Many people who are interested in improving their health usually turn to the latest fad diet or exercise to see improvements. They try the newest diet only to realize later they did not achieve the result they desired, and they are still stuck with their health symptoms. However, the key to supporting proper function and overall health in the body isn’t necessarily any one particular diet or exercise. It’s in building a strong foundation for your health by supporting your unique bio-individuality, nutrition, and lifestyle needs! In this article we will talk about supporting the body with the 6 Foundations of Health I use with every client to reduce symptoms and optimize health.
To achieve optimal health, a person needs to think about the body as a whole and how it interacts with nutrition and lifestyle changes. Everything in the body is connected and everything relies on other body systems to function optimally. You can think of your body and health like building a house: You first need to build a strong foundation otherwise your “house” will fall apart if you try to build walls or a roof on a crumbling foundation. It’s the same for your health – You need to start with a strong foundation to build upon your health from there. Through the use of the six Foundations, a nutritional therapy practitioner can help support a client’s bio-individuality and optimize their health for the long term. The foundational approach includes a nutrient-dense diet, digestion, blood sugar regulation, fatty acids, mineral balance, and hydration. Once these are all balanced, you will have the proper support for optimal health, and understand the tools that work for you to maintain long-term health.
The first foundation we begin everything with is a nutrient-dense whole foods diet.
Our bodies rely on food to fuel everything we do. From our thinking all the way down to the smallest cell, we require fuel to get everything done. Everyone eats to supply this fuel, however the quality and type of foods we eat make a huge difference on how well our body functions. When we eat a properly prepared, nutrient-dense whole foods diet, our cells have the fuel to run optimally and we feel energetic, clear-headed, and ready to take on the day. A whole foods diet includes foods that are closest to what we would find in nature or on a farm, and don’t come out of bags or boxes. By choosing a variety of quality proteins, healthy fats, and carbohydrates (or “macronutrients”), we will also get a variety of vitamins and minerals in our diet. Vitamins are important helpers in the body to “support tissue growth, digestion, elimination, and immune function” and they prevent deficiency diseases like scurvy and rickets (1). Our body cannot make enough essential vitamins to optimally support us, so it’s important we eat a variety of foods to obtain them. Minerals act differently than vitamins in that they are the “spark-plug” to start processes like moving nutrients into cells, maintaining nerve health, contracting and relaxing muscles, and regulating tissue growth (2). By providing our body with a nutrient-dense whole foods diet, we are able to lay a solid starting point to work on the other five foundations that are key to improving and maintaining your health.
The second foundation to health is digestion, which every single cell in the body relies on to obtain its nutrients.
You must digest and absorb what you’ve eaten. If you eat the most beautiful food, but don’t digest and absorb it then it does nothing for you. Every single cell in the body relies on proper digestion so those cells can provide nutrients to your body, and your body can function optimally for you. When it isn’t properly functioning, “the digestive process demands a lot of energy, so when it requires more metabolic work than normal, you may notice yourself feeling tired more often.” (3). Digestion is a north to south process, meaning it starts in the brain and ends with the anus. Anything that goes wrong in that north to south process (or anywhere in between) will affect the remainder of the digestive process and will result in dysfunction and symptoms. Another way we can support our digestion is making sure our gut bacteria (or our “microbiome”) is balanced through a nutrient-dense whole foods diet. By supporting a healthy diversity of balanced bacteria in our digestive system, we are able to obtain additional nutrients as a byproduct of those bacteria. This really sets our body up with a firm foundation to improve and support the remainder of the foundations of health.
The third foundation of balancing your blood sugar will help provide you with sustained energy and a better mood.
