Beyond a Healthy Diet: Try Nutrient Therapy

There’s no doubt that nutrient therapy can improve your health if your diet is far from stellar, whether that means you seldom eat vegetables or you consume too many empty calories.

If you follow a healthy diet, you may not see the potential benefits from nutrient therapy. But you may be surprised to learn that a well-balanced diet doesn’t guarantee nutritional health. 

One reason to consider nutrient therapy is to learn if your healthy diet actually supplies all the essential nutrients needed to meet your unique needs.

Our team at Docere Integrated Medicine offers comprehensive nutrient therapy, which includes a wide range of services supporting your daily diet, ensuring your optimal health, and helping you prevent or treat disease.

Here, we explore four of the top reasons nutrient therapy can improve your health, even if your meals are well-balanced.

Improves your nutritional well-being

It would be great if everyone could get all their essential nutrients through their diet. But even if you do your best to stick with a balanced meal plan, there’s a good chance you fall short of some nutrients. Let’s look at one nutrient, potassium, to show how that can happen.

Fruit and vegetables are the top sources of potassium, yet one serving of the foods highest in potassium only delivers 9-16% of your recommended daily needs.

If your meals include only the best sources, you still need 6-11 servings to get enough potassium to keep your muscles, nerves, heart, and brain functioning. That’s why the American Heart Association recommends getting four servings of fruits and five servings of vegetables every day.

Falling short on fruits and vegetables means you may not get enough of other nutrients primarily found in plants, such as vitamin C and dietary fiber. During nutrient therapy, we evaluate your diet, help create a meal plan that supports your health, and recommend high-quality supplements when needed.

Maintains optimal health

You need optimal nutrition to support your basic health. Every function in your body, from producing energy and building muscles to ensuring your heart and organs work, depends on getting a specific amount of vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats every day.

During times of stress, you need more than the recommended intake. For example, your body uses substantially more nutrients than normal if you engage in competitive sports, suffer an injury, or have a chronic disease.

When you schedule nutrient therapy, we identify your specific needs and determine if you need to boost your intake of certain nutrients.

Identifies your risk for nutrient deficiencies

Your diet may be great and provide the right amount of nutrients, but you could have a health problem (diagnosed or unknown) that prevents some nutrients from getting into your bloodstream and reaching the tissues that need nutrition.

Conditions in your gastrointestinal (GI) tract, especially those causing inflammation, disrupt nutrient absorption. A few examples include:

• Crohn’s disease
• Ulcerative colitis
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Peptic ulcer
• Pancreatic diseases
• Short bowel syndrome
• Autoimmune diseases (celiac disease)
• Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO)

Advancing age also increases your risk of absorption problems and nutrient deficiencies. As part of your nutrient therapy, we can run a risk assessment, review your medical history, and recommend steps to prevent nutritional deficiencies caused by malabsorption.

Prevents or treats chronic diseases

The foods you eat and the nutrients you consume have the ability to prevent chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. After a long-lasting health condition develops, the first line of treatment includes dietary changes.

It’s not easy to modify your diet in ways that work for your lifestyle. Additionally, you may not know exactly what you need to change to optimize your health.

Nutrient therapy offers the support, guidance, and information you need to prevent or treat chronic diseases, including a meal plan you can stick with for the long run.

To learn more about how nutrient therapy can help you stay healthy, call Docere Integrated Medicine or request an appointment online today.