MNU

Anyone over the age of 18 can do our certifications. Whether you are already working in the health and fitness industry and want to augment your success with clients, an athlete looking to improve your own performance or you are a nutrition enthusiast who simply wants to be able to make informed decisions on nutrition, the MNU Certification has an option for you. None of our 3 certification options have pre-requisites as we intend to take everyone right from the beginning, all the way through to the level they want to be at.

Absolutely none. You can have a PhD, a dietetics degree, currently study a business degree or this could be your first attempt at furthering your education past high-school. It really doesn’t matter. The MNU Certification is designed to take an individual right from the basic principles all the way through to being able to understand and apply advanced theory. Each student will have their own journey of development and those with less knowledge to begin with will clearly need to spend the upper end of the weekly time commitment to ensure full understanding. Those with greater knowledge will be able to use the extra time to look into more advanced concepts and methods.

Yes! The Essential and Full-Online options allow anyone, anywhere, to be part of the MNU Certification. The ‘Full with Honours’ option is also available to anyone however it requires attendance at 3 residentials over the year.

Timezones: Most of the course is very easy to follow no matter what your timezone. The lectures are released at the same time each week, however they are then available for the remainder of the course. It is impossible to guarantee that the Live Catch-Up lectures are at a suitable time for everyone as we currently have students from several different countries on different continents. The Live sessions will however be filmed and made available to view. If there are enough students from your timezone, you never know, we may even find a work around to suit you; I’ve never done a lecture at midnight.

Yes, the MNU Certification has been designed so that it is extremely flexible. A weekly lecture and 3-6 hours of study time per week are expected from you however these can be done at a time that fits your schedule. So if you are working full-time or are in University, no matter when you get some spare time, you can progress your learning further by studying and catching up on content at a time that suits you.

Unfortunately not. Our aim is to provide the best possible nutrition education experience but also to ensure that our graduates know everything they need to know as well being equipped to continue learning with a critical mindset. For these reasons we do not differentiate between those with previous qualifications and those without. We will provide differentiated learning experiences to cater for both beginner and advanced students.

Weekly online lectures will be available to view on the MNU online learning platform and will include homework tasks and formative online quizzes. Catch up weeks are provided throughout your academic year to ensure that no-one falls behind. You will also be a part of a forum where you, your class mates and the Mac-Nutrition team can discuss the various topics covered in detail on a weekly basis. The MNU Mentoring Lab and personal tutors, depending on which course option you choose, are other ways you can advance and support your learning with the MNU Certification.

No. We are very careful to use the phrase the ‘Mac-Nutrition Universal (MNU) Certification’ in all our wording but yet we are occasionally asked if we are affiliated to an official University. Mac-Nutrition is a consultancy specialising in nutrition education, support and counselling. The MNU Certification is simply a knowledge acquisition certification that qualifies an individual to be insured to practice as a nutritionist or nutrition consultant.

No. We want to be very clear about this and why we have made the conscious decision not to be accredited.

If you want to be a dietitian and work in hospitals, go and do a dietetics degree, it’s as simple as that. This course will qualify you as a nutritionist/nutrition consultant and allow you to be insurable to practice what you are taught.

Course accreditation, whilst it sounds nice, only has ONE overarching benefit; it allows the individual to be sure that the course is inline with the accrediting bodies views of the evidence. In this vein, Mac-Nutrition is known both nationally and internationally for being a cutting edge, evidence-based nutrition consultancy. It’s kinda our thing. Look at the calibre of individuals who are willing to put their name to our commitment to evidence based practice/teaching in our endorsements section.

Therefore, the only other possible benefit of accreditation would be to give CPD points to individuals who have already completed a full university course that will qualify them for ‘Registered’ nutritionist status. We don’t want to jump through hoops and increase the cost of our course just for the benefit of a very small group of people.

Finally, our goal is to elevate the status of the MNU Certification to that of our Mentorship program which is now recognised as an industry ‘must do’ among even the most qualified of individuals. We are already working with some major players in the industry to make this happen. Watch this space.

Upon completion of any of the certification options, you will get a certificate relevant to the option that you chose signifying your achievement. For both of the Full options you will be required to fulfill the assessment criterion to be able to be insurable as a nutritionist or nutrition consultant.

The MNU Certification demonstrates that you have learnt from the best in the industry, have been taught the most up-to-date, cutting-edge, evidence-based information and, for those on the ‘with Honours’ option, have gained hands-on experience.

