What is nutritional therapy and why might you need it?

Here’s what nutritional therapy isn’t:

• Nutritional therapy isn’t about handing out diets, one diet for diabetes, another for heart disease and so on.
• Nutritional therapy doesn’t suggest diets according to symptoms.
• Nutritional therapy doesn’t assume that your symptoms mean that you’re the same as someone else who happens to have those symptoms.  We’re all different and should be treated differently.
   

What nutritional therapy does do is look at a whole person.  Rather than suggesting a diet to lower your blood pressure, a nutritional therapist asks why your blood pressure is high in the first place and deals with the causes.  The knock-on effect of this is that you may not only lower your BP, but also reduce your arthritic pain or depression (which you thought was unrelated), because many symptoms can result from one cause. 

Nutritional therapy treats you as an individual, and while there may be some obvious tenets that apply to everyone, such as making sure you eat enough fruit and vegetables a day, there are many things that are specific to you.

Nutritional therapy can tackle many things.  Some are obvious, such as constipation and allergies, but others may be less obvious, for example low energy, depression, infertility, stress, heart disease, arthritis, autism, behavioural disorders…  The list is endless.  You’ve heard the saying “You are what you eat”.  Well, your being encompasses not only your physical state, but your mental and emotional states too.

My philosophy

I believe that good nutrition is the cornerstone of good health.  You may not be completely healthy with it, but you certainly can’t be healthy without it.  If your nutritional status is sound, your body can then benefit from any other therapies you may be having, whether physical or emotional, conventional or alternative.