At the Table with Kelly Springer

Kelly Springer, a registered dietitian and nutrition expert, is the guest on the podcast At The Table. She is the owner of Kelly's Choice, a nutrition and health company that offers counseling, workplace wellness, webinars, and brand partnerships. Kelly's expertise has gained national recognition, and she has been featured in publications like Forbes and Women's Health. She shares her journey to becoming a dietitian and discusses how nutrition education in schools can be improved. Kelly's Choice has grown into a collective of over 50 dietitians and is expanding globally. They focus on specialized areas of nutrition to provide expert knowledge and support. The school nutrition program is lacking in proper nutrition education, and there is a need for accurate information to be taught to children. Kelly is working to change the narrative and promote true nutrition education in schools. Welcome to At The Table with Sarah and Julie. At The Table is a podcast by two pediatric registered dieticians and moms who love food and wine. This podcast aims to have insightful conversations about all things food, from navigating pediatric nutrition and managing selective understanding genetic disorders, pregnancy, motherhood, and mental health, to promoting sustainability, eating out at restaurants, talking to chefs, and organizations that support feeding kids. We cover a wide range of topics with our goal to provide you with evidence-based insights, but also to be a hub of true expert voices in the food and nutrition field. In this episode of At The Table, we sit down with Kelly Springer, a business owner, registered dietician, and nutrition expert who is on a mission to educate the world and improve the lives of others. In 2012, Kelly started her own business, Kelly's Choice, and is passionate about educating the public and promoting their tagline, Real People, Real Food. Kelly's Choice functions as a comprehensive nutrition and health company that offers private nutrition counseling, workplace wellness, educational webinars, media appearances, and brand partnerships. Her expertise and insights have gained national recognition with appearances on Good Morning America and features in national publications like Forbes and Women's Health. Furthermore, she has been nominated for the Entrepreneur of the Year Award and has won a Telly Award for the exceptional work as a spokesperson for an Apple of New York. These awards are a testament to Kelly's remarkable accomplishments and her significant impact in the industry. We had such a great time getting to know Kelly and a wonderful conversation that we hope you enjoy. So with no further ado, here's Kelly Springer, MSRD. Welcome, Kelly. Thank you for being at the table with Sarah and Julie. You have an exceptional background. You're a dietician and we're very impressed by everything that you've done. I saw that one of my Syracuse professors from nutrition had posted something on your LinkedIn and I was like, this is awesome. I've been looking for somebody of your caliber to interview, so I'm glad we were able to connect. I want to sit at this table anytime. We read a little bit about your background and how you became an RD and it seems like you had a role model in your life that was a dietician in your family. So my first question is how did that impact not just your career path but your personal choices growing up? Well, that is an interesting question. So I was very fortunate that my mom and grandmother, even though they didn't have the nutrition degrees, were extremely healthy, extremely where we had every meal cooked from scratch and nutrition was very important to my entire family. And then on my dad's side, his youngest sister, he's 112, which is crazy, right? So his youngest sister went into nutrition and I was her nanny. So I think learning about healthy eating my whole life and then seeing how she was able to make a job out of it was really interesting. I have now teenagers and the way I was able to feed them, I was able to use that degree in my home and then also using it for a job. So it's been really interesting to see. That's wonderful. And I mean, it's really awesome that you're able to have that full circle from growing up with your family and then passing that on to your kids because that can be rare, especially in some families, there's not always that nutrition education. So to be able to have that expert knowledge all the time, I think it's wonderful. Well, it's very interesting because my almost 19-year-old has chosen to go into nutrition. So she's a freshman at Ole Miss and I think that's really interesting that she also sees how great this profession is and wants to continue. That's exciting. So tell us a little bit more about Kelly's choice. So becoming an RD and then having your business, how did that take shape? Well, that's also interesting because I get on and speak to all of the SU students each year. I volunteer my time because my road wasn't straight. There was a lot of curves, a lot of breakdowns, a lot of things that happened along the way. And so that's where I like to talk to students to say, hey, as long as you're moving forward or trying to move forward, you're on the right path. So I was very lucky to start right in nutrition at a very young age. I got my BS in nutrition and then got my Masters in Health Ed. But the reason why I got that Masters in Health Ed was because I applied to Syracuse University after going to West Virginia and was denied into my internship. It's not funny of now how closely I work with SU. But this is, again, if I didn't get that door slammed, I wouldn't have gotten my Masters in Education, which now led me to be presenting and speaking and working with school districts and colleges. So this is where it's not