[Nutritional education: from ignorance to social representations in post-graduation by Rio de Janeiro (1980-98)].

Tbe present article aims at analyzing the of nutrition teaching in post-graduation programs from 1980 to 1998. As the maine cause for nutrition as an academic subject, nutritional ignorance is the basic focus of dissertations from the 1980's up to 1990, showing that the beginning of researchers' education was marked by a technical and intervening approach whose subject scope followed an outside logic. After 1990, dissertations began to criticize nutrition curriculum and practice and to introduce the concept of social representations. On doing so, they kept structural concepts when relating representations and practices. Tracing back the relevant chronological facts of nutrition, as a science and as a profession, ends up to empty informers' statements, revealing that nutritionists represent their education and practice more as a result of external idealized views than as a group of meaningful representations rendered by their practice, in which relational experiences among individuals and with their social environment take place.