what’s for dinner? (and…why do I care?)
The reason I moved towards functional medicine, specifically functional nutrition, is because I needed to make peace with my second graduate degree (and massive amounts of student loan debt from it) as a nurse practitioner. I was trained to see body systems as separate, people as a set of symptoms and the checking of boxes as the way to hopefully get insurance to pay for some small amount of the insufficient thing I was doing. I needed a way back into meeting people where they actually were. I needed a way to integrate my own experience as someone involved in the regenerative, local agriculture scene. I needed to be able to integrate, in meaningful and relevant ways, my first graduate degree in counseling psychology. I needed a way to bring my love of slow, spacious time as healing time into a practice. I needed a way beyond and through simply prescribing medications that mostly never felt aligned with me or safe to me. I needed a way that made a difference.
In my experience western medicine is built on compartmentalizing for efficiency. Some folks are really able to do this well. I have never been one of those folks.
Our healthcare system in the US is built upon sick care, God bless it. We speak about preventive care but we have a system of sick care. Meaning we respond to things once they are waaaay down stream. We actually get serious about helping folks once they have diabetes, once they have depression, once they have autoimmunity, etc. And at that point there is a limited toolkit which is a bunch of medications. And this is not true across the board, like almost nothing is true across the board because there are providers and drs/nurses who bash all these categories. But our system as a whole is set up to…
Treat symptoms, not people.
Treat homogenous groups, not diverse bodies and identities.
Treat men’s bodies, not women’s.
Treat towards the broad, not the contextual or the nuanced.
Treat the diagnosis, not the human.
Check boxes rather than hear stories.
It’s similar in the mental health side of our healthcare. We’re often better at really paying attention when someone is really struggling. In mental health we if often feels like trying to categorize what is honestly uncategorizable. So, we have categories of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, bipolar, intractable depression, PTSD, adjustment disorder, etc. And we have learned to at least talk about these things, which is SO helpful because we can actually say, “this is a thing and it needs help. “
This is really important. It helps us realize something is happening!! And we need to respond!
We are learning to talk about them which is positive. And often mental healthcare, like regular old healthcare, forgets that these diagnoses happen within the flesh and blood, the stories, the families, the relationships, the hopes, the pain and grief and complexity of human beings.
It’s a tricky situation: we need categories to organize things and by doing so the very categories themselves often remove the humanity. Our messy humanity…that doesn’t fit well into categories.
To quote functional nutrition guru Andrea Nakayama, “Nutrition is about growth, metabolism, and repair.” This means it's not about one particular diet. There is no one set of foods or dietary theory or protocol that is right for every person.
On the whole, we want to be able to eat a wide variety of foods that takes into account diversity, quality, and quantity and timing. And that may look different in different times of life, different development, stages, different disease, processes, especially acute ones, etc..
I do not subscribe or prescribe any single dietary theory.
Most folks are well served by simply food. Diet means real food becomes the Earth or animals.
When we introduce specific diets for specific foods, then we have I considered the fact that we introduced nutrient deficiencies. So if we take out gluten, we are not introducing future deficiencies. But if we take out something like tomatoes for the family, we might begin to introduce particular deficiencies.
When someone is struggling with a chronic health issue or unexplained symptoms, it is pretty much always useful to start. This involves Putin theory and sugar in the body foods are highly inflammatory. Now as an aside, not everybody needs to remove Putin dairy and sugar to be well we're talking about folks are feeling great no symptoms like headaches or rashes or digestive or fatigue or depression.
So again, I'm not suggesting that every person needs to make these foods from their diet. But if one is choosing to take food as medicine or food, poison stance, then we're going to work with eliminating foods that are proven to be inflammatory and lots of individuals. Now we may not do that all at once Unless that's where the person is and is ready for.
