Nutrition and Healthcare

lAlthough nutrition plays a more important role in preventative medicine than it does in treatment of diseases, an understanding of the body's functioning at the nutritional level can indeed help in the treatment of a variety of problems.

Understanding the link between diet and disease, and being able to use nutritional counseling and therapies within a medical practice, is so vital to the healthcare component of medicine that it should be required knowledge for every medical school graduate and practitioner.  However, unfortunately this is not the case, so instead, a profession has emerged that specializes in food and nutrition and the effects on the body, this is a Nutritionist.  Nutritionists fill that void between Health and Healthcare.  

Concepts of nutrition and its relationship to health and disease are rarely given the attention it deserves in medical education of today.  Take type II diabetes for instance,  "Today, there are 11 million Canadians living with diabetes or prediabetes. Every three minutes, another Canadian is diagnosed. Chances are that diabetes affects you or someone you know."*  It is defined as the following on diabetes.ca 
"Diabetes is a chronic, often debilitating and sometimes fatal disease, in which the body either cannot produce insulin or cannot properly use the insulin it produces. Insulin is a hormone that controls the amount of glucose (sugar) in the blood. Diabetes leads to high blood sugar levels, which can damage organs, blood vessels and nerves. The body needs insulin to use sugar as an energy source."

- *See more at: http://www.diabetes.ca/about-diabetes/types-of-diabetes#sthash.AKVPv19b.dpuf

Diabetes did not really exist when people didn't eat every meal out of a box or carton off the shelves of the supermarket? The food we ate was not filled with added sugars and chemicals often too hard to pronounce that no body really knows what it is or most don't even question whether it is safe to consume because it is sold at the grocery store and the FDA, and other government officials deem it safe to consume.  

A nutritionist is someone to guide you through the maze of confusing information from books, media and magazines that is often floating around and make sense of it and guide to a more healthier, happier versions of yourself and bridge that gap between Health and Healthcare. So that doctors can be the doctors of the past, that were there for you when you were sick and in medical emergency situations, and they were not writing a prescription for every person that came through his door. People were nourished and lived happy, healthy, pain free lives into their senior years and actually enjoy retirement and did not have a medicine cabinet of pills to take everyday just to feel 'ok'. A nutritionist reminds you and teaches you how good wholesome, foods that were grown from a seed and not created in a lab, can nourish your body so you can live the life you have always dreamed of.  

Holistic Nutritionists are currently an unregulated profession. but the Canadian Assocation of Holistic Professionals is working at regulating our profession so that it can be recognized and covered by insurance companies across the country.  To find out more, go to: cahnpro.org 
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