or three weeks and that transformation can be extraordinary. So I think that immersion can be really helpful because that way you can, you know, all the other stuff can go away and you can actually really be in the environment and really, you know, do that sort of deep reflection and that reflexivity. It's that demonstrating cultural responsiveness. Yeah, which would obviously be so hard to do in clinic, in a practice. Like when you're sitting in your clinic and you're in your day-to-day environment, so many things you have said there about that open-mindedness, that openness and willingness to learn and also that two-way learning and conversation, it's not just about, you know, digations of the experts, I hold the information you need, here you go, off you go and implement it. It's so much more than that. And I think that's why this is such a fascinating conversation but also I can imagine those experiences of traveling to Bali and Rome and travel in general, you know, really opens up your beliefs and your values and your thoughts and the things that you thought you knew about how the world worked. So it's just a great reminder and I'm sure that everyone comes back from those incredible opportunities that you do have with students and just quite changed in how they would practice. Life-changing and some students are that clear, it has been life-changing for them and that's such a joy, such a pleasure for me to be able to facilitate and be a part of, yeah, incredible. You have spoken about cultural responsiveness, you know, involves self-awareness, it involves reflection. So let's talk about the practical part here. What does that look like in practice for dieticians who are working with people from diverse food cultures? This would be every dietician and you know, they'll be seeing it a range of different population groups and cultural backgrounds. And this comes back to the reflexivity that we've already talked about and that need to move from reflection to reflexivity and approach those interactions with cultural humility. I think we're a work in progress, we have to constantly work to understand ourselves and you have to create the time to do that. We're so busy these days, you can't do it in big pieces, this sort of work, you know, you need deep thinking time, it's part of that mindfulness, you know, if you can create some time to be mindful and think deeply about these things, you will be able to bring this to your practice. So thinking about yourself, thinking about your influence just by being there and just by being in the room, so to speak, already has changed the dynamic, the power structure, that micro-environment for that individual or that group of people. But I think when dieticians are thinking about a particular interaction, I can just run through a couple of bullet points that people can tick off really, not that it's a quick tick list, let me tell you. But thinking about that person, so it might be an individual, it might be a group of people, but did they feel included? Did they feel heard? Did they feel they're understood? Did they feel safe? Did they get what they needed? What were the barriers and enablers? Well, did I play or you play in creating barriers and enablers? Were you surprised by anything in that interaction? Which of your personal biases or assumptions, beliefs, values, inherit or otherwise were challenged? And how are they challenged? And how this you learning change your future interactions? So by asking those questions and taking the time, this is the thing you have to take the time to ask those questions and get the information in order to be able to answer those questions, we'll start to move from being a reflective to a reflexive practitioner. We will be practicing with cultural humility and hopefully creating culturally safe spaces for people to enter and engage in. That's where we need to go, particularly when we're working with diversity and people from diverse cultures. Really interesting points here and I agree with your point about the time that it takes. You need to free up some time to spend on this and I think starting, as you mentioned, with yourself and your own thinking, you know, really deeply about your own kind of experiences, beliefs and values and all those sorts of things. It's a really good practice for dieticians to do and I know that we are all very busy as practitioners and clinicians but really it should be something, you know, even by starting by listening to this podcast, for example, those thoughts should really be going through your mind and setting aside a little bit of time to work through, as you said, that almost checklist of questions to be considering with these clients so that you can really have the best outcomes possible and the best interactions possible. I'd love to continue talking about these kind of practical strategies. Can you share some of the approaches that you have found most helpful when trying to understand food, culture and cuisine, especially from perspectives that are outside of your own? You obviously have travelled a lot and merged yourself in different cultures and cuisines but for maybe people who are living in Australia or we have got a lot of US dieticians, what can they do to help really understand all these kind of differences that are happening around us? I think learn as much as you can beforehand. Again, it's a time thing and it depends what the context is as well. Are you travelling? Are you joining me in Rome, for example? And a lot of people will say, "Oh yeah, easy, I know Italy, I can join." But here's some things to read. You're going to have culture shock. Oh, what does that look like? You know, how do you deal with that? To read before you