Andrea Jenkins
Dietitian,
Preceptor & Consultant
Andrea Jenkins, Seminole
Nation Tribe of Oklahoma, MS, RD, is a registered dietitian
and certified diabetes educator with the Community Health
Centers (CHC) of Santa Maria, California. (She has two
master’s degrees. One is in nutrition; the other is in
agriculture information science and education.)
Jenkins divides her time between the primary care program
and the comprehensive perinatal services program. She
conducts nutrition assessments and provides recommendations
to physicians for medical nutrition therapy. She uses the
Sweet Success Program guidelines for pregnant women with
diabetes, and she provides nutrition education both in the
clinics and the community.
Jenkins helped
make it possible for the California Polytechnic State
University’s (CPSU) dietetic internship program to use the
Santa Maria CHC as a training site. Jenkins, who received
her bachelor's of science in nutrition from CPSU, serves as
a preceptor, supervising and educating the interns.
The people that Jenkins currently serves at the CHC
identify themselves as Latino, Latino-American, Hispanic
and Oaxacan. She says that 90% of her time is spent working
with these people on the issues of obesity and diabetes.
These health issues also took the majority of her time when
she was a registered dietitian and then a nutrition program
manager with the Indian Health Council in Pauma Valley,
California. There, she cared for a largely
reservation-based American Indian population. As a
consequence of these experiences, Jenkins says, “I
recommend that students who are thinking about becoming an
RD and working with American Indians or Latino, Hispanic or
Oaxacan population, work towards their CDE (certified
diabetic educator).”
One of the
strategies that Jenkins recommends for reducing both
obesity and diabetes is breastfeeding. She points to
research that shows that babies who breastfeed learn to
regulate their intake, limiting it to only what they need.
On the other hand, in their eagerness to nourish their
babies, mothers, who bottle-feed them, can ignore the
babies’ signals that they are full and urge more food on
their babies than they need. Breastfeeding also is linked
to a reduction in diabetes.
This
article was originally published in the Summer, 2009
issue of
Winds of Change. (The cover
artist is William Rabbit, Cherokee.)