Outpatient Nutrition Counseling allows for focused evaluation of your diet, how diet relates to illness, illness prevention, and recovery. Balance is key. There is so much information about nutrition on the internet, in magazines, on TV, in the newspaper, that it can be overwhelming to determine how this relates to you and your life. There are also many individuals that declare themselves experts in nutrition that have no formal training, experience and/or scientific background. I have spent the past 10 years working in both hospitals and outpatient settings, seeing nutrition heal and malnutrition delay recovery, or cause the illness in the first place. One of my most shocking discoveries in hospitals is the prevalence of malnutrition. Deficiencies in many different vitamins and minerals is sadly very common, which is disturbing considering we live in one of the most affluent countries in the world. People are over fat but undernourished. Healthcare professionals are only now coming to accept that overweight individuals may be very depleted in protein and micronutrients, ie vitamins and minerals.
Part of my time as a hospital dietitian was directed towards trying to educate patients on the importance of nutrition and how to change their current eating practices to improve disease outcome. Often times patients were too stressed by a newly diagnosed illness or just too sick to absorb what I was trying to teach them. It was also frustrating for me, and confusing for the patient, to receive food that was not an extension of my education. Another frustration was other healthcare professionals promoting bad eating habits within their own patient population, ie “They are so sick, it’s better for their family to bring in fast food and milk shakes for them to eat, than they eat nothing at all.” Well, eating nothing might actually have been better in that case. There is a whole lot of fat and calories in that kind of food, but very little nutrition. The body cannot heal itself without the proper fuel to do so! You can’t build a house when you only have half of the bricks.
Through working as an outpatient nutrition counsellor I hope to empower and teach my clients, not only what to eat (dispelling myths along the way), but how and where to find the best food to implement recommended changes.
A list of diseases where nutrition can help heal or delay disease progression:
Other areas where nutrition consultations may be of great value: