Empowered Education

In this rapidly changing economic climate, where less people are opting for 4 year degrees due to job insecurity, 6 figure tuition costs, and a diminishing return on your investment, more and more people are seeking a shorter path to a self-made career. The wellness industry is a TRILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY, and the people who will prosper the most are the people who are educated with the right kind of information that can actually help transform lives.

That’s what we do at HMI. We empower our students so that they can begin helping people change their lives as soon as they graduate, if not before. That is one reason we have so many students who enroll with us even AFTER they have already attended other nutrition schools.

For well over twenty years now, individual private distance-learning schools have been gaining momentum. Some offering certification programs, others offering courses ala carte. The halls of academia are not what they once were, and in the information age people are more interested in getting real information to empower themselves, NOW. 

It is likely you have already asked yourself, what is my true passion, and how can Iy start living it? For some, the answer will inevitably be institutionalized education. In becoming a lawyer, I had no choice, It was a four year degree followed by another three to get my doctorate. 

Today there are literally millions of students with great degrees from incredible institutions of higher learning, who are broke. They’re jobless. Or, they’re in jobs they hate. With lots of debt. 

In health and wellness, if you want to be a surgeon and operate on the human body, you have no choice. You will be in college getting your BS, med school getting your MD and then many years as a resident and intern. There’s no other path in the Western medical model to be able to perform surgery. And, that’s a good thing! 

But it’s not a good thing in many other fields. Business school is a perfect example. Years and years pursuing an MBA? There are countless successful 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses were started by people with NO degree at all, not even a Bachelors let alone a Masters. Moreover, there are thousands of failed businesses and tremendous losses in businesses created by highly degreed business owners. There simply is no correlation in many fields. Nutrition is one of them.

Why not go the institutional route and become a registered dietitian or licensed nutritionist? If your dream is to call yourself a Registered Dietician and work in a setting where you provide dietary recommendations for sick patients, then the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) approved RD schools are the ONLY way to go. As of now, they have the monopoly on licensure and it has been that way for quite some time. 

But if your dream is to educate, empower and encourage people to change their own health — dramatically — and right now, then pursuing an alternative route to obtaining that education is desirable. 

There are countless reasons why I personally, chose to avoid the route of Registered Dietician. As a former attorney I took an in depth look into the sources of sponsorship money for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and I found reprehensible connections between the AND and the corporations largely responsible for the ill health of millions and millions of people around the globe. The diet pushed by the Academy is a diet that is the primary cause of death and disease in our society. Not to mention,

1. The most LOYAL sponsor of the AND has been the National Cattleman’s Beef Association for 13 years running, 2001 through 2014. 

More than a third of all raw materials and fossil fuels consumed in the United States are used in animal production

The production of one calorie of animal protein requires more than ten times the fossil fuel input as a calorie of plant protein.

Producing a single hamburger uses enough fuel to drive 20 miles and causes the loss of five times its weight in topsoil.

Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food. It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat and only 25 gallons to produce one pound of wheat

To produce a day’s food for one meat-eater takes over 4,000 gallons; for a lacto-ovo vegetarian, only 1200 gallons; for a vegan, only 300 gallons.

Animals raised for food produce approximately 130 times as much excrement as the entire human population and animal farms pollute our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. Run-offs of animal waste, pesticides, chemicals, fertilizers, hormones and antibiotics are contributing to dead zones in coastal areas, degradation of coral reef and health problems. (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency).

Raising animals for food now uses a staggering 30% of the Earth’s land mass.

Seven football fields’ worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.

The massive amounts of excrement produced by livestock farms emit toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia into the air. Roughly 80% of ammonia emissions in the U.S. come from animal waste

The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth

2. The AND Foundation sells sponsorships for hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of their biggest sponsors? The Nestle Nutrition Institute, which recently sponsored the Foundation Symposium titled Optimal Hydration. 

Nestle, you may not know, is a company whose CEO believes that ALL drinking water should be privatized and that as human beings, we do not have an essential “right” to clean drinking water, but it is a privilege. 

3. As part of its “Kids Eat Right” program, the AND chose Coca-Cola to educate dieticians, who then in turn “educated” children and families about a healthy diet.  

Among the Coke sponsored messages to dieticians? Sugar is not harmful, and aspartame is completely safe for anyone over the age of one.  

4. Kellogg and the National Dairy Council have been a sponsor of the AND for the past 9 years.

There is a better way.