By eating a bio-individualized balance of protein, healthy fat, and carbohydrates, our body has the energy we need for right now and the energy we need for later in the day. Many times people experience late-morning or late-afternoon fatigue, and reach for “quick energy” carbohydrates such as a doughnut, potato chips, juice, or a latte. They may experience an increase in energy but it is short-lived, and then shortly later they’re back to experiencing fatigue, irritability, light-headedness, or shakiness again. These dips and peaks in blood sugar will contribute to the body’s overall stress, which will cause digestion dysfunction and deplete nutrients. Through eating a balanced amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates for your unique needs, we can take stress off the body and provide ourselves with enough energy to tackle the entire day.
The fourth foundation includes eating plenty of healthy fats to provide us with satiety, energy, balanced blood sugar, and absorb fat-soluble vitamins and some minerals.
Healthy fats provide fuel for a healthy brain, and provide a cushion around our cells which is crucial to cellular function and detox. Most importantly, fats make food taste good. Healthy fats help provide support to other foundations by increasing nutrient absorption. Our great-grandmothers incorporated a variety of healthy fats into their daily diet such as animal fats, cold-water fish, and various plant-based fats. These types of fats are healthy options because they’re able to be obtained through minimal or no processing. Only until we started consuming toxic, processed fats such as canola oil, soybean oil, seed oils, and margarine did we start to see a deficiency in healthy fats rise in the population. These types of toxic fats are highly processed, inflammatory, require equipment to extract, and are already rancid when they hit the supermarket shelves. When we consume these toxic processed fats, our bodies are unable to utilize them efficiently and they cause inflammation and pain. Including enough healthy fats in our diet helps to lower inflammation and supports optimal health in the body.
The fifth foundation includes balancing minerals to create the “spark” in supporting other body functions.
Minerals are important to the body because they act as the body’s “spark-plugs” to facilitate actions such as building and breaking down bones, moving nutrients into cells, monitoring growth of tissues, and flexing or relaxing muscles. These actions help support our energy production, a healthy bone structure, and enable us to move our muscles as needed. Minerals also need to be in proper balance with other minerals, meaning we can’t have too much or too little of each one. Calcium is an example of a mineral we need in balance. It’s one of the most abundant minerals in our body and can be found mostly in our bones. Without the proper balance of calcium and potassium, we know we are susceptible to bone fractures, breaks, and bone degeneration. Many of us take a calcium supplement, however sometimes our calcium isn’t absorbed due to low stomach acid, chronic dehydration, toxic fats in our diet, or vitamin depletions. This is why it’s really important to ensure our other foundations are supported first, so our minerals are able to function to help provide support.
The last foundation of health is hydration. You can survive for weeks without eating food, but only a few days without water.
Adequate hydration supports everything in the body. It’s crucial to the all body functions, but most of us are chronically dehydrated. We are busy, distracted, drink coffee or juice instead, or don’t like the taste of water so it is easy to get dehydrated. However, every cell, body system, and organ requires water. Some of the important functions water helps carry out are lubricating our joints, flushing out toxins, supporting the digestive process, and transporting nutrients. When we are dehydrated, our whole body has to work harder to complete these tasks. Chronic dehydration can lead to to symptoms like fatigue, cravings, headaches, inability to concentrate, joint pain, heartburn, constipation, and muscle cramps. A simple way to ensure proper hydration is to drink a glass of water in the morning, and drink water throughout the day. Hydration throughout the day is better than gulping down multiple glasses of water in the evening. Drinking water throughout the day helps to re-hydrate the body, so it’s able to support all of the other foundations we already reviewed.
Through supporting each one of these foundations with nutrition, digestion, blood sugar regulation, healthy fats, mineral balance, and hydration you will be able to build a strong foundation to optimize your health.
Throughout a person’s life, different foundations may need to be supported at different times. It is important to complete a periodic review with a nutritional therapy practitioner to ensure your health goals are maintained. When all the foundations are strengthened, you will feel your best and be ready to tackle whatever the day brings.
Sources
1-2. Nutritional Therapy Association. (2021). Basics of Nutrition Student Guide [PDF document].
3. Wentz, I. (2019). Hashimoto’s Food Pharmacology. HarperOne.