The profession of nutritionist integrates the characteristics of chefs, health care professionals, medical practitioners, Chinese medicine practitioners, psychologists, marketers, administrators and other professions. Nutritionists can reduce the occurrence of various chronic diseases by scientifically and reasonably allocating people's diets and promoting people's health, and improve the people's nutrition awareness by popularizing nutrition knowledge to the whole society.

Nutritionists can be divided into clinical nutritionists, public nutritionists, food nutritionists, sports nutritionists and catering nutritionists according to their different functions.