About Nutritional Therapy
What Is Nutritional Therapy?
There are many factors influencing our health. We’ve all heard the phrase “You are what you eat” and this is clearly true - every cell of your body is made from what you eat, drink and breathe in. It’s only common sense that what you consume has a significant influence on your health and performance.
The environments we live in and the lifestyles we lead also affect our bodies, placing stresses and strains on us both physically and mentally, and these too have an impact on the nutrition that our bodies need in order to cope.
Nutritional therapy is about finding out what a client's nutritional needs are, either to achieve peak performance or to heal an illness caused, partially or wholly, by nutritional imbalance and then to devise a set of adjustments to diet and lifestyle in order to achieve the required nutritional input.
You may be surprised at just how powerful seemingly small changes to diet and lifestyle can be in resolving many different ill-health conditions. The human body has a fantastic ability to keep itself in tip-top condition if it is given the right nutrition. Unfortunately the majority of people don't do that - it's estimated that less than 10% of people in the UK obtain even the RDA amounts of all the vitamins and minerals.
Tests
A consultation with a nutritional therapist is a lot longer than you typically spend with a GP because the therapist takes the time to fully analyse your medical history and your current diet and lifestyle in order to uncover the real underlying causes of an illness. We don't just treat the symptoms.
In some cases diagnostic tests are employed to help uncover the cause of an illness, they can significantly speed up this process by revealing what's really going on inside your body.
Individuality
Individuality is a very important aspect of nutritional therapy. Unlike conventional healthcare where everyone with a particular symptom or health complaint tends to be treated in the same way, often with prescribed medications, the nutritional therapist takes time to judge just what treatments will be most effective for each individual client.
The diets and lifestyles of individuals vary enormously and so do the environments they live in and the stresses and strains they experience. Other factors, such as the genes we are born with and the conditions we have been exposed to throughout our lives, also have varying effects on the nutritional needs of our bodies at the present moment.
All of this means that every person is unique. Nutritional therapy recognises this and tailors a programme for each individual, consisting of dietary and lifestyle changes designed to promote optimum health and/or recovery from illness.
The Nutritional Programme
A nutritional programme usually contains, at its core, changes to the diet. Some people expect to be told to stop eating everything they like and to spend the rest of their lives eating nuts, seeds and houmous. This is not the case at all - trust me! We have a very important rule in nutritional therapy, it's called the 80:20 rule: if you eat healthily 80% of the time then you can indulge yourself the other 20%. You just have to make sure you get the 80:20 the right way round!
Changes to lifestyle are also often advised as part of a nutritional programme and again these need not be onerous. The body requires some exercise in order to operate efficiently but that doesn't mean you have to spend hours every week jogging.
Supplements may also be advised. Diet should always be at the core of any nutritional programme but supplements can provide a useful boost, in order to speed up a healing process which might otherwise take a long time, provide additional nutrients where digestion or absorption is below par or where needs are greater than normal (e.g. in the case of diabetes).
What Conditions Can It Help With?
Improving your nutrition can bring stronger resistance to disease and better health overall, and nutritional therapy may be particularly helpful if you have a specific condition such as:
- Allergies and food intolerances.
- Anxiety and depression.
- Age-related issues (e.g. macular degeneration, memory decline).
- Arthritis.
- Asthma, hay fever.
- Diabetes.
- Digestive disorders (e.g. bloating, constipation, diarrhoea, heartburn).
- High blood pressure.
- High cholesterol.
- Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
- Inflammatory bowel conditions (Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis).
- Osteoporosis.
- PMS and menopausal problems.
- Pre-conceptual issues (infertility).
- Skin conditions (e.g. eczema, psoriasis).
- Tiredness, chronic fatigue.
- Thrush, cystitis.
- Weight problems.
This list is by no means exhaustive, nutritional therapy may help to resolve many different ill-health conditions.
Nutritional Therapy and Conventional Healthcare
It is important to note that nutritional therapy is not an alternative to conventional healthcare; it is a complementary discipline which means that it can work alongside conventional medicine in the treatment and support of ill-health conditions.
Always consult your GP if you are concerned that you may have a serious
health problem or if you notice any unusual or unexpected symptoms.
Nutrition Titles
Nutritional therapists are commonly referred to as nutritionists but in fact the two terms mean different things.
- Nutritionists normally work in settings such as the food industry, in research and academia, or in government and other agencies. They are not usually qualified to provide individual nutrition advice.
- Nutritional therapists on the other hand are qualified to provide individual advice and most work in private practice.
- Dieticians are also qualified to provide individual advice but they work principally in the National Health Service.
