Nutrition

If you’re ready to use a nutritious diet to enhance your wellness or help treat a medical condition, the experts you need aren’t far away. We offer nutrition services in communities throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, including New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, Bay St. Louis and Biloxi. Find a location near you.

Anyone is a candidate to work with a registered dietitian. At Ochsner, we offer lifestyle counseling and nutrition guidance for clients who want to improve their wellness and quality of life. In addition, we work with patients for whom nutrition services are an integral part of medical care. Our team includes more than 40 dietitians who specialize in working with patients with various medical conditions. We also have 20 dietitians with expertise in diabetes.

Our dietitians’ specialties include:

• Cancer

• Cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels and congestive heart failure

• Childhood and adolescent health

• Dialysis

• Gastrointestinal disorders, including celiac disease, cirrhosis and Crohn’s disease

• Immunocompromising conditions, including food allergies and HIV/AIDS

• Kidney disease

• Nutritional support, including oral and tube feeding at home

• Pulmonary disease, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

• Transplantation

• Weight management, including overweight and obesity, bariatric surgery, and eating disorders

• Women’s health, including anemia, osteoporosis and pregnancy

When you turn to us to help boost your wellness through nutrition, we take the time to get to know you and understand the factors that influence your dietary choices. These include what you like to eat, your access to nutritious food, how you shop for groceries, where and how often you eat out, and your level of support at home. We also get to know your medical history. If you think you may have a food sensitivity, we offer food sensitivity testing for 170 foods and food chemicals.

After learning about your unique lifestyle factors, your dietitian will help you understand how they affect your nutrition and how you can still enjoy the foods that are important to you. You and your dietitian will develop an individualized meal plan and a strategy for sticking to it. During follow-up visits, you and your dietitian will review your progress and discuss successes and how to overcome challenges.

At Ochsner, we don’t just use nutrition to empower individuals to achieve optimal wellness. We also use nutrition to fuel wellness in the communities we serve. Our community nutrition and wellness initiatives include:

• Eat Fit. A nonprofit collaboration with hundreds of restaurants and other food service establishments throughout Louisiana, Eat Fit can help you make nutritious choices when you dine out. Partner restaurants feature the Eat Fit seal of approval on their menus next to items approved by our dietitians. Download the free Eat Fit mobile app in the App Store or Google Play to find participating businesses, recipes and other nutrition resources. You can also bring Eat Fit home through our cookbooks. The Eat Fit Cookbook features some of our favorite recipes from Eat Fit partners. In Craft: The Eat Fit Guide to Zero-Proof Cocktails, you’ll learn how to make showstopping, alcohol-free cocktails inspired by the bar staff at our Eat Fit partners.
• Eat Fit CHOP: Kids in the Kitchen. Do you have a child who’s interested in cooking? Eat Fit CHOP: Kids in the Kitchen is a great resource to help them hone their skills. A series of eight cooking classes designed for schools and youth programs and organizations, Eat Fit CHOP: Kids in the Kitchen teaches participants ages 8 to 18 basic cooking skills. This helps them build confidence and a love of nutritious food.

Virtual visits are available when appropriate.

You do not need a referral if you plan to self-pay. A referral is necessary if you use insurance.

Our approach to nutrition is personalized. We’ll take the time to understand your lifestyle factors and work with you to gradually shift toward a nourishing diet that fuels your wellness. We won’t ask you to change everything immediately. Instead, we’ll make this shift easy by prioritizing key steps you can take right away to have maximum impact on wellness. We’ll develop sustainable ways for you to make nutritional edits to your diet.