3. Naturopathic Nutrition

Can the food you eat really affect your health?

One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive. The other three-quarters keeps your doctor alive. (Hieroglyph found in an ancient Egyptian tomb.)

Are you confused as to what you should do?
Would you like to know what foods are best for you?

What is Naturopathic Nutrition?
Naturopathic Nutrition is a simple concept: it is the science of working out which foods are right for your body to heal itself and to restore proper balance. It takes a holistic approach aimed at finding the cause of an illness or imbalance rather than merely looking at the symptoms. As such, it has been employed for many years in various different cultures.

In 390AD, Hippocrates said: "Let food by thy medicine and medicine be thy food".

In the 20th century, Eddison said: "The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and the cause and prevention of disease".

In 1960, the Nobel Prize winner, Dr Linus Pauling, stated: "Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow".

Since then, modern science has discovered the healing properties of dozens of foods and their nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, essential fats and amino acids. These ingredients contribute to the body's metabolic processes. If you are very lucky your normal diet may provide enough of these without you ever having to think about them. Good nutrition is the foundation of health; we are literally made up of the foods we eat. However, despite the many medications and supplements we take or the lifestyle changes we may make, if we do not eat the right foods for our body and our nutritional intake is low we will still age quicker, have problems for longer and the innate healing of the body will not take place.

Today people are overfed and undernourished. With a combination of genetics, stress and faulty lifestyle we are silently changing our internal environment and body chemistry to produce illness. No drug can reverse this process. Nutritional therapy has been shown to reverse the process in the body and enable it to repair itself.

How does Naturopathic Nutrition work?
How well you feel depends on how efficiently your body produces essential enzymes, hormones and other substances, and how it rids itself of wastes and toxins that could interfere with your internal chemistry. Naturopathic Nutrition involves assessing what you need so that these processes can improve.

Naturopathic Nutrition is not about giving the same treatment to everybody- for example, calcium supplements to all those suffering from osteoporosis. Although some research studies have used this approach with moderate success, it is not the most effective way to treat osteoporosis. Two people with identical symptoms can have entirely different needs since everyone is genetically unique, has a history of eating different foods and lives in different environments.

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