Surrey Story: Prof Danielle McCarthy and Anna Wheeler

How did you decide to study at Surrey?

Danielle 
I really wanted a course that had both nutrition and food science and nowhere in my home, Ireland, did that. I didn't want to go to a massive city because I moved the year after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Northern Ireland, so I was not used to going up to big cities on my own because it wasn’t safe at that time. Thankfully, that has changed, but moving to a place that seemed safe was really important to me.

When I visited campus it was a beautiful sunny day. I remember my mum saying to me “gosh, can you imagine? You wake up every morning to blue sky!” and that might sound really silly, but I loved the campus. 

The other major thing for me was because I had studied in Northern Ireland, our A levels were different.  I studied art and design, chemistry, and home economics, and I do maintain that my career has absolutely used all of those subjects. But at that time, and still now, sadly, there's an idea that you're either a scientist or you're a creative arts person. If Surrey hadn’t been open minded and accommodating to my differences, I wouldn’t have been able to apply.

Ultimately, I think enabling access to education is so important. Everyone should have the chance to study somewhere like Surrey. Once I’d started my course, I received a bursary because of my first year exam results. I remember my mum sending the story to the local paper! It was really helpful for us as a family because we were having financial difficulties at that stage. 

I know you both lived together at Surrey. As Nutrition students, how were the meals? 

Anna
Not necessarily good. A big part of studying was explaining to people that we didn’t do a cooking degree! 

Danielle 
I remember in my final year, my project was whether or not fish gelatin could replace pork gelatin, and we had to skin tons of mackerel. My house stank and we had loads of mackerel which nobody wanted to eat. We were not at all popular. But I ended up marrying the man that helped me do that, so it turned out for the best! 

What are your favourite memories from Surrey?

Anna  
In our first year on campus, we made some lifelong friends, and there was a great balance between work and play at Surrey. We worked really hard – our course had one of the highest numbers of taught and lab hours, but there was time for socialising and hobbies too. 

I wrote for the university paper, and that was brilliant because you would turn up, take your pick of some CDs, and write reviews. I also interviewed the band Reef, who were playing a gig at the Guildford Civic Hall. That was my first experience of writing, and I’ve ended up having a focus on communications in my career, so it must have made an impact!

What were some of the most important learnings you took from your time at Surrey?

Anna 
With the degree we did, it covered all sorts of topics like physiology, pharmacology and biochemistry, which helped us narrow down what we’d like to do for our career.  

I did a short intervention trial for my dissertation which involved designing diets with different glycemic indices, blood work and getting the study published. It was quite unusual for a dissertation to do that depth of work, and even though I didn’t go down the academic route, it helped me understand how trials worked which was helpful for my career. 

Danielle 
I remember absolutely hating microbiology because it tended to be on a Thursday after Wednesday night at the union, and you had to look at germs under the microscope. It wasn’t my favourite subject, but things like that have stuck with me. As a nutritionist now, I can recognise that you need to be aware of the impact of ingredients like salt on food safety, and that understanding is vital for reformulation programmes. 

I can remember thinking “when are we ever going to use the Krebs cycle?” that we learned in Biochemistry, but these became topics I geeked out on in my PhD. Figuring out how to use the information like a jigsaw was the bit I loved. My PhD gave me confidence to do human intervention trials as well as cell culture work and DNA expression. 

Surrey also taught me how important it is to have fun as well as work hard. I speak to lots of people, some of them in their forties now, who don’t know how to have fun and work at the same time, because their success relied on them working without a break. I'm so glad that there was a fun atmosphere at Surrey as well as the academic side because I see people now having to re-train their brains not to put work first all the time. 

Could you tell us a bit about your career paths leading up to Nutrition Talent? 

Danielle 
It’s been a bit of a long and winding road. The placement year at Surrey was really important. I worked with a fantastic team at Yakult where I learned a lot of applied knowledge, including science that was accepted in Eastern culture and not necessarily Western culture, which was fascinating. 

Once I’d graduated, I moved to product development, designing pizzas for different retailers, but I got the itch again for research. I still liked the idea of being in industry and wanted to travel, so found a European PhD with Reading, sponsored by Unilever. I was driven to figure out how to have an impact on people’s health on a larger scale. 

After a short post-doc I moved to the Applied Science team at GSK, working on research programmes looking at plant science polyphenols. I got to travel to New Zealand every February because that’s where we grew our blackcurrants. I was living the dream!

I spent a few more years at GSK, but then took the plunge and set up my own consultancy. That only ended up being for a short time as I was offered the position to head up nutrition at Sainsbury’s, and Anna, my confidante, said that I could not turn that position down. It was fascinating to work on the health strategy for a big retailer, across huge numbers of products and suppliers. 

If you watch the program ‘Location, Location, Location’, my life was a lot like that. I had two children in a small flat in London.  People already thought we were mad for having two children, and I wanted another child, but I would never see them if I had to keep working at the same rate to pay for everything. We decided to jump ship and I moved back to Northern Ireland, and that’s when Anna and I launched Nutrition Talent. 

