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Reflexion and proposition of a tool for teaching small animal nutrition in veterinary courses
Laurent Alvès de Oliveira, Denis Grancher, Sebastien Lefebvre
To cite this version:
Laurent Alvès de Oliveira, Denis Grancher, Sebastien Lefebvre. Reflexion and proposition of a tool for teaching small animal nutrition in veterinary courses. 23. Congress of the European society of Veterinary & Comparative Nutrition, Sep 2019, Turin, Italy. �hal-02306173�
Reflexion and proposition of a tool for teaching small animal nutrition in veterinary courses
Alves de Oliveira L, Grancher D, Lefebvre S Vetagro Sup, Food science and animal nutrition unit,
France.
e-mail: sebastien.lefebvre@vetagro-sup.fr
Introduction. A few years ago Iveta Becvarova made a situational analysis of nutrition teaching in Europe [1]. The study highlighted the lack of nutrition hours in European veterinary cursus, notably considering small animal nutrition. Moreover, in France many newspapers relayed a popular opinion that veterinarians were skilled in medicine but not in nutrition [2]. Thus, the problem was to improve nutrition skills of students in an overloaded curriculum.
Analysis of the past situation. At the Veterinary school of Lyon, teaching of nutrition was based on dietetics and calculation. The last one was often an off-putting issue for most students. Moreover, calculation-based nutrition often distracts them from dietetics consideration and was an obstacle to try different feeds. Another problem was the advice of a good product among the large panel of commercial
feeds. The student choice was often the disease
was the same as the Nevertheless, how can it be otherwise? For a non-nutritionist veterinarian, it is quite impossible to learn all available products and to use nutritional data that are not user-friend . Consequently this teaching method is laborious, too calculation-based and not focused enough on the acquisition of reflexion and dietetic skills.
Modifications. Our aim was to improve the student ability to advise a dietetic plan and a diet to the pet owners. To achieve the aim in the time restrained context the calculations were presented but not performed by the students. They were performed by software created to allow students to test, compare and adjust many diets (industrial, homemade or mixed) in a couple of seconds (the software database includes more than 2700 human feed and 1000 pet feed). Practical exercises were based on study of the computer analyzed intake of 40 nutrients (on the metabolic weight basis in kg0.67 or kg0.75) and the relevance of the diet in the nutritional plan to the animal affections. Moreover, to help the student to choose a commercial food, we provided anonymized diagrams for each kind of disease. These diagrams present concentrations of the most relevant nutrients to the disease (on the food energy content basis). Thus, students had to argue for one food only with objective data. The name and the trademark of the chosen food were revealed only at the end of the exercise.
Discussion. This new approach of nutrition teaching was well received by students.
In developing dietetics and clinical skills, the students seem more objective and more ready to argue for their feed choices. However, students are more dependent on our materials (software and diagrams). Consequently, we released our software and diagrams under Creative Common License to allow an external use. We are looking forward to more data on the results of these changes from the veterinary profession.
References: [1] Becvarova et al. (2016) J. Vet. Med. Educ. 4 (4): 349-358; [2] Carrey (2017) Libération [Internet]. 9 nov 2017 [cité 1 avr 2019]; available at:
https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2017/11/09/croquettes-pas-nettes_1609031
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23rd Congress of the ESVCN - Torino 18-20 Sep. 2019
