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Health & Fitness

Open Doors: A Profile

While studying nutrition and dietetics in college, Jeremy Lampel, MS, RD, thought he had his career path mapped out entirely.

Lampel began his journey as an engineer, receiving a bachelor's degree in Engineering from San Jose State University. Engineering as a career was short-lived after he began working in various farmers' markets in 2001 and 2002. The vast variety fruits and vegetables intrigued Lampel to acquire a knowledge base that would not only fulfill his own curiosities about how foods have a direct correlation to longevity, but also aid others in adopting healthier lifestyles in the process.

Lampel completed the dietetics program from San Jose State University in 2008. The graduate has been a Registered Dietitian for five years and now works with Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in the Santa Cruz County providing nutrition education. Lampel encountered a difficult decision midway into his experience within the field that ultimately steered his focus toward assisting this target audience in preventing chronic illness with food instead of treating existing disease states.

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“I was happy in clinical,” Lampel asserted. “When I was in school, I was very much into medical nutrition therapy and I thought that is where I was going to go. It is easy to be a dietitian clinically and turn empathy off or a part of yourself that sees people as people. It is more like solving problems.”

When it comes to general health, prevention and treatment go hand in hand. Since Lampel's shift in career concentration, he recognized how much more prevention could positively impact a sizable group of people in need than treatment could. On the contrary, treatment is individualized to the patient and not guaranteed to be effective.

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“Prevention is very difficult,” Lampel explained. “There are multiple levels. If there was no prevention, there would never be treatment. Therefore, prevention prevails.”

In the beginning stages of Lampel's career in clinical, he witnessed treatment being administered to various patients that were not all necessary or even useful. To this day, Lampel feels that our medical system places a great deal of emphasis on treatment that is “inefficient and hard to sit through sometimes.”

The majority of Lampel's workday consists of managing and training a staff while making sure the facility is running operationally smooth. Aside from this, he is providing nutrition education to women, infants, and children. In college, Lampel was fascinated with the minute details and intricacies of how the human body utilizes nutrients together. His line of work deals with taking these complex concepts and translating them in an easy-to-understand way, conveying fundamental nutrition messages.

“Advanced information is important, but in this environment, basic content is all people really need,” Lampel stated. “They just need a bit of basic guidance. It depends what you are doing. It is all very rewarding.”

Seeing a change in a mother, a child, or even a diabetic patient is the most memorable aspect of Lampel's profession. Bringing inspiration to perfect strangers reminds him of why he entered the field in the first place.

“Especially for parents, they need that guidance for their children,” he expressed. “A lot of the time, parents are just doing what their parents did and there could be some inherent issues with that.”

Lampel could not imagine his life in any other way. He expected to pursue clinical research with his nutrition degree, but instead, is bringing valuable information to those who need it most because he chose to “open his doors.” Lampel interacts with the public each day and approaches educational sessions with a set of tools, his knowledge and experience, that can potentially be used change the lives of others.

“This,” Lampel said, “is more than a job. It is a lifestyle.”

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