Sheri Glazier, the Dirt Road Dietitian, is known for her work to connect registered dietitians with food production. She recently represented the Oklahoma Beef Council at the multistate Nutrition Adventure event designed to connect registered dietitians with the people and practices behind beef production. Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays spoke with Glazier about the event.
Glazier said the event is planned every other year with Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma’s Beef Councils. During the interim years, Glazier is studying hard to determine which dietitians and nutrition influencers to invite and what pertinent information to bring to them via which nutrition experts.
“Ultimately, we just want to immerse those into the beef industry who don’t have the opportunity,” she said. “This year, we wanted to take it a step further and immerse them from gate to plate, and we were able to successfully do that this year.”
She explained that registered dietitians are the sought-after authorities for nutrition science and information, and sharing the beef story with this selected audience, all of whom use various media platforms to educate the public, is a great way to get information out to a broader audience through qualified voices.
Data collected from this year’s event showed that 95 percent of the attending participants had never had the opportunity to visit a farm or ranch before. Glazier’s goal was to better equip the dietitians to answer labeling questions regarding raising claims, such as Grass Finished Beef and the like.
“We want to give them first-hand experience and knowledge to truly understand what those labels really mean so they can ultimately provide a confident recommendation to their clients, but also while navigating their lives and working with media and spokespeople as well,” Glazier explained. “We know people are becoming further removed from their food, and that is ultimately the goal of this program. How these checkoff dollars are spent is ultimately to bridge that gap.”
She emphasized the importance of transparency during events such as the Nutrition Adventure to ensure that no questions are off the table. “We really want to give them the confidence to know that whichever beef choice their customer can afford will still give them that protein, iron, zinc, and those sorts of things. Sometimes it is just empowering them to ask the questions in a safe environment, because sometimes it can be intimidating when this is not a normal opportunity that you otherwise would get. We had attendees from L.A., D.C., Nashville, Tennessee, just all over the United States, including Oklahoma.”
While it is important to Glazier to include local influencers, she underscored the importance of educating influencers from more populated urban areas.
When attempting to explain the return on investments to beef producers when checkoff dollars are used for such events, Glazier could only say that the impact of the events is immeasurable, and she wishes each producer could experience it for himself or herself.
“We’ve been having really great feedback on social media,” she shared. “We don’t pay them to produce content afterwards. We just provide an opportunity and encourage them to share afterwards. It has been encouraging to see some of the authentic creation of content that we are seeing afterwards.”
Also encouraging is the spread of information from peer-to-peer as the invited dietitians share what they have learned with colleagues, and also network with other attendees to continue the beef messaging in a lot of different ways.
“We have attendees, too, who are tied to the internship director or work in food service, and they have a lot of influence over menus and things of that sort,” Glazier said. “With that comes nutrition education, so to be able to answer questions to patients and clients through your students becomes immeasurable too. We just want to make sure that we are providing an opportunity for this next generation of healthcare professionals to be trusted advocates for beef because if we don’t share this information, who is?”
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
