Functional Nutrition
A ROOT CAUSE APPROACH
What is Functional Nutrition?
Functional nutrition is deeply steeped in functional medicine, a health care practice that attempts to understand and resolve the underlying root causes of imbalance and illness in the body. Functional nutrition is at the core of the functional medicine approach for the prevention and resolution of disease, emphasizing diet and lifestyle changes, and nutritional supplements.
What is the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine?
The conventional healthcare model is very good at saying: you HAVE this and rarely asks the question, WHY do you have it? Functional medicine nutrition attempts to answer that question.
A key concept to understanding the difference between the two approaches is that the conventional approach is geared towards identifying pathology and disease. When running labs, reference ranges are looking for late stage disease development.
When we’re looking at health through a conventional lens, you either have a disease or you do not have a disease; if you do not have a disease, you are considered healthy.
Conventional lab reference ranges are based on a bell curve where 95% of people tested fall into a clinically normal reference range.
There are 2 chief problems with this:
If the average population in modern day is not the picture of health, then are we basing our “healthy ranges” on a sick population?
This is why we see so many people being told by their conventional health providers that their health is “normal” despite them having ongoing symptoms.
But just because you do not have an identifiable, diagnosable disease, does NOT mean that you are healthy.
The functional approach, in comparison, recognizes that illness doesn’t just pop out of thin air; there is a spectrum of health and the labs & reference ranges are trying to assess for early prediction.
Functional Lab Testing
You can think about functional lab reference ranges as optimal ranges. We’re looking at a tighter, smaller range and anything outside of that is suboptimal, and it gives us clues that something within the physiology of that person is out of balance, EVEN IF they are not at a diagnosable disease state.
We want to identify imbalance of normal physiology so we can address these underlying dysfunctions and root causes—ideally before it gets to a pathological disease state. With this approach, we can catch things trending in the wrong direction early on, and we have the opportunity to restore balance and prevent or reverse the disease state.
Please keep in mind: as functional nutritionists, we are NOT doctors. While we can work collaboratively with you and your other practitioners, functional nutrition is not a replacement for conventional medicine.
As functional providers, our job is to listen. We want to hear your story. We want to unearth exactly what is going on. We want you to understand that it’s not “all in your head,” even if you’ve been told exactly that.
Why would you need to see a functional nutritionist?
You have symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, burnout, weight gain/weight loss resistance, depression, anxiety, but your conventional doctor says everything is normal.
You suspect thyroid issues, but have been told everything is fine.
You just don’t feel yourself, but all your blood work from your doctors comes back “normal.”
You have chronic constipation, bloating, belly discomfort or heartburn, but aren’t sure why.
You’re wondering how food and diet can make you feel better and/or if you’re eating the right diet for you.
You read a lot about food, diet and health, but need some help discerning how to prioritize this information.
You feel like you’re not being heard by your current healthcare practitioners.
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Before the advent of modern medical technology and scientific pharmacology, physicians traditionally had to inspire in each patient a confidence in his inner ability to heal. To be effective, a doctor had to listen to the patient, to develop a relationship with him, and he had also to trust his own intuitions. Those are the qualities [practitioners] seem to have lost as we have come to rely almost exclusively on “objective” measures…
— Dr. Gabor Maté
The work that we do as functional nutritionists offers the best of both worlds.
We can bring in modern science and objective measures with functional testing, and also rely on the listening ear, our intuition, and our relationship to the client.
If this sounds like something you're looking for, functional nutrition might be right for you!
THE FUNK’TIONAL NUTRITION PODCAST
Episodes About Functional Nutrition & Medicine
