Andrea Zick

Bsc (Hons) Nutrition & Health (1st class) Roehampton University

10 years experiences as a chef in 5-star Hospitality

Working as a chef for different 5 star hotels in Germany and London for more than 10 years made me determined to study nutrition as my interest in food was more than simply just providing high quality and tasty meals. In my opinion many menus and chefs fail to approach food as an important tool to prevent chronic diseases such as cardio vascular disease or cancers and are also contributing to the current obesity epidemic. Often managers claim providing healthy foods in restaurants would be no sales objective as people are interested in taste and not in health when eating out. This is an argument which I hope to challenge with my consultations, as I am convinced taste and health can go hand in hand.

It just needs a different approach to create menus that have reasonable portion sizes and supply a variety of micro and macro nutrients.

Graduated 1st class in Nutrition and Health at Roehampton University I gained the Tetley Tea award for best Nutrition and Health Student 2009. My strong background in hospitality and my extensive knowledge of nutrition & health enable me to understand new policies and regulations related to food safety and nutrition. This allows me to react proactively to the ever-changing food industry and its regulations by suggesting implementations to counter these changes immediately.

Food labelling is my major interest and I implemented nutrition labelling in menus before the Food Standard Agency focused their interventions on calorie labelling in Restaurants at the beginning of 2009. I also carried out several research projects in this area, one of which was funded by the Organix Foundation and focused in particular on children’s menus, which are often poor in nutritional composition.

My experience as a chef in hotels such as the Westin Grand Berlin, Four Seasons Hotel Berlin and Four Seasons Hotel London allows me  to understand the demands of a hotel and catering operation, hence I was able to support the implementation of a healthy menu in the Wyndham Grand Hotel Chelsea Harbour. With that I gained experience in creating healthy balanced menus that offer nutrition information as additional service to customers. Providing training to chefs and the service team in nutritional aspects of healthy eating and in how far nutrition information available on menus has its restrictions was a vital part of the project as it enabled the team to sell the menu efficiently and to be able to answer customer questions directed towards menu choices.

My support to corporate business may include:

• Nutritional analysis of recipes and menus

• Writing suggestions for healthy menu items as well as product design

• Offering advice on food safety regulations and procedures

• Giving nutrition seminar which increase the awareness of healthy public topics of sales and service employees to enable them to enter the wellness and health market

• Corporate health education

• Client education, marketing and promotion of healthy messages

As a Registered Associate Nutritionist I provide nutritional assessments to individuals. These assessments (being fully-confidential) improve the awareness of positive and negative aspects of someone’s diet on their health. This can be progressed by nutritional support for weight loss, weight gain or weight maintenance. I appreciate that leading busy lives may make it feel difficult to change longstanding habits and my approach is therefore tuned to your individual needs to make a lifestyle change not just do-able but enjoyable.

My support may include:

• Training on how to read and understand nutrition labels

• Personal food shopping tips

• What to choose when eating out

• Creating meal plans and recipe suggestions

• Practical tutorials in healthy cooking

Benefits of nutritional training may be:

• Achieve and maintain a healthy weight of a BMI (18.5-24.9)

• Regain energy and feel great

• Get control over your food cravings

• Improve your resistance to illness and stress

• Regain restful sleep and high concentration levels

My personal interests are the effects of psychology on food intake and how society influences the way we eat and what we value about foods. Hence the sustainability of the food chain and in particular sustainability of diets and menus is one of the most recent topics studied in my curriculum.