Nutrition

Nutritional therapy uses diet and nutrition to treat and prevent disease. You may know therapists as Nutritionists and Dietitians, but many other natural therapies also use diet and nutrition as a key to health. Naturopaths place heavy emphasis on diet and nutrition for example.

Throughout the centuries, food has been used as medicine and the best known physician to the Western World, Hippocrates, is often quoted as saying “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food”. Extensive scientific research shows evidence that quality whole foods are both curative and protective. So when your grandmother told you to take lemons for your cold, scientists can now tell you why she was right.

What we eat, how it is processed and used by the body and eventually how the waste products are eliminated are all important aspects of nutritional therapy. A nutritional therapist may come to a conclusion that your diet is inadequate or that your diet is adequate, but your absorption of nutrients is impaired or that you are not eliminating efficiently because of a lack of water and/or fibre in your diet or some other combination.

It is common in our society to only think about nutrition when we are sick, pregnant, overweight, start to show signs of aging or have a condition that is made worse by eating some type of food (eg. allergy, diabetes etc.). At other times we make little attempt to eat tasty, nutritionally balanced meals. We often think more about what we put into our car than what goes into our bodies - you wouldn't dream of putting the wrong fuel into your car.

Children are often rewarded with foods severely lacking in nutritional value when they are good, so as adults we carry that reward system into our daily lives - we make daily decisions about our state of “goodness” and what we deserve. Ofcourse, you deserve a treat when you come home tired and stressed after a busy day! An over reliance on pre-made and heavily processed foods and a motivation for strong tastes regardless of nutritional value, can lead to many of the deficiency diseases which are prevalent in our society today.

Most nutritional therapists will tell you that a varied, whole food diet combined with exercise are two of the best ways of maintaining health and avoiding disease.

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