go, whether it's read or speak to people, whichever your way of learning, try and access what you can. I think there's nothing that can substitute for maturity and experience. I mean, as you are exposed to more situations, you are able to have more to draw on, to understand other people's food, culture and cuisine. I think showing genuine curiosity and interest is really important and then respect is really important. I'll give you just a few examples, you know, thinking about when I started to work with Turkish migrants in Australia. How was I actually going? to, I mean, I'd lived in Turkey for seven or eight years, so I had some knowledge of the cuisine. But in order to really connect with those people, I needed to share something of myself so that can be really important with some cultures. So understanding whether this is important and the thing that geled most with them and something that you might not normally be part of a consultation or a research activity was for me to tell them I had a child to a Turkish man. Now that doesn't normally come up in conversation, but immediately we were all friends. Immediately there was a connection. So understanding what you need to share to start that rapport, working in Hong Kong, I used to go and teach in Hong Kong, it's really important to share something personal about yourself, not just that I'm an lecturer with so many years experience and data, so just understanding different ways that communities will respond to you can be really important so that you can actually get to those things that you want to know about food, culture, and cuisine. And that can't emphasise that enough that there's no one's size fits all. Their respect is really important in all cultures, but it plays out differently in different cultures and you'll find in some cultures you know you'll have a family who you know is really struggling with poverty and they want you to sit down and have a meal with them and you know they can't afford to feed you because they're actually killed, they're only chicken to share with you. And so your values, I can't take that away from those people, I'm not going to eat that meal, they need to have that meal because that's all that they're going to have for the day, but it's actually probably going to be more insulting that their hospitality was rejected then go without the meals. So you have to eat the meal. Even though it may not feel right to you that you're taking away the only protein resource this family might have had for that week. So it's a fine balance, but it's also about doing that, learning beforehand around how a particular culture responds in different situations. I mean there are just a few examples, but learning beforehand, absolutely talking to people and then also admitting, I didn't know that. Wow, can you try me more? Can you tell me more? This is how we do it. You know, sharing stories as well is important, but don't go into any situation without having done. You know, we have got information at our fingertips these days. There is really no excuse for not having done a little bit of pre-preparation before going to meet a new cultural group. And then ask questions because people respond to feeling, you know, we talked before a little bit about the dietician being the expert and coming into the room and being there and that dynamic having to change, but for some cultures, they will be very shocked by the fact that you want them to engage in the conversation because they come to you expecting you to tell them what they need to do. So if you're going to challenge that cultural norm, you need to do some background reading. As an educator, you know, I spend a lot of time teaching people from the Pacific Islands, students in Hong Kong, students in Australia, students in Turkey, students in the UK, and I would have to say they all have different learning styles. On an individual level, yes, but also on a cultural level, the way you approach teaching the same material will be different in each one. So you need to know that before you embark on that. You just, you can't take your dietic consultation, run sheet and just apply it to every different cultural group. Yeah. You can't go in blind like there's no reason, you know, when you say we've got so much access to information, but in some ways it's almost reducing our need for connection because we think, oh, we can look at it, we know or whatever it might be, but that's just opportunity to still ask the questions and find out more be curious, be authentic, was authenticity is what leads to connection. And again, it's factoring in that time into a consult or into a learning session or into a workshop or whatever it might be that you're running as a dietician to allow for some of that storytelling and sharing of information and questions and we're kind of taught it as a rapport building, but it's beyond that isn't it's beyond just that building a bit of rapport. It's deeply understanding or trying to understand the person or the people sitting in front of you or standing in front of you. I was certainly not trained in that way, way back in the 80s. It is certainly where we need to be going, we're facilitators, we are not makers of change, we are facilitators of people's own journey of change and we need to be skilled in all those areas of facilitation, which includes all the things that we've been talking about. Yeah. Just to finish, I know that continuous learning, it really seems to be a theme throughout your career. It's certainly a theme of dietician connections. How do you personally stay curious and keep developing and learning and growing as a dietician? Some of that I think has to be individual. I don't sit still very well. I mean, I do, I