How functional nutrition is growing as an alternative healthcare

We have made major leaps in the field of healthcare in the last few decades-from the Human Genome Project to the recently emerging potential of the gut microbiome. But why is it that health issues, on the contrary, have risen sharply at the same time? The answer is not difficult to guess: the average modern urban lifestyle is basically a health hazard chamber. A lifestyle highly sedentary, locked indoors, away from the Sun-food environment consisting of highly processed foods. Toxins in our air, water, and household products. Nutrient-depleted soil, just to name a few. We as a population today are overall very unhealthy. With an exploding rate of disease incidence. The global chronic disease burden is rising drastically. Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and chronic lung disease, are collectively responsible for 74 per cent of all deaths worldwide. About half of these deaths are in people younger than 70 years. It is estimated that the global burden of NCDs will further increase by 17 per cent in the next decade, and in Africa by 27 per cent. As we can clearly see, it is NCDs or chronic health conditions which form the bulk of the problem. And we know why this is, looking at the state of conventional medicine today. It is good at handling acute and emergency cases, but the state of chronic healthcare is very poor. Almost all chronic conditions are treated by managing symptoms only, instead of actually solving the problem and healing people by addressing the root causes of diseases. The drugs used for chronic disease management typically have a long list of side effects and most often worsen the health of the individual (including the condition it is helping to manage) in the long run. This model didn’t just emerge naturally, it is incentivized by the pharmaceutical industry, which has to a large extent hijacked the modern medical system today. The pharmaceutical industry lobby is estimated to be the biggest in the world today by a huge margin. This is what has led to the emergence of alternative holistic healthcare modalities. Owing to the alternative healthcare field being a largely unregulated space, there are oodles of unscientific practices thriving here. However, there are also many very scientific and highly evidence-based practices out there that are actually doing justice to the modern medical literature and miraculously healing people with hard-to-treat medical problems that they have suffered for years from. The most prominent among them are functional medicine and functional nutrition. Functional Nutrition is a form of holistic treatment that uses advanced testing and root cause analysis to reverse diseases and eliminate the risk of the disease. Root cause analysis is the process of identifying the underlying reason behind the emergence of diseases. A functional nutritionist uses more sophisticated assessment protocols for assessing test results which are based on rigorous research. A Functional Nutrition Practitioner uses what are known as optimal ranges for assessing test results. These ranges are based on research to formulate what are the most optimal values for health. As opposed to the conventional practice, which is to use reference ranges most often just based on a plain statistical average of a population that is already sick; additionally, it is most often people who are sick who get tested at labs, making the problem worse. Functional nutrition and functional medicine are forms of holistic medicine, and there is no regulatory body that is the authority on these terms. Functional Nutrition follows the same principles as functional medicine except with a focus on nutrition. The author is CEO and Founder, iThrive. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.