Nutrition and Disease Prevention
By: Pamela Egan, NP-C, CDE, ABAAHP, MN
Prioritizing life and health maintenance is essential to achieving health and longevity. Diet, exercise, stress reduction and the avoidance of toxins are all key elements of health.
To operate optimally, the body needs a number of different vitamins, minerals and nutrients. The 13 essential vitamins are divided into two groups, fat soluble and water soluble. Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat soluble and can be stored by the body. B vitamins and vitamin C are water soluble – with the exception of vitamin B12 and they cannot be stored.
Medical foods represent an entirely different scientific and medical approach to managing health conditions. They are formulated with macro-and micro-nutrients that are recognized by scientific principles to support the dietary management of a disease or condition, and are to be administered under the supervision of a physician or license healthcare practitioner. Furthermore, they must be specially formulated and processed to provide nutritional support as part of an ongoing doctor-supervised dietary management program to treat a specific therapeutic or nutritional need. Medical foods contain nutrients in therapeutic amounts that typically cannot be acquired through normal dietary measures.
High quality nutrients are different that low quality nutrients such as those that you find in
the drug store or over the counter.
Many of the negative vitamin studies reported throughout the course of the past decade were conducted using extremely low quality, drugstore and supermarket brand vitamins and nutritional supplements. Medical foods that are manufactured and packaged under GMP-certified conditions assure the highest quality and clinical reliability. Nutrisearch by Lyle MacWilliams is a good comparative guide to nutritional supplements or the lack thereof. The effectiveness of medical food programs have been evaluated in numerous clinical intervention and observational studies and published in well-known healthcare journals.
Medical whole food nutrients have been designed to support the management of a variety of chronic conditions including those associated with:
- Cardiovascular disease
- Metabolic syndrome
- Type 2 diabetes
- Inflammatory bowel disease
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Fibromyalgia
- Premenstrual syndrome
- Leaky gut syndrome
- Atopic disorders
For questions or more information relating to this article, Ms. Egan can be reached at 985-892-3031 or www.pamelaegan.com.
