Local Nutritionist, Kelly Dorfman, Becomes an Author

Kelly Dorfman has a master's degree in nutrition/biology and has been a practicing nutritionist dietitian for 30 years. She lives with her husband and three children in North Potomac and runs her practice here, as well. Her specialty is finding nutritional solutions to common ailments.

Dorfman lectures on diet and health around the country and has written dozens of articles on children and nutrition. She was appointed by Gov. Martin O'Malley to serve on the Maryland Board of Dietetic Practice. As a mother of three herself, Dorfman has a hands-on understanding of the challenges parents face. She has written a book entitled Whats Eating Your Child?, which is a compilation of real life stories from her work with her clients. They illustrate how using nutritional means can be an effective way to deal with some common health problems.

Patch caught up with Dorfman this week as she started her book tour.

Patch: Your new book, What's Eating Your Child?, is a culmination of your years as a nutritionist and touts the hidden connections between nutrition and chronic childhood health issues. Is this more than just “eating right,” which is something that most doctors and parents want for all children?

Kelly Dorfman: Absolutely. "Eating right" can mean different things to different people and is a vague concept if ever there was one. Most doctors and parents do want kids to eat a healthy diet but are not always clear about the details. I wanted to empower parents by helping them understand specifically how what a child eats can impact her mood, health, behavior and school performance and what, exactly, they can do about it.

Patch: What initially led you to the area of children's developmental issues and the use of nutritional resources to help them?

Dorfman: I have always had a detective's mentality and mindset. When I first started studying nutrition, it was always with an eye to practical application of the principles. Consequently, I was disappointed when there was so much talk about how important nutrition was but when it came down to solving health problems, it was rarely considered first line therapy. This mentality is changing slowly but last month I was contacted by three nutrition students attending three different universities. They were all near the end of their training and their common complaint was they knew very little about how to use nutrition to really help people beyond adjusting calories and salt.

When I first started seeing children with developmental issues, I was not sure how nutrition could help them either but I thought, in theory, it should be able to help some of them. There is a chemical process associated with learning and where there is chemistry, there is a possibility of nutrition intervention. Every time a person ties their shoes or solves a calculus problem, chemicals are moving around in the brain. If someone is exposed to information, such as language, over and over but cannot "learn" it, something in that biochemical learning process is not proceeding properly. It turns out that some nutrients are critical for the learning process and if the child does not have them or has an unusually high need for them, he will not learn unless he gets them. I discovered through a combination of combing through research, talking to biochemists and other practitioners and trial and error what works best in what situations.

Patch: Do you find some people to be skeptical of your view that conditions as common as ear infections and stomach aches and as severe as anxiety attacks and ADHD, might all be helped with specific nutritional supplements? How do most doctors, therapists and the public respond to this idea?

Dorfman: Most therapists, doctors and parents have an overwhelmingly positive response to the idea. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that most of the parents I see have been to a number of other specialists before they get to me, so they have tried conventional approaches and have failed. At that point, even otherwise skeptical doctors are willing to consider an approach that, at worst, will do no harm. Besides, while I put these ideas together in ways that are easy to understand, I have not created them. Many researchers and professionals who are smarter than me have been talking about these principles for decades.

Patch: When and why did you decide to write this book?

Dorfman: I was asked to write the book by someone who heard me speak in New York a few years ago. While people have often said, "you should write a book," this person was a book agent and he was determined to help me get it done. He originally suggested a general nutrition book but I was committed to writing something that would be both interesting and entertaining. So, I wrote it as a series of true nutrition detective stories.

Patch: What types of patients do you treat in your local North Potomac office? The book seems to focus on children, do these practices apply to adults?

Dorfman: The book focuses on children but my true specialty is medical problems that have not responded well to conventional treatments. I help people of all ages explore nutritional possibilities. My oldest client is 99