Nourishing the human body to achieve homeostasis and health.
Let us begin with operationally defining wellness nutrition as nutritional intervention aimed at providing the genetic, innate or inner intelligence of the body with the nutrients required for the expression of homeostasis and health. Wellness nutrition is also about