Dr. Caroline Richard is a RD, PhD and an Assistant Professor of Nutritional Immunology in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Alberta. She completed her BSc and internship in Nutrition at Laval University in 2007 and then her PhD in Nutrition and Metabolism in 2013. She then completed her postdoctoral studies in nutritional immunology at the University of Alberta in 2016. Dr. Richard’s research interests focus on understanding how specific nutritional interventions can mitigate immune dysfunction related to chronic diseases including obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. She was recently awarded a Canada Research Chair in Nutritional Immunology and was the recipient of the CIHR-INMD/CNS New Investigator Award in 2019. In 2015, she also received the Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism Award for Nutrition Translation for her review paper in immunology. She is currently funded by CHIR and NSERC among other industry grants that she holds.
Medical nutrition therapy for patients living with chronic kidney disease (CKD) includes several dietary modifications; limiting sodium, potassium, and phosphorus, and modifying protein intake depending on the stage of CKD. These complex diets have often led to the restriction of foods that are otherwise considered healthy. New evidence suggests that consideration of processed foods is becoming increasingly important and that optimizing diet quality can improve outcomes for these patients. Learning Objectives: 1) Increase familiarity with the 2020 KDIGO and KDOQI nutrition practice guidelines. (KDIGO – Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes, KDOQI – Kidney Disease Outcome Quality Initiative). 2) Understand how food processing impacts diet therapy for this patient population. 3) Explore the impact of diet quality on disease outcomes for this patient population.