Let Food Be Your Medicine

Diet and Lifestyle Counseling is a traditional naturopathic approach used to facilitate the body’s own natural healing and health building potential through individually formulated nutritional and lifestyle modifications. Rooted in naturopathic principles from ancient Greece, China and India, it is a supportive process that helps identify the underlying cause of imbalances to target a revised action plan that acknowledges and fosters responsibility for self-care using nutrition.

Modern industrialized dietary patterns characterized by high intakes of processed, pre-packaged and artificially flavored foods, such as animal milk and meat products, fried foods, refined grains and cereals, and high-sugar drinks, are lacking in many essential nutrients that our body needs to maintain favorable health. Too many processed and denatured foods are being consumed and directly contributing to a long-list of avoidable health problems.

In acupuncture & Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there is no difference between food and medicine- food is medicine. Because eating the right foods is the safest, least invasive technique to bring about the most beneficial change in poor health conditions, proper nutrition is always the preferred first line of treatment in TCM to treat and prevent disease.

Historically, acupuncture and TCM promotes eating a diet consisting mainly of fresh plant-based foods that are the most vital and free from chemicals, preservatives, and over-processing. Generations of people have used the TCM plant-based diet to initiate good dietary habits that not only treat various symptoms and syndromes, but also promote health, vitality, beauty, and longevity.

Studies have shown that a plant-based diet helps maintain optimal function of the musculoskeletal, circulatory, nervous, endocrine, lymphatic, and digestive systems. In some cases, correcting nutritional deficiencies with a plant-based diet may be used to help alleviate symptoms and poor health conditions that have not responded well to conventional care.

The effectiveness of nutrition therapy in acupuncture and TCM lies in the use of a set of diagnostic principles that arrange various signs and symptoms of categories of poor health called patterns of imbalance. Patterns of imbalance help describe how illnesses begin, what trajectory they’re taking, and how functional health and wellbeing is impacted. In acupuncture and TCM, the goal is to identify and treat the underlying root pattern of imbalance, rather than just chase the manifesting symptoms.

Our Natural Health Consultation seeks to determine how various signs and symptoms are organized into a pattern that illustrates the condition of health. Taking into account your whole well being, not just physical symptoms, our practitioners try to find out how other factors like your environment, constitution, lifestyle and dietary habits, and emotional and mental well-being depict a pattern of imbalance at the root of the current condition. Using the information gathered, our acupuncturists will outline a personalized plan for using plant-based nutrition, as well herbal medicine and nutritional supplements, to meet your individual lifestyle needs.