always straight. And then I went into bariatrics. I worked long-term care with children and the children's centers and things like that. So my big launching off moment was working for Wieden's Food Market. So with Wieden's, I was the employee dietitian. But again, how the road's not straight. I was going through divorce. I had a five and three-year-old and I had to work all of these side hustle jobs to pay for my kids and to rent and everything else that was going on. So I was literally putting 50,000 miles on my car every year. I was an inside the cross dietitian. So going down to Baltimore at least like four times a year, I was working with colleges and driving all over to support their campuses, doing private practice. And I ended up doing so much work that I couldn't even handle it all. So in 2012, I started Kelly's Choice as a collective of dietitians. And today, we're over 50 dietitians nationwide. We are going global into India and Ireland and the UK. So it's really interesting to see how it's just opened up because of telehealth, which is really cool. That's amazing. That is fascinating. You've made your own empire. And like you said, all your experiences that have led you to this is so neat because you've been able to draw in dietitians with different specialties. Yes. That is very important to me because I love working with weight loss and type 2 diabetes. So they're like my two sweet spots, also women's health. But I really do not work with the kidneys or 2Bs or eating disorders. I mean, I can for sure. But I love the fact that now that we have such bandwidth that the dietitians who really focus in, they're passionate about and where they have the most knowledge. I think that's such a great approach because as you said, nutrition is such a broad field. There's so many niches within it that you can't be a specialist in all of the different areas. So it's really important to bring on different experts who can take the lead in those different areas. I completely agree. So we do want to talk a bit about the school nutrition program because I think many of our listeners will be very intrigued to know how the school nutrition program works for their kids. I specifically wanted to know first and foremost, what is being told these days in terms of nutrition education for kids? Farrah and I both have kiddos who are entering the school world and I feel like the messages our children are being told has changed a bit in the past decade. Actually, my first job out of nutrition school was doing nutrition education for elementary schools outside of Seattle and I just think it's changed since then. So I wanted to know, are you still doing some of the slow, low food education models or is it more of a neutral approach to food? What's the messaging being heard in schools? Well, first of all, this is very sad to say because I thought that 20 plus years ago when I got my master's in health education with my nutrition, I thought that there would be more nutrition education. And if you go around the country, you will find that almost all nutrition has been pulled out, that there isn't any education in the school. In our school district in particular, because I can speak to that because I know, there is basically like a whole act kind of situation where they're getting a little bit of nutrition but it's coming from a late person. And my kids are hilarious because they'll come home and be like, it was completely not accurate information that this person was saying. And I said, you didn't say anything did you? And they're like, no. But it's interesting and I just did a talk for the Oklahoma Dietetic Association and this came up with them. It came up at our New York State Association where misinformation, if there is anything at all in the schools that's coming up or people's bias about how they feel about nutrition is being taught. So it is my goal from the beginning of getting my master's in teaching that we do have correct information being told to our children. I am working with some larger groups like American Dining Creations which is pushing into school districts or trying to change the narrative away through the yellow, red and green or whatever like the good, bad, whatever. And so now it's going into nutrition, true nutrition education of making sure we have protein and fiber. What does that look like? How do we put those together? And giving education and getting away from that and coming over to the other side. So I think that we weren't so good, bad and that was not helping at all. It really didn't give education behind that food. We just reviewed 15,000. Yes, 15,000 recipes. Our team just did that for them and it was in thing of like what was classified as green which you're like, why is it green? Or why is this thing red? Like it didn't even honestly, it didn't even make sense. So it wasn't necessarily objective data anyways. Right. So like you know kind of back in the day of when kind bars got released they said that this is an unhealthy food because of its fat content. Well we're eating nuts. Of course it's going to be fat or we're getting nutrients, vitamins so there's more education in why they fought for that. When we were reviewing these venues, an avocado might come up red because of the fat content but the French fries came up green because it was in a smaller serving size. It was wacky. So we really took all of that and I think that we'll be doing this more often for restaurants, for other districts as well of really looking at that to say wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. So we were able to kind of put our stamp on every single recipe of like where we classify that and how we're driving it towards nutrition. Does this have nutrients, vitamins, protein, fiber? That's great. So it's getting the full picture