i am a registered nutrition practitioner working with the functional medicine model
Nutritional Therapy is the application of nutrition and lifestyle medicine sciences in the promotion of health, peak performance and individual care.
Registered Nutritional Therapy Practitioners assess and identify potential nutritional imbalances and understand how these may contribute to an individual’s symptoms and health concerns. They recommend personalised nutrition and lifestyle programmes and work in partnership with their clients to help them implement these dietary changes, and instil healthy habits, in support of health and wellbeing.
Nutritional Therapy is not a replacement for medical advice. It can however, form part of an integrative approach to healthcare and play an integral role in prevention and management of symptoms of diet-induced disease. Our professional body is the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine
functional medicine asks how and why illness occurs
Chronic disease is usually preceded by a period of declining function in one or more of the body’s systems. Restoration of health requires improving the specific dysfunctions that have contributed to the disease state. One disease or condition may have multiple causes, just as one fundamental imbalance may be at the root of many seemingly disparate conditions, as shown in this diagram from The Institute for Functional Medicine literature, “Functional Medicine: a clinical model to address chronic disease and promote wellbeing”.
Functional Nutrition
Functional nutrition is about finding the right way for each of us to eat – using food to maximise the potential for health and reverse dysfunction or disease. There is no single “right diet” that applies to everyone. We have different genetic backgrounds, different preferences, and different lives. We all want to be healthy, but many of us haven’t figured out how exactly to make food and dietary patterns serve that goal. Functional nutrition offers the concepts, strategies and tools to make that happen.
For untold centuries, humans have relied on the food supply as a source of energy, health and connection. However, over the last several decades, changes in the food supply (and in how we use it) have contributed strongly to the growing epidemic of chronic disease. Functional nutrition was developed out of a desire on the part of healthcare providers to change that picture.
Emerging science is very clear that food is a powerful influence on health. Food offers not only the calories that fuel our body’s metabolism (engine), but it also contains many diverse components that play important roles in all our bodily functions. Poor quality food can create disease, and high quality food (in the right proportions and amounts) can reverse disease and sustain health. To quote Hippocrates from thousands of years ago, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food”
Changing eating behaviours isn’t easy, even if you are well-informed about what to do. There will be ups and downs. But, unlike a diet, these changes are not harsh restrictions on your eating, and they do not involve counting calories or depriving yourself of delicious food. They are scientifically sound approaches that can benefit you for a lifetime!
Excerpt from The Institute for Functional Medicine literature, “Introduction to Functional Nutrition” The Institute for Functional Medicine