– Linda Lazarides | www.health-diets.net
Naturopathic nutrition has been around for thousands of years. It is quite a simple concept: using foods to help the body heal itself. In various foods, there are ingredients such as vitamins, minerals and flavonoids, which contribute to the bodys metabolic processes. If you are very lucky, your normal diet may always provide enough of these without you ever having to think about them.
Naturopathic nutrition forms part of the training of a nutritional therapist. Naturopaths and nutritional therapists believe that if your body begins to malfunction, for instance showing abnormal fatigue, skin problems, arthritis or headaches, then its metabolism is over-stressed and could do with a helping hand. A good practitioner will be able to diagnose which aspects of metabolism are under stress, and recommend foods and sometimes supplements to help. The practitioner will also usually suggest leaving out certain foods which may be hindering or stressing your metabolism. A good example of this is sugar, which your body is not designed to consume in the quantities found in the average modern diet. Excess sugar overworks your pancreas and adrenal glands and pushes up your blood fats. In turn this encourages cholesterol deposits on artery walls. Someone with heart disease or high blood pressure, for instance, will always be asked to keep their sugar consumption to a minimum.
Ive already changed to a healthy diet. Why should I do any more?
Nutritional therapy can succeed when a conventional healthy diet fails, because it is tailored to the individual. For instance, wholegrain bread is considered to be a health food, but if you cannot digest it properly it could in time produce inflammatory reactions and lead to a chronic problem such as migraine or irritable bowel syndrome. Many health problems are caused by poor digestion and absorption. These problems must be corrected to allow the nutrients from your diet to get to the cells where they are needed.
Surely foods and supplements cannot cure anything serious?
Most people think of a good lifestyle as helping to prevent an illness, and assume that if they are unlucky enough to get the illness then only some really powerful medicine can cure it. You need to be in no doubt whatsoever that, while medicines can be necessary in some situations, they do not cure chronic illness. (If they did, the illness would not be chronic, which means “long-term” or “permanent”). Over many years, a combination of genetics, stress and faulty lifestyle silently changes a person’s internal environment and body chemistry to produce an illness. No drug can reverse this process.
Self-help, in the form of eating healthy foods and taking supplements, can do a lot to help you make the enzymes, neurotransmitters, immune cells and hormones which your body needs in order to function better. However, this is not enough if a past faulty lifestyle has damaged your ability to:
- Excrete cellular wastes which build up and inflame your tissues.
- Or to absorb nutrients from your intestines into your blood and cells.
To help reverse this kind of damage, you need more than just a healthy diet. Special dietary tools and techniques are required to:
- Find out if your absorption of any nutrients is especially poor.
- Reduce the harmful gut bacteria which damage food absorption (in severe cases, consuming yoghurt and probiotics alone is nowhere near enough to do this).
- Find out which foods may be especially aggravating the illness.
- Speed up the removal of cellular wastes from your tissues.
- Enhance your production of liver enzymes.
- Permanently reduce the inflammatory processes which cause the symptoms of most chronic illnesses.
These are the tools and techniques of Nutritional Therapy. You can find out more about nutritional therapy and its success rates in my book Treat Yourself with Nutritional Therapy at www.health-diets.net/books/nutritionaltherapy/ .
