Stop Hiring Your Dietitian Last
By Kaylee Porter MS, RD, LDN
Most health brands bring a dietitian into the conversation at the very end. The product is built, the packaging is printed, the campaign is booked, and someone forwards the near-final claims for a quick "can we say this?" review. I think that's the most expensive habit in health marketing.
A registered dietitian's value isn't just in blessing a claim after it's written. It's in shaping the claim before the product hits the market. When companies follow this current pipeline, the money left on the table is bigger than the compliance risk.
What’s happening in health marketing?
In 2022 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) replaced its 25-year-old supplement advertising guide with the Health Products Compliance Guidance, which now covers not just supplements but foods, functional beverages, apps, and devices. The standard it enforces is "competent and reliable scientific evidence," which for a health benefit generally means randomized, controlled human trials.
The FTC judges the "net impression" of an ad as a whole, including the product name and the imagery. A careful disclaimer doesn't save you if the name and the image promise a cure. Additionally, the agency focuses on what a reasonable consumer takes away, not what the marketer intended. Your good intentions or catchy phrasing don’t even enter the analysis.
My hot take: you’re using dietitians for the wrong job
When a brand hires an RDN as a final compliance check, or worse, rents an RD's name for a byline while ignoring their clinical judgment on the actual claims, it's spending money to buy a rubber stamp. That's the wrong job for the most useful person in the room.
A dietitian who knows how to read and interpret scientific literature reads a draft claim the way the FTC and a skeptical consumer both read it, and can tell you three things a copywriter can't.
What the current literature actually supports, and how to read it.
Where the claim outruns the evidence.
Which compliant claim would still sell.
Dietitians don't kill claims. They transform an un-runnable claim for a runnable one while it's still cheap to change. Here’s an example. A brand calls a product "Clinically proven to boost immunity.” A dietitian can tell you the difference between "there is a study" and "there is high-quality evidence" and can provide an honest claim the evidence supports. While that version is narrower, when handled well it reads as more credible to a customer who's tired of being oversold.
I'll take the obvious counterargument head on. "That's what our lawyer is for." Your lawyer tells you whether a claim is legally exposed. They usually can't tell you whether the underlying science is reliable, or write you a better claim that keeps the conversion and loses the risk. Those are different skills.
Why it matters
If you only see this as compliance, you're undervaluing it. The downside of getting it wrong is real and seen frequently: corrective advertising, refunds, etc. But the bigger cost is quieter. It's the launch you reprint because the name was a claim.
There's also an upside most brands sleep on. A credible, evidence-anchored claim is a moat. Anyone can write "boosts immunity." Far fewer can write the specific, substantiated version and stand behind it, and that specificity is what earns media coverage and retailer confidence, and it's what brings customers back.
How would this work?
Move the dietitian upstream by bringing them into product naming and positioning, not just the final legal read. Treat "what compliant claim still sells?" as a brief, not a constraint. If you're putting an RD's name on your content, use their judgment on the claims too, or you've bought the credibility and thrown away the value.
So here's the question worth sitting with: who reads your current claims the way a regulator will, and when?
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