Nutritional Therapy
'You are what you eat' has become a famous phrase but 'you are what you digest' is actually more accurate.
Analysing an individual's dietary and nutritional requirements, taking into account lifestyle, emotional and environmental influences is the daily life of a nutritionist.
Nutritionists routinely perform functional tests such as stool analysis, blood tests, saliva tests and hair sample analysis in order to gain insight into the biochemical individuality of their clients.
Computer assisted programmes (such as the BEST system) are increasingly used to measure certain parameters such as toxity levels as well as subtle imbalances. The nutritional profession is here to guide patients and point them in the direction of optimum well being.
Based on the data collected, nutritionists then recommend special dietary guidelines for specific ailments, specific supplements or herbs to support digestion and detoxification.
General nutritional advice
Cooking fats
Always prefer a little butter to margarine (despite misleading advertising campaigns).
Margarine is a manufactured food, unnatural and definitely not health promoting. You are better off with a little butter.
You can use olive/canola oil but ensure you add a little water to the pan to stop the oil from over-heating. All good quality oils change molecular structure at high temperatures and become carcinogenic (cancer promoting).
A diet aimed at allergy sufferers will always contain twice as many vegetables as normally eaten and more protein (higher vitamin & mineral content, fewer sugars and/or grains) for the reason outlined above.
It is a good idea to ‘rotate’ food, ie: not to repeat the same food items 2 days in a row. Diversity is the key for allergy sufferers.
The organic issue
I always recommend that allergy sufferers in particular eat organic whenever financially possible. They are usually found to react to the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on vegetables and fruit (eg: apples in Somerset are sprayed 24 times a year!) rather than to the food themselves. There are a number of good websites (Farmers Market Direct or FMD, Riverford) from which to shop, they will deliver too!
The most important items to buy in the organic department are: root vegetables (they take the brunt of chemicals) and dairy product. This is no guarantee that allergies will stop purely as a result of eating organic but it will limit the damage to the mucous membranes. Migraine sufferers are likely to find that drinking organic red wine does not lead to the all too familiar headaches the next day. This is due to the Sulphur Dioxide content in sprayed red wine. Sulphur dioxide is also known to cause Sinusitis and allergic rhinitis.