and again focusing on the nutrition not good, bad because of this specific criteria that makes it that way but looking again full picture. That's right and I just really hope and pray that in the next few years that we truly can get nutrition education back into school. That would be a big win. It's sad that they have pulled out the physical activity, the nutrition, the things that are so important for children to grow and develop and then continue that for their life. That's part of how they sustain themselves. There's the research out there on how good nutrition translates to good education or just learning better in the classroom and being able to pay attention. So that's amazing that you're working towards that. And then I guess I have a question is I know as you're working through this you're obviously have so many challenges. I know that there's probably a budget challenge with different school districts. What's been your approach in trying to make sure that you get access to all those schools? So because we were told that there's absolutely no money for what we do, that's what's been told across the board. We started a nonprofit called Nutrition Education for All. We got our 501c3 just a year ago. And so now we're able to take in grant funding to be able to support the schools because I was just got so fed up that I'm like I'm just going to start a nonprofit so that we can have the ability to work with the community and the school district. That's amazing. So you have Kelly's Choice and now the nonprofit. That's so inspiring. So that is so great. Very cool. So I get this kind of leads me to saying congratulations. I mean you're doing so much and I know this year you were named American Heart Association Women of Impact. So big congratulations of that. Let's talk a little bit more about how your involvement with them and what you've done with American Heart Association. Well it's interesting that my good friend Amy is on the board at our local chapter and I was talking to her a lot about it because in the past I was being asked at least yearly sometimes twice a year to volunteer for American Heart. And as a business owner it's hard to give a lot of your time as volunteer work when it's really work that you're doing. It's not volunteering. Does that make sense of the difference between like giving time but also doing what you do as a job. So when other people are asked to volunteer they're usually full time employees and so they're donating their time of their own business or like somebody else's business. Do you see what I mean? So I was like, I'm all about volunteering but this is like what I do, like this is my job. It's kind of like in the cardiac surgeon do a heart surgery. It's like a weird ask, right? So finally I'm like, why do I join the board so that when I set volunteer hours I am truly volunteering. This is part of me giving back to the community versus just being asked to do for, right? So it made more sense to join the board because I could have more of an impact as well on how they're setting up nutrition, how the FDA is doing file label packaging, how we're going about the education. And so I've been more impactful giving my hours that way than just doing like a sugar demo for whoever, right? So really getting more into the policy is something that was very important to me before and still a little bit now. A lot of the talk around American Heart is CPR which is great but that's because something has gone wrong, right? It's not preventative. So CPR, smoking cessation and then reducing salt. That's like the three things I always heard and I was like, okay. Well, I really believe that we have such power as dieticians to prevent heart disease of the education that we have. So how do we get out in front of this? How do we send messaging? How do we do things like Women of Impact where every single event that I went to, I'm talking about, did you know that 80% of heart disease is preventable through health, nutrition, lifestyle changes? And it truly is. So how do we change the narrative instead of just talking about what happens after of truly preventing heart disease? That's great. Especially, I mean, we do know everything is very reactive in our country and not preventative and I feel like we have months for everything, right? We have National Nutrition Month, we have the Heart Awareness Month. But then I feel like people are not really aware about what to do, right? We have these awareness dates, but what are you doing for that? And so it's great that we're starting to do the education to be more preventative. I 100% agree with you. So this is where back in the day, I would hear from doctors, I've been doing private practice a long time, that people know how to eat, they just don't. They just choose not to. I'm going to tell you right now, people do not know how to eat. And I know you probably are in the same line as me. Anyone from a lawyer, a doctor, down to the person on the manufacturing floor, it does not matter their education level, it does not matter where they come from in the country, no one has been taught nutrition education unless they went to school like we did. No one has been taught. And when I went to school in 1998-7, whenever I went to school till 2024, I've learned so much more and that's where I think things have changed research and that's our job is to keep up with that and to give that information. Exactly. Like you said before, there is a lot of misinformation in this industry as well and things do change and that is our role as dieticians is to keep up with the changes and make sure those are being communicated accurately to the public. So how can we disseminate this information and make it better? Well, I'm glad that you asked. So I haven't started yet, but I will be starting a media