HealthCert Blog

Dr Hannah Mayr – Assistant Professor at Bond University and one of the expert presenters of the HealthCert Advanced Certificate of Medical Nutrition Management – delivers an insightful podcast on nutrition and dietary patterns and their role in cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and management.

In the podcast, Dr Mayr explains how a dietary pattern approach to CVD management differs from a traditional approach.

Dietary approaches towards CVD management have typically taken a nutrient-based focus, like lowering saturated fats or reducing sodium in the diet, or a focus on specific food groups, like vegetables. Often these approaches are targeted towards clinical risk factors, but fail to reflect how patients truly eat foods.

A dietary pattern approach considers the combinations of foods that should make up a person’s diet. It focuses on which types of foods are eaten regularly and which foods should be eaten less often, and can translate better into practical recommendations and is less prescriptive than traditional diets.

Listen to the full podcast now:

Dr Hannah Mayr is an Accredited Practicing Dietitian who completed her PhD thesis at La Trobe University. Under the principal supervision of leading Mediterranean diet researcher, Prof Catherine Itsiopoulos, she investigated the effect of a Mediterranean versus low-fat diet on inflammation and adiposity in patients with coronary heart disease.

Dr Mayr has published a number of reviews, methods and results-based papers within this work and received the ‘New Researcher Award’ at the 2018 Dietitians Association of Australia National Conference for her thesis work exploring a novel dietary assessment tool, the Dietary Inflammatory Index.  Her research and practice interests are in dietary patterns and interventions, chronic disease and metabolic health.

Dr Mayr currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in Brisbane and externally with La Trobe, which includes activities to enable implementation of the Mediterranean diet into routine care for chronic disease management. At PAH she leads a mentorship group focused on research capacity building for clinical dietitians. She also teaches into the Master of Nutrition and Dietetics at Bond University and she is passionate about engaging dietetics students in research activities.

If you have any questions for Dr Hannah Mayr, we invite you to join the free HealthCert Community at community.healthcert.com and comment your questions on this post.

Show notes

Heart Foundation: Heart Healthy Eating Patterns:
https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/getmedia/e86eadc0-db35-4e71-815d-75614414f79a/Nutrition_Position_Statement_-_HHEP_FINAL-3.pdf

Heart Foundation: Dietary Patterns and Cardiovascular Disease Outcomes:
https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/getmedia/463b101d-0741-47fb-8f89-09629d8cc6d4/Dietary_patterns_and_cardiovascular_disease_outcomes.pdf

Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015-2020 8^th Ed.:
https://health.gov/our-work/food-nutrition/2015-2020-dietary-guidelines/guidelines/

Learn more in the online Professional Diploma Program in Medical Nutrition

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