Since 2004, Dr. Hugues Plourde, PhD, has been teaching a course called Bioenergetics and the Lifespan at the School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition at McGill University, as well as advising new grad students each year. Dr. Plourde received his bachelor’s degree from McGill in dietetics (in nutrition, specifically) and a doctorate from the University of Montreal. His credentials alone are impressive, but especially so when you consider that Dr. Plourde changed his career path from basic mechanics, which he studied in high school, to a long-term program in nutrition and sports, without, at least at first, having taken any courses in either physics or chemistry in high school.

In addition to teaching, Dr. Plourde works as the clinical coordinator of training at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

"Since 2000, when I took charge of my first grad students as my responsibility, I realized how much I love the two jobs I’m combining. It’s a three-fold path, which includes education and teaching (groups and individuals, plus research), communication via health promotion and a mind-blowing amount of reasoning and research," says Plourde. "The work in nutrition is a never-ending story, requiring a lot of changes and a constant renewal of diagnostics and thinking."

When thinking about nutrition, the cliché "eat well, live well" might be the first, or perhaps only, thing to come to mind, but in fact the field is aligned with a great many others, as Dr. Plourde confirms. "For example, I’ll be teaching nutrition and wellness next semester to students of the kinesiology and physical education departments because it’s necessary for those students to learn how everything works together." A solid understanding of nutrition, he says, is bound to affect your understanding of your main program of study.

As promising as the field is, nutrition still suffers from the popular understanding that it encompasses merely the desire to "eat well," when in fact it also covers how the body works with what it ingests and how this process affects your day-to-day life. Physiology, kinesiology, physical education and medicine are just a few of the other possible disciplines connected to human nutrition and dietetics.