Health Coach celebrities: Experts concerned over nutrition and diet ‘qualifications’

IT’S the online qualification that is helping celebrities to sell health products — and it has health professionals worried.

IT’S the online qualification that is helping celebrities to sell their health products — and it has health professionals worried.

The Health Coach certification offered by US-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) — which calls itself the world’s largest nutrition school — has a raft of high-profile wellness warrior enrolments.

IIN offers a 12-month correspondence course and then students gain the title “Health Coach” and are “qualified” to offer nutrition and diet coaching to clients.

IIN’s mission is “improving health and happiness, and through that process, create a ripple effect that transforms the world.”

Model Rachael Finch is the latest celebrity-turned-businesswoman — and IIN alumnus — to cash in on the lucrative health-food craze with the launch of Impressed Juices, a cold-press fruit drink.

Supermodel Miranda Kerr, who calls herself a “health practitioner” and founded the successful luxury organic cosmetics company Kora, is also a graduate.

Best-selling author Sarah Wilson completed the course before she famously quit sugar, as did controversial paleo chef Pete Evans before his children’s book Bubba Yum Yum was pulled for being considered a health threat to babies.

Rachael Finch with her line of cold-pressed juices. Picture Norm Oorloff

Miranda Kerr is another IIN graduate.

Even almost-royal Pippa Middleton recently joined the thousands of people worldwide tuning into weekly lectures on their iPads.

According to Sydney University Professor of dietetics Margaret Allman-­Farinelli, any course promising to make someone a health professional in 12 months “rings alarm bells”.

“For someone who has previous education in medicine or scientific method, it might be possible,” she said, adding it normally takes up to five years to qualify as a dietitian.

“(Health professionals) are able to evaluate research, clinical trials and new ingredients, and their knowledge evolves over their careers.

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“This is not something you are likely to get from a short course,” she said.

Sydney-based dietitian Susie Burrell said that under-qualified health experts could be dangerous if people with serious conditions followed their advice.

She called it an “arrogance of ignorance” that may have consequences. “We could have a serious medical consequence from someone who has spouted advice,” she said.

Both Evans and Wilson have spruiked the benefits of the course and advertised discounts to their followers.

Wilson wrote: “The IIN teachings certainly played a part in the evolution of my I Quit Sugar ebooks, books and business.”

Evans has also sung the praises of the institute. “I can thoroughly recommend it for anyone wishing to ... create a new career for themselves,” he wrote.