"Your nutrition is your medicine"
-Hippocrates
Circa 400 BC
What IS Nutritional Therapy?
Nutritional Therapy is a health modality that uses food and/or supplementation (depending on the clients needs, desires, and goals) to give the body what is needs to heal itself. It is an increasingly popular health field that fills a large void in America's healthcare. You may already be eating an otherwise appropriate diet, but if you are not digesting properly or are under stress, you may not be getting what you need from your food. Nutritional Therapy educates and empowers you to take control of your own health. The body’s innate intelligence allows it to know exactly what it needs and how to adapt to its environment in order to function best.
You’ll learn how to listen to your body.
Optimal health is built on the biochemical foundations of a properly functioning digestion system, healthy blood sugar balance, mineral balance, appropriate fatty acid balance, and sufficient hydration. With Nutritional Therapy, we have the ability to detect and correct underlying dysfunction by addressing weaknesses in any of these foundations. Utilizing nutritional assessments, diet refinements, dietary supplements and lifestyle adjustments, a personalized program is created just for you.
What does a Nutritional Therapist do?
As a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP), I help clients find solutions to living a healthy, more vital life. Together we sort through the conflicting and sometimes misleading dietary information that circulates the media and work to embrace a properly prepared, nutrient-dense, whole food approach to eating. This isn’t about a “diet” of counting calories or points, or weighing and measuring food, or eating from a box. You’ll eat plenty of delicious, satisfying food . . . foods that your body has been asking for.
My mission is to be your guide in this journey of using food to recover your health.
Nutritional Therapists do not diagnose or treat medical conditions, but instead support the underlying health of the body in order to help it function more optimally. After an analysis of your health information and nutritional assessments, we develop a practical nutritional and lifestyle plan that fits your life; changes that are individually tailored to correct the deficiencies in your body and, accordingly, restore balance and improve health.
Why Nutritional Therapy?
Nutritional Therapy advocates prevention over prescriptions.
In the United States we spend more money on health care than any other nation in the world. Despite the 3.8 trillion dollars spent in 2014, almost half of all Americans suffer from chronic disease. The medical and pharmaceutical industries would have us believe that they are making great strides in solving our health problems, but that couldn’t be further from the truth:
As a society, we seem to expect one or more of these conditions to strike us as we age. It doesn’t have to be this way!
Nutritional Therapy promotes a return to traditional and sustainable forms of farming.
The truth is we live in a very toxic world! Since World War II, 60-80,000 chemicals have been introduced into our food supply to create modern methods of food production. These chemicals have completely altered the chemistry of our soil, our water and air, our animals and thus our food and our health. With each generation, our overall health is deteriorating.
We are seeing a direct link between our health and the use of chemicals in fertilizers, weed-killers, and pesticides used on conventionally grown crop.
Marketing and slick advertising by big corporations and pharmaceutical companies are steering our health . . . and as a society we are listening and responding as encouraged! Improving our health through prevention will require changing how we think, act, and eat. . . . and advocating for change in our own homes, our schools, our communities and our health care settings.
~Over the past 57 years diabetes has risen from 1.8 million cases in 1958, to 29.1 million cases in 2012, or 9.3% of the American population.
~Obesity has reached epidemic levels with a 250% rate increase since 1980. As of 2014, more than two-thirds of US adults are overweight or obese. (Map of Adult Obesity in the US, 2013)
~Heart disease is ranked as America’s number one killer for both men and women in the United States. Though death rates from heart disease are declining, cardiovascular disease occurs in 75% of the population.
~ADHD, autism and learning disabilities rates
– rare in children a generation ago –
have risen to roughly 10 million.
~Dozens of degenerative diseases and chronic conditions – such as asthma, depression, fibromyalgia, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, MS, and Parkinson’s disease — strike Americans with increasing frequency.
Our current health care system is disproportionately focused on waiting until people are ill before providing care, and in doing so, we are missing the opportunity to assist people to stay healthy. Simply put, numerous incentives in our health care system are either misaligned or unsupportive of healthy behaviors and preventative care. In an average year, the U.S. spends less than $10 per person on prevention – about the same amount as a single movie ticket costs in many cities!
Manufacturers have made chemical food additives – such as stabilizers, flavor enhancers, synthetic vitamins, hydrogenated oils, artificial colors/dyes and sweeteners – a significant part of our diet. An estimated 80-93% of all processed food on our grocery store shelves contains genetically modified (GMO) ingredients with no labeling to inform the consumer. The effects of drinking milk and eating beef from conventionally-raised cows given genetically modified growth hormones as well as the effects of eating grains, fruits and vegetables grown with GMO seed have not been tested on humans. Research is showing that animals who eat GMO foods suffer from reproductive health abnormalities, shorter life spans, lameness, and digestive dysfunction just to name a few. Why would humans react any differently?