How Food Heals: Understanding Nutritional Therapy

Using food to heal 5 common health ailments

—

Unfortunately, we live in an era where ‘good nutrition’ can be seemingly impossible to find. Truly natural foods aren’t even safe, with 100 percent of all wines grown in Napa Valley sprayed with RoundUp.

There was a time — not many decades ago — when ‘nutritional therapy’ meant simply using food for healing. Today, nutritional therapy is considered an evidence-based approach to optimizing your health through customized shifts in your nutritional intake. In other words, there’s proven evidence that this approach works. Changing both your nutritional intake for the better and your general lifestyle (such as avoiding excessive sitting, now that sitting has been shown to be nearly as dangerous as a poor diet) is the ideal combination for better health.

Nutritional therapy is a holistic lifestyle approach that can help you needle into the heart of health concerns.

Rather than treating the symptoms of an issue, nutritional therapy can help treat the cause.   Is it any coincidence that a host of diseases and maladies have increased as our nutritional intake has plundered?

Anyone can benefit from nutritional therapy. You don’t have to be overweight or struggling with a specific disease or concern because almost every person could adopt a healthier nutritional intake. Nutritional therapy is also personalized because every person is unique. There’s no room for a one-size-fits-all model here, though outdated research on nutritional therapy (like the food pyramid model) still persists.

You can seek guidance from a nutritional therapist who has a diploma in Nutritional Therapy and is experienced in pathology, physiology, and biochemistry. They are often in private practice and can help you create a diet and lifestyle plan to reach your health goals. Meal planning, diet recommendations, and concrete steps for making lifestyle changes are what you can expect.

Here are five diseases that may be curable with nutritional therapy:

1. Obesity

Obesity is a bona fide disease that can lead to a number of other ailments ranging from diabetes to heart disease (the number-one killer of women in the US). It seems obvious that nutritional therapy can reverse obesity, but if it were that ‘easy’, we wouldn’t have a population with the majority being overweight. Nutritional therapy can help obese patients learn new strategies for changing their diet and understand why other approaches (like fad diets) have failed.

2. Addiction

Addiction is a disease. Nutritional therapy can help recovering addictsby teaching them why it’s important to care for their body — particularly during this vulnerable time. It can also help prevent addicts from replacing one addiction with another. For example, sugar lights up the same parts of the brain that get activated by cocaine. Food addiction is also very real and is a natural pairing with nutritional therapy.

3. Digestive Woes

Whether you suffer from recurring diarrhea, constipation, bloating, or any other type of digestive issue, the cause is probably what you’re feeding your body. Everyone has a different digestive tract that may or may not be aggravated by the foods we eat. You may be put on a cleanse, slowly adding foods back into your diet, in order to get to the root of what foods should be avoided.

4. Eating Disorders

From anorexia and bulimia to orthorexia and binge eating disorder (BED), nutritional therapy is absolutely vital for ED patients. These patients are usually already very savvy at knowing the nutritional content of just about every food, but may not have fully digested what happens when they completely forego certain nutrients only found in foods. That’s why it’s built into so many in-patient ED clinics.

5. High Cholesterol

High cholesterol is often caused by dietary choices — as well as genetics that encourage carrying excess weight. It can be challenging for patients to address without nutritional therapy because they find it so difficult to give up foods that can lead to high cholesterol. There are always alternatives, and therapy can help these patients find suitable, workable alternatives.

Nutritional therapy prioritizes unprocessed, natural foods that are local and seasonal. It’s a great way to get expert help on meal planning that’s truly balanced and delicious. Supplements may also be recommended in some cases since it’s nearly impossible to get all your nutritional needs met from diet alone. Consider nutritional therapy just as vital as any other form of healthcare.

---

You may also enjoy reading How Yoga Changed My Relationship With Food — and Myself, by Kasey Goins