If you complete either of the Full options i.e. complete a minimum of 80% of the online lectures and pass the final exam, then yes, you will be eligible for insurance to give nutrition advice. We will be able to get you preferential rates for this with one of our insurance partners.

No. Not to any great extent. However, the MNU Certification has been written with two key purposes surrounding medical issues such as PCOS and Diabetes. Firstly, there will be advice on how to stay within your scope of practice but also when working with someone with one of these medical issues is not outside of your scope. Our ethos will always be ‘first do no harm’ and knowing when to refer clients with medical conditions out to specialists within a particular clinical area is imperative.

Secondly, it will provide you with both the knowledge and the evidence-based practical skills required to support clients with specialist clinical conditions and to liaise with other medical professionals to give the client the safest and most effective support possible.

We do not believe in paying for a service you did not receive, so yes we do offer refunds. However, the 2-month upfront enrolment cost is non-refundable. If you have been paying in monthly installments you simply stop your direct debit payment. In the instance where you paid upfront, the discount you received becomes nullified. Your refund will be based on the amount you would have paid had you been paying in monthly installments. Therefore, the balance between these price points is accounted before the refund is awarded.

With the overwhelming interest in the MNU Certification in its first year, we have implemented an enrolment fee. By securing your place on the MNU Certification with an enrolment fee you are displacing another student’s opportunity to come on the course therefore we only want you to enrol if you are 100% certain you want to do it.

The MNU Certification contains both formative assessment methods i.e. ongoing quizzes and recaps to ensure understanding, as well as a summative assessment i.e. an exam. At the end of both the Full-Online and Full-With Honours course options there will be an online exam that can be taken at anytime during the exam period (see timetable). Students must pass this exam and are required to have viewed a minimum of 80% of the lectures to become an MNU Certified Nutritionist.

Having a personal tutor is the highest level of 1-2-1 interaction and support you can have on MNU. Much in the same way people have different learning styles, some individuals need more support and guidance with certain topics, therefore we have given this option to allow for that.

Having your own tutor means that you will be assigned a member of the MNU team to act as your personal tutor for the duration of the course. You will be entitled to 30 minutes of 1-2-1 contact time per month (either as a phone call or via Skype/FaceTime) which can be split into 1-3 calls depending on your preference, as well as regular email contact (up to 10 emails/month) to help support your learning. The calls can be set up however you would like them with the time being used to explain anything that you found difficult to conceptualise in the online lectures, to ask any questions that may have been prompted by the lectures or content in the MNU lab and/or to help with the assessment process.

The type of course you do will very much depend on the exact route you want to take. If you want to work in hospitals then you will need to take the route that leads to becoming a Registered Dietitian. If you want to apply for a specific job, it’s worth looking at the requirements on the job description. However, if you want to work for yourself or have a job and want to increases your knowledge in the area, these are the benefits of doing the MNU Certification:

1) Theoretical knowledge acquisition

MNU will be a years worth of content, condensed from much longer methods of study, only to include the information that is specific to working with a wide range of clientele – including athletes, weight loss clients, clients with the key clinical issues and business to business corporate wellness clients. Many academic courses contain information that is designed to give credits or allow you to go on to do research e.g. learning about the sociology of sport when studying sport science or whole modules on research methods and lab techniques that aren’t applicable to Dietitians, Nutritionists and Personal trainers working with people outside of labs.

2) Practical application

The entire course has been written from a practitioners perspective – What do you need to know, why do you need to know it and how do you apply it. It will start with the basics but even they will only be the basics necessary to build up to the important advanced aspects of programming with clients.

3) Building a successful nutrition business/career

Obviously Mac-Nutrition has been lucky enough to be successful, building from a team of 1 to a team of 9 currently.

Not 9 people dotted around the country doing their own thing and using the same Facebook page. A team of 9 people who work day in day out together, sharing experiences, working on client case study meetings, sharing knowledge and reflective practice. Dealing not only with individual clients but also governing bodies, professional sports team and large corporate businesses. The Mentoring Lab will be designed to build the professional and business competencies required to not just have the theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge but also how to actually be successful in your career.

4) Confidence and Integrity

1-3 above are the underpinning elements of our wisdom pillar. We also plan to spend a great deal of money, time and effort putting MNU on the national and international map. So that when you put your certificate up on your clinic wall and display your MNU graduate logo on your website, people will have the confidence that you are a person of integrity and have done your dues to be able to help them achieve their goals.