is diet advice speech protected by the 1st Amendment?

[dead0man]

Reason

Do you have a constitutional right under the First Amendment to give people diet advice? The state of Florida says citizens can't get paid for it unless they have the proper occupational license, and a woman threatened with fines for breaking state regulations is asking the Supreme Court to uphold her freedom to suggest healthy meals.

Heather Kokesch Del Castillo is a health coach in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. She got in trouble with the state in 2017 because she was providing food advice to paying customers but is not a licensed dietitian (and doesn't claim to be). She was threatened with fines and misdemeanor charges if she didn't stop offering her services for money unless she becomes a licensed dietitian, which in Florida requires an undergraduate degree, 900 hours of supervised practice, testing, and fees.

Instead, she sued, represented by lawyers with the Institute for Justice. She argued that the First Amendment protected her right to be paid to give diet advice to willing customers. If she were to write a book providing diet advice, the state could not demand she be licensed as a dietician in Florida in order to sell the book in stores. That would be a clear First Amendment violation. Why would giving advice person-to-person be any different?

[Person Man]

I had some friends who did a similar Senior Design project and that is what one of the panelists asked about. "You could get in trouble for offering unlicensed dietary advice". Fun times.

I mean, you can't just give legal advice through "speech", but I guess just trying to educate people on generalized knowledge or ideas that don't attempt to do anything for them as an individual should be protected speech. That is, telling someone who they should/could sue, if anyone, if a dog bites them at the dog park or what to do if the police are accusing them of having drugs is very different than generalized advice about "their rights" or even "don't talk to cops or invite them in (not unlike vampires)".

For this case, I would say that there is a 70% chance that this isn't "speech", but it will largely hinge on whether this was just general sharing of perceptions and observations or actual unlicensed professional services.

[brucejoel99]

Whether one has a constitutional right under the 1st Amendment to give people diet advice is irrelevant because that's not what this woman's case was about. Her case was about whether she had a constitutional right under the 1A to offer commercial speech tied to medical advice, which the government would frankly have to try to lose a case about even if strict scrutiny was being applied, & it's not. Her case has not only already lost in the 11th Circuit, but she lost it while garnering one of the friendliest possible panels of judges in the country that she could've gotten, so what does that say?

[Torie]

Dead'O,  I suggest that you insert the word "paid" in your headline. I give unpaid diet advice all the time. If you want some, let me know.

Licensure of dietitians to create a monopoly for them is asinine. Next thing you know it will be barbers. Oh wait. Is there a rational basis for it? Usually finding a rational basis is about as easy as indicting a ham sandwich.

Do you really want SCOTUS to become our nanny to protect us from every silly law known to man? Do you want to give them that much power? I am not sure I would want to even give myself such power.

[dead0man]

Do you really want SCOTUS to become our nanny to protect us from every silly law known to man? Do you want to give them that much power? I am not sure I would want to even give myself such power.

if the end result is fewer silly laws, yes, of course.  Certainly the law makers aren't going to fix the many problems they created.

[It’s so Joever]

No, it’s paid and it’s a medical profession dealing with a serious crisis which doesn’t matter constitutionally, but just makes this whole example worse.

[DaleCooper]

You don't have to be a doctor to know what is and isn't healthy to eat. One of the ways that Americans have rewritten reality in order to accommodate the feelings of fat people is convincing everybody that eating healthy is rocket science. It isn't.

Now, if this woman is mixing the diet advice with medical advice that only a licensed practitioner should give, like for example telling people that eating veggies is a replacement for taking their medications, then she should be in trouble. But if she's just coaching people on how to eat carrots instead of triple cheeseburgers then she should have every right to run her business.

[Senator Incitatus]

I would say anything categorized as "advice" is generally the sort of expression which is protected, but I construe "protection" much more narrowly—I do believe someone could be restricted from selling "advice" in exchange for money without this infringing on their right to simply express such advice.

TL;DR: It's called FREE speech, so it should be FREE.