Food First
Personalized Functional Nutrition
Our uniqueness lies in prioritizing a Food-First personalized approach in supporting you for better health. Our approach encourages you to be proactive in creating better health and vitality alongside with our nutritional guidance, advocating the importance of a collaborative practitioner-patient relationship.
What is Functional Nutrition?
Functional Nutrition uses the functional medicine approach to assess one’s nutritional health status, and optimise how the body is functioning. This functional approach assumes that food contains molecules that are necessary and are essential to promote one’s well being and health.
When high-quality nutrition is applied functionally, effectively and consistently, it may not only help manage diseases, but help prevent future chronic disease and promote wellness and healthy lifespan.
What is Personalized Care?
Personalized nutrition focuses on the individual rather than groups of people. Very often it is being thought as an approach that provides nutrition advice and strategies to individuals based on their unique genetic information acquired from big data and machine learning.
While this is somewhat accurate, other personal and unique factors that contribute to valuable clinical information are often underutilized in delivering personalized nutrition. These factors include one’s current nutrition status, health and medical history, lifestyles and habits, gender, ages, just to name a few.
When this information is acquired, individualized dietary advice and nutritional therapy can help individual to achieve specific health goals and outcomes.
What is a “Food-First” approach?
The idea behind a “food first” approach is that patients with chronic conditions who change their diet first, before trying pharmaceuticals, or perhaps even nutraceuticals, often see dramatic positive outcomes in their health. In other words, a food-first approach is a nutrition strategy that prioritizes using food over supplements.
While this approach does not suggest that food can help every patient, nor that dietary changes alone are effective in meeting all nutritional needs for patients, it advocates the idea that changing what, when, and how we eat can be an effective first step for many. More importantly, the improvements that they experience can serve as empowering feedback, motivating them to make other needed lifestyle changes.
References:
- Zhang H, Wang Y, Jiang ZM, et al. Impact of nutrition support on clinical outcome and cost-effectiveness analysis in patients at nutritional risk: a prospective cohort study with propensity score matching. Nutrition. 2017;37:53-59.
- Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Physical activity and good nutrition: essential elements to prevent chronic diseases and obesity 2003. Nutr Clin Care. 2003;6(3):135-138.
- https://www.ifm.org/news-insights/power-functional-nutrition-2/
- https://www.ion.ac.uk/news/what-is-functional-nutrition