I love the work we do with Nutrition Talent in terms of supporting nutrition science and making sure that the right experts are in the right organisations. 

Anna  
The placement that I did was also key to the start of my career, so a massive thank you to Surrey, and to our tutor Jonathan Brown who found our placements and is now working with us again on a nutrition careers session for current students. He found amazing opportunities, and I was lucky enough to spend a year at Unilever in their nutrition team. 

I was able to get stuck into that team straight away and was given responsibility from the start, working on some big brands like Flora, and Marmite which was really exciting. In fact, I still work with Flora Proactiv today, 20 years later! What I learnt on my placement definitely influenced my final year at Surrey, giving me practical knowledge and ideas for the future.

After university, I worked at a trade association before going back to Unilever. My role was a mix of working on communications with healthcare professionals, as well as consumer PR and a more practical side of the job, which involved making sure all claims on products were accurate and products had the correct nutritional information. There was a numerical ingredients focus in product development which I loved.

Later I moved to Coca-Cola Great Britain as part of the public affairs and communications team, which was a really interesting career move. A lot of my time was spent thinking about low calorie sweeteners and explaining the science behind them to health professionals and how they can be a useful tool to enable sugar reduction. . Even today, there’s a lot of misinformation about sweeteners. Another important part of my role was to bring a scientific voice to a big organisation. 

After a while, I wanted a change and I set up my own consultancy business, which I also still work on. Soon after that Danielle and I set up Nutrition Talent, a nutrition consultancy and recruitment company which has been running for six years now. We work with different organisations to provide them with nutrition expertise. This could be recruiting someone to work in their team permanently at all levels from graduate to director level, it could be consultancy resource for a project or longer-term consultancy support. Some of our consultancy work includes providing nutrition advice, and strategy and health communications, for example building health narratives. We currently have over 1300 nutrition professionals registered with us so we are able to provide our clients with the support they need, at the appropriate level, when they need it. 

We also work on career development and were delighted to come back to Surrey to deliver our Nutrition Careers workshop to students recently. We have our own podcast. The ‘Humans of Nutrition’ podcast aims to bring to life the work of nutritionists, and the people behind the work as well, thinking about their challenges, inspirations and how we can all work together to create change on a large scale. 

You can listen to the podcast here: https://www.nutritiontalent.com/podcast/ 

How do you feel about the rise in social media influencers in the health and nutrition space? 

Anna 
There is a lot of misinformation on social media and it is a big problem. Part of our responsibility as Registered Nutritionists is to help set the record straight, because everyone has a view at the moment. There are people with no nutrition training giving advice on social media, and also influencers with medical qualifications, who perhaps don't have the nutrition background. Doctors get very minimal nutrition training for example, which is a worrying fact.

This is another reason why we set up our company. With nutrition, it can be a winding career path, and there isn’t the same protection of title as dietitians, which means that unfortunately lots of people can call themselves nutritionists. We are proud to be Registered Nutritionists with the Association for Nutrition, who are fighting to protect our title. It’s so important that we make sure people with the right qualifications are giving advice to the public and on people’s social media feeds, especially with the amount of fearmongering involved. 

Danielle 
What fascinates me is the level of engagement that comes with the increase in social media content and fearmongering about health and wellness. Interest from the public is definitely there and sometimes advice from the wrong people can put attention and anxiety in the wrong place. Misinformation can put people’s relationships with food at risk, which is very dangerous. 

We’re also seeing time and time again how important nutrition is to staff wellbeing. Health is such an important part of productivity, and we need careful decisions about health so the public isn’t misinformed.

What have your experiences been as women in science, and do you think representing women’s health and nutrition is particularly important? 

Anna 
Nutrition is quite an unusual form of science as it is a very female-focused profession. 

We're lucky that we're a strong community, though I don't necessarily think that's anything to do with it being mainly female. There are some brilliant, very senior women in important roles in the in the nutrition world but there’s still work to do particularly when you get to boardroom levels. 

Women’s health has improved over the last few years, but there is still not enough research on women’s health specifically. It’s definitely not 50/50 with research into men and women, and the statistics are shocking. 

Danielle
The fact that it is normal for women to be visible in the nutrition industry, and to see so many female success stories is fantastic. The vast majority of my mentors through my placement year and supervisors on my PhD were amazing women. We’ve recorded a podcast episode with Professor Sue Lanham-New from Surrey who is definitely leading the way in nutrition, specifically in vitamin D research.

Any key advice for current students?

Soak up as much knowledge as you can while you're at university, but also think about what experience you can gain alongside your studies. There are so many nutrition courses available now, and a lot more competition, so it’s even more important to do a placement if you can and gain any kind of experience - whether it’s volunteering to help your tutors or supporting at conferences. When you leave university, you need to be able to transfer your knowledge in a way that adds value to an organisation.  Anything you can do whilst you're at university alongside that functional expertise that you're building, will help you demonstrate and deliver that value.

You can listen to the podcast episode with Professor Sue Lanham-New here.