As a dietician for Coastline Elderly Services in New Bedford, Kim Ferreira says the best part of her job is being out of the office.

Ferreira travels around the Southcoast passing along healthcare education and the steps to better nutrition. Her site visits often keep her local – cooking for the Rochester Council on Aging, holding workshops with both the Marion and Mattapoisett Councils on Aging and co-hosting a nutrition segment on ORCTV.

What makes the travel worthwhile, she said, is how accessible nutritional education can be for the public.

“What’s nice about nutrition is that anybody can benefit,” Ferreira said. “Some topics are geared to particular age groups, but everyone can learn something.”

A Michigan native, Ferreira received bachelor’s degrees in both exercise physiology and nutrition from Michigan State University, and a master’s in nutrition from New York University.

While Ferriera was completing her degrees in Michigan she worked as a Nutrition Health Advocate, helping her fellow students who were dealing with body image issues and eating disorders.

It was while working with her peers, she said that she realized that she wanted to focus on nutrition education. This led her to approach ORCTV about filming a local nutrition segment filled with “how-to’s,” for good health.

“I always knew I wanted to do more community nutrition and a lot of it is just getting out to the community,” she said.

Ferreira makes monthly visits to the Rochester Council on Aging, where she cooks breakfast for the guests and tells them the nutritional information of everything they eat.

Labeling foods is a practice she also uses with Coastline’s Meals on Wheels program. Everything she serves comes with a fact sheet of all of the nutritional information found in the food. Knowing exactly what they are eating, she said, is half the battle.

“It certainly sparked discussion,” she said. “Sodium, for example, is such a hot topic right now and people can read the labels and see exactly what’s in their food.”

From there, she said, people can use the information to make better choices with what they are eating.

Cooking your own food, she said, can be an important first step to better nutrition.

“Investing a little bit more time in cooking is worth it because you know what is going in there and you can meet your needs,” she said. “A lot of people want the quick and easy thing so it’s not shocking that’s what you’re seeing.”

The “quick and easy” solution to eating is affecting children. Schools are trying to adopt healthier alternatives for the students to combat obesity and diabetes, she said.

“Kids have become so removed from where their food comes from,” she said. “To them, it comes from a box.”

Southcoast residents have one great advantage in that they have access to a lot of locally grown, organic foods, she said.

Being healthy doesn’t mean they have to eat only gluten-free products or cranberries, she said. Rather, it’s about setting small goals that you can reasonably meet.

“It’s important not to make it harder on yourself than it needs to be,” Ferreira said. “We over-think it. Sometimes we just need to take a step back. It has to become part of your routine and don’t overload yourself with too many changes because you can’t realistically sustain that for a long period of time.”

Recently, Ferreira hosted a workshop in the Marion Music Hall, which focused on how to cope with chronic illness.

“It was nice because it gets people out of the house and gets them to set a small goal for themselves every week,” she said. “It’s a goal they are comfortable with but it’s also feasible.”

Ferreira said she hopes to work with ORCTV again soon on a “question and answer” segment with her co-host, Tabitha Tripp, of Tender Hearts Home Health Care in Marion. Tripp currently hosts the ORCTV segment, “Navigating the Way for Seniors.”

“Obviously there’s a million topics you can do on nutrition so it’s a good idea to know what people in the community have questions with or have difficulty with,” she said. “It’s something a lot of people struggle with. It’s frustrating but you have to tackle one at a time.”