The Role of Nutrition
What you eat plays a crucial role in your health – a fact borne out time and again by medical research. The overriding principle is easy: The quality of what you put into your body affects the quality of you.
The food you eat is your body’s fuel. This fuel is used to operate all your body’s organs, whether they’re intended to fire your nerve pathways, increase your circulation, or make a baby – among a host of other functions your organs perform. Your brain, heart, lungs, skin, ovaries, and every other part of you need hundreds of essential minerals and vitamins to work at optimal levels, and the better quality these nutrients are, the better-quality body systems you have.
All of us – male or female – need good food, but, for women, nutritional health can have dramatic effects on specific aspects of our physiology. We learned that how crucial hormonal balance is to your well-being. Well, what you eat can dramatically affect your endocrine system, influencing the amounts of hormone your body produces, as well as the quality of your hormones. Nutrition provides a cornerstone treatment for almost all women’s hormonal problems, including mood swings, weight problems, issues with menstruation, and infertility. In addition, a good diet can reduce your susceptibility to heart disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis – all of which can, in particular, affect women during menopause. Even without specific problems to treat, good nutrition is a must for any woman who simply wants to take care of herself, making her not only feel beautiful, but look beautiful, too (a poor diet will quickly show itself in the condition of your skin and hair). However, with so much advice out there, it can be hard to know what exactly makes up a “balanced” healthy diet.
Nutritional Medicine
Food is a powerful therapy, and nutritional medicine is a system of healing based on the belief that food is medicine and that you can relieve many health conditions by making the right diet and supplement choices. Today, there’s a vast amount of scientific evidence to prove the positive effects of certain foods and nutrients on preventing and treating illnesses, such as cancer. Nutritional medicine also benefits you if you don’t’ have a specific illness but want to optimize your health. There are a number of tests that can assess nutritional deficiencies and discover if allergies, intolerance, or other factors are at the root of any problems. A nutritionist can also work with you to make sure your diet is at an optimum and not aggravating your symptoms in any way.
