Nutrition on the run: Fueling the veterinary professional for steady energy and better care

This episode of The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success focuses on a familiar challenge in veterinary medicine: maintaining proper nutrition during long, unpredictable workdays. As clinic schedules fill and breaks become limited, meals are often replaced with quick, convenient options.

Cohosts Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, discuss how those daily choices can affect more than energy levels, including cognitive function, client communication, and team interactions. The episode also outlines practical approaches to help veterinary professionals build more consistent eating habits in a busy clinical setting.

Partial transcript:

Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP: We all know that we can choose habits that make us healthier, and we also know that it’s really hard. Now, whether to be healthy, whether to maintain optimal weight, or [whether] to stay fit is a personal choice for each one of us, but when we’re thinking about a veterinary clinic setting, Aaron, why does all of this matter from a clinical perspective?

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Great question. I think that it’s really worth the exercise in framing food differently. As a culture, at least in the US, for a lot of us individually, we have sometimes unhealthy relationships with food. So I like to use the word fuel—fueling and energy—as opposed to straight-up food, like "good food" or "bad food," per se.

But I think that the way we fuel ourselves in a vet clinic setting has a huge impact on our physical performance and our cognitive performance.

I want to talk about 3 specific impacts that food has in the clinic setting. One is cognitive performance, one is client communication, and one is team dynamics. Part of this team dynamics part is really being a reliable peer, which we all want to have around us. We also want to be a reliable peer to others. So let me break these down briefly, 1 at a time.

Fueling or having energy for cognitive performance—what I think about with this is blood sugar spikes. We have all those sugary, tasty things. Perhaps this even starts at your local Starbucks, where your Starbucks drinks sometimes look like what we used to get at a Dairy Queen or something like that. It’s already sugary to start with. And then, if you have a sugary treat or pastry with that in the moment…your blood sugar spikes. You’ll get a little surge of energy, which feels great. But then, inevitably, there’s a consequence of that.

We’ll have an insulin surge, and then there will be a crash, or a dip in energy. When this crash happens, we actually have a very obvious physiological response to the carbohydrates. So the sugars will cause reduced attention, slower processing speed, and more mental fatigue. In the vet setting, you’re constantly making microdecisions—thinking about drug dosing, diagnostics, surgical precision, and emotional stability—while keeping an eye on everything around you at all times. If you are crashing from the sugar buzz, your cognitive performance is going to be compromised. So if your glucose is going to be on a roller coaster, your attention will often also be on a roller coaster, and that is not an ideal setting for practicing vet med.