For the majority of May I was home and taking advantage of some much-needed relaxation from the spring semester. Also getting in as much family time as possible. I have included a picture of my beautiful beach back home! This was definitely a crucial and much needed time away from all things school.
At the end of May, I came back to Tallahassee and immediately started working on things for this project. We have been working with a program called ProNutra. This program is where we have been planning our menus. This research study is a controlled feeding study, meaning that we provide the meals that our participants will be eating. They will first eat a total sodium diet for two weeks followed by a washout period, then they will eat a two week sodium density diet. Our participants will choose 3 of our 6 total options of breakfast, lunch, and dinner that we are preparing. Those 3 meals will be tailored to their specific caloric intake requirements. Like I mentioned, their first two weeks of meals will be a total sodium intake diet. This means that their meals for two weeks will have 2,300mg of sodium a day regardless of caloric intake.
After the washout period they will then receive a sodium density diet. This diet includes 1.2mg of sodium per kilocalorie. This just means that the amount of sodium in their meals will be based on their energy needs (aka their caloric intake). I have also included a picture of one of the meals I curated in the ProNutra program. Along the same lines, throughout the month of May we have been working on becoming ServSafe certified. This certification will allow us to ethically and safely cook and serve these meals to our participants. While it may not seem like much, these two tasks are crucial to our study.
We still have several things to learn and work on for this project. We are going to be learning how to use a lot of the lab equipment needed for this study. We also are going to work out how to make the flow of our participants’ visits as smooth as possible.
When it comes to professionalism, there are still so many skills left to be developed over the course of this summer. In the future we have anything from simply interacting professionally with participants to going to professional conferences and presenting this research. I am eager to continue to develop both these research and professional skills. My knowledge of research was small going into this and my experience even smaller, which leaves so much room for growth both professionally and in the research field. I am excited to gain more and more from this experience.
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