can, but as long as I'm reading, you know, and sometimes I feel really sad that there are many more books in the world that I'll ever have the chance to read before I die. It's that kind of like, oh really? So you know, you have to prioritize. But there's just so much that I don't know, and probably a lot that I've forgotten as well that I need to refresh. So I'm really driven by challenge and you know what's next. How can we, you know, move beyond? You know, I trained to be a chef a long time ago now, 26 years ago, and a dietician who have many years before that. I've been constantly looking for opportunities. How does this integrate together? How can I move to? What's the next challenge in being able to use this and develop this? And in the profession itself, mostly in the last, obviously, the last chunk of my career, it's been as an academic. So it's been, how can I package this now so that others can learn so that others can, you know, not follow the same path, but find their own path in this culinary nutrition culinary medicine, culinary arts, and nutrition, and in that pathway. It's not for everybody, of course. And I'm not advocating that all dieticians need to do X, Y and Z. But this journey that I've been on is now for me, it's really, you know, how can I make that available to others? And you know, I'm fortunate enough I've worked at an institution and have great line management who have enabled me to be creative about how we can package that up. So we're very much in this culinary nutrition space, looking at more and more opportunities for people to be able to upskill to also, you know, discover this way of working. So always hungry, always, always, and also trying to do things, you know, trying to get that all the bits of the brain working. So, you know, taking photographs of food is a different way of sharing the story as well. And lots of people do that, of course. We're very, lots of people are very social needs. So we more so than me, I would say. Oh, Sharon, that has been so, so interesting. I've so enjoyed this conversation. I feel like for anybody listening, there is so much to take away and think about. Very thought-provoking. I don't want to use the the punt food for thought, but it's just how it had to come out. But you've really introduced a lot of terms, I think, for some people that they would be thinking differently about. The themes that came up again again, you know, curiosity, a willingness and open-mindedness to learn more and ask questions and a deep understanding or willingness to understand and know and learn about different cultures. And that can be done in so many different ways. I really liked how you said, it kind of depends on your learning style as well. Like some people would love to go and travel and really bathe in a country and understand, you know, the people and have conversations. Whereas other people might find that reading about it and deeply reading about the history and the culture of that country is more their style. So finding that style that works for you individually and obviously within the context of how you work and how you live. But there are lots and lots of actionable strategies that I think Dirtitions can take away from today and I'd love to continue to explore these themes and the conversation and I'm sure we will do that down the track. So thank you very much Sharon for your time today. Really enjoyed it and we would definitely have you back for more. Thanks for having a book. It's been a great conversation and PepsiCo can just suggest that anyone who's starting on a cultural journey and if you're not able to travel just find a restaurant, start to explore, choose a country, go and explore what's around you, groceries, restaurants, talk to people. It may not be the same authentic experience that you would get in the country itself but it's a really good starter. We've done some research to show that that actually really helps to help people in this broadening this cultural understanding space. Yeah and ask some questions, ask some questions to the share for to the owners and really engage that curiosity even at that level because we often go to restaurants, enjoy the social event, the food which is obviously what is part of the experience but Then take it that little extra step further by asking questions and learning more about the owners and what their story might be and where they've come from. So that's a great suggestion and a really easy place to start for student dieticians, but all the way through to dieticians that have been practicing for quite some time. We will make sure that we put some ways that people can contact you in the show notes if they have any questions and learn a little bit more about the wonderful adventures that you do offer through to Rome and to Bali. I'm very keen to jump on board on one of those one time in the future. But yeah, thank you very much Sharon. We really appreciate you taking the time with us today. Thanks again. The content products and all services referred to in this episode are intended for health care professionals only and are not intended to be medical advice, which should be tailored to your individual circumstances. The content is for your information only and we advise and you exercise your own judgment before deciding to use the information provided. Professional medical advice should be obtained before taking action. The reference to particular products and or services in this episode does not constitute any form of endorsement. Please see our website for teas and teas. To get all of the links and resources we discussed in this episode, you can go to dieticianconnection.com/podcasts. 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