Overview

Basically Nutritional Therapy is a way of using diet and supplements to encourage the bodies natural healing. It does this by detoxifying the body, correcting vitamin and mineral imbalances, restoring healthy digestion, and developing a positive attitude.

In order to do this effectively, a Nutritional Therapist will ask various questions about your medical history, moods, digestion, diet, exercise, stress, menstrual problems, family history and energy levels. This will help in finding food allergies, nutritional deficiencies or just nutritional problems that could be getting your body down.

History

Clinical nutrition is a field that developed in the 1940s to treat individuals with specific nutritional deficiency diseases, like scurvy and pellagra. By the 1960s, however, experts were beginning to recognize that certain doses of nutrients had the power to prevent illness.

Today, researchers and scientists continue to uncover the therapeutic role of individual nutrients in the prevention and treatment of disease. For example, antioxidants like beta-carotene, selenium, vitamin E, and vitamin C have been shown to protect against the development of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic degenerative diseases. The field of clinical nutrition has evolved into a practice that is increasingly incorporated into mainstream medical treatment.

Benefits

Nutritional Therapy can help a wide range people from children to mature adults.

Some of the most commonly encountered conditions that may be helped are:

• Low energy or chronic fatigue
• Headaches and migraines
• IBS or digestive disorders
• Weight Control
• Reoccurring thrush or cystitis
• Infertility
• PMT
• Menopause
• Frequent colds and infections
• Childhood hyperactivity
• Arthritis or joint pain
• Acne, eczema or psoriasis

Procedure

A Consultation with a Nutritional Therapist will provide you with an individual programme suggesting foods that may improve your health and if necessary recommend nutrients or herbs to help rebalance your body and strive towards optimal health.

Prior to an initial consultation, you may be asked to complete a simple questionnaire detailing your symptoms, dietary and lifestyle habits. The initial consultation lasts between 1 and 1.5 hours. During this consultation simple tests such as tongue or nail analysis may be carried out to assist in understanding your current health and nutritional status. Follow up consultations usually last approximately 30 - 45 minutes.

Nutritional Therapists believe that everyone functions differently, has different nutritional requirements and tolerates foods in different ways. To help understand more about how you function, bio-chemical testing* is sometimes used to help target the appropriate treatment.

* Modern bio-chemical tests can be very helpful in providing information such as nutritional status, toxicity levels, digestive function or the hormone balance of your body. This information can help to identify the causes of your condition or provide early indication of future illness and allow for accurate targeting of your treatment. There are a number of different tests available, most of which you can easily carry out at home using simple test kits.

Source of information: Nutritional Therapist - Carolyn Hill DN DThD | Nutritionalist - Loretta Cowles NC Dip RAW mBANT