training for dieticians because I think that I was thrown in. The first time I did TV, I had steak food on the TV spot. I didn't know where to look, I didn't know what to do and now, I don't even know how many times I've done TV spots. But I think getting comfortable understanding, lighting this, that, whatever, I really think I could help a lot of people and it's going to help the message out. We are starting an ambassador program, so if any of the dieticians are listening, we are taking on ambassadors to really help you get your word out as well. It will help you with the messaging, so you're seeing everything and not worried about working with products that we don't want to represent. I always say, free to lay is not reaching out to me to represent them. We'll make sure that all the brands are high quality and you can start to get some practice. We'll help you along the way with wording and all of that, so if anyone's interested, I think it's going to help really build our profession as well. Wonderful. That's super exciting and again, it's just very much not something that's in our formal training as dieticians, so I think it's great that you are reaching that gap, that knowledge gap and addressing that. It's really cool. What would you say to our listeners and the families that are hopefully listening to our podcast now, what is the best way to guide them to navigate social media and to get good resources? Well, for the first time ever, this is very exciting. Commercial insurance is covering the cost of dieticians, so I highly recommend reaching out to a dietician to figure out what's going on with your family, with your children because it could be a host of different things and working one-on-one with a dietician, I do believe it's the best way to get the right advice. And then always, if you see something wacky on Instagram, it's wacky. Walk away. Real food is where we want to go, so if someone's saying, Joey, banana, run the other direction, a potato, a beef, that's my number one advice. If you're hearing anything like that on social media, just run far away from it, block it, just get it out of your feet because real food is the direction that we want to go. Right before this, I was on a call with a food allergen group, a lot of food allergies right now, and so again, I've worked with a dietician to understand where those allergens might be coming from, how they might be getting into that child or that person's food supply. Just understanding the ins and outs on a higher level can be extremely helpful. So lastly, how do you think technology will continue to impact the future and especially the role of dieticians? Well, I mean, we're all telehealth now. It's very interesting of what happened over COVID. We had the platform already in place, we weren't really utilizing it. And now the fact that I can jump on a Zoom and connect with a dietician in India and understand what's going on there and being able to support work sites that are global, technology has done all of that. And the fact that we can keep these platforms compliant so that their information is safe is incredible. We can share information, we can bring on dieticians that speak multiple languages, that are affiliated with a religion, and that people can find the person that looks like them, feels like them. I think technology is just unbelievable. Yeah, it really allows you to reach a much wider audience, that's for sure. Yeah, and I think it also gives the dieticians flexibility to get a little bit more life balance. I feel like because it's such a dominant female industry and a lot of us are moms or working moms, and I think that gives you the flexibility to be able to still see patients and build your career while you're able to do it from home or from somewhere else if you need to. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, kind of bringing it back to what we first talked about, that's why I quit my full-time job. I didn't have any flexibility whatsoever, and now we're a full woman staff, and so if someone needs to go to the Valentine's Day cookie making, go. We shouldn't have to compromise that way. We need to have the flexibility as a female group as well. I think you're making it a lot more flexible for your customers to your clients, right? Because they're not always able to get physically to a clinic or people with disease families and work life balance, they're not always able to physically go in somewhere. So I think Thomas has opened things up a lot for our clients as well, which is great. Yes, and we do have night and weekend availability, which I think is absolutely huge because so many people are busy during the day and don't want to take off work to see the dietician. And so being able to have weekend and night availability is amazing. Oh, absolutely. And that makes such a big difference because even with kids, I feel a lot of the times that when it comes to the dietician, sometimes it can be an afterthought. And so to be able to make it know this is a priority now because we're catering to the availability and your flexibility, I think that's huge. And it takes small steps but to get to bigger results, this is amazing. So we're very impressed and thank you, Kelly, for what you do and for bringing our profession to such a level that is amazing. We're going to change healthcare. Right? We're going to change healthcare. That's been my goal forever. We can change healthcare. We can prevent these chronic diseases. And I know that if we can educate more, then we're going to be able to do that. Well, thank you very much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us at the table. Be sure to follow us on Instagram as well as on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are Sarah and Julie. Talk to you next time at the table.