Clinical Nutrition
As a society, we are overfed and undernourished. Because of this, we are setting ourselves up for chronic disease, aging, and unhealthy lives.
Clinical nutrition is used as a therapeutic and prevention-oriented modality in the functional-medicine model. It is important to understand the value of food—not as calories, but as information. The right nutrients turn on health-promoting genes and turn off disease-promoting genes. These findings are part of a new science called epigenetics.
Approaching clinical nutrition from the functional-medicine perspective means identifying imbalances unique to the individual which are contributing to that individual’s symptoms. These nutrient imbalances can occur in a number of different systems, including digestive, absorptive, detoxifying, hormonal, structural, and inflammatory. Rather than focusing only on relief care, the goal is corrective care. Once the malfunction is corrected, the symptoms disappear.
A healthful diet is one component of lifestyle modification. Research has shown that a Mediterranean-style diet provides the most benefits for weight loss and reducing cholesterol and other disease-causing biomarkers.
Supplementing a healthful diet with nutraceuticals—vitamins and minerals, enzymes, and plant-based products—is necessary to achieve optimal health. As the environment becomes more toxic and the food supply decreases in variety and nutrient density, maintaining optimal levels of nutrients is not possible with diet alone.
The government’s Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of nutrients is inadequate because it fails to account for bio-chemical individuality, lifestyle habits such as smoking and drinking, use of pharmaceuticals, sickness, or disease states. In addition, its guidelines only marginally account for a healthy pregnancy.
Common sense and scientific research both lead us to the conclusion that if we want to be healthy and disease-free, we must put the right raw materials into our bodies: real, whole, local, fresh, unadulterated and unprocessed foods—free of synthetic chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics.
The Darien Center for Integrative Medicine offers nutritional counseling to assess your health needs in regard to your active lifestyle. Through nutritional counseling, basic health needs are met and specialized information is given to fit each person’s everyday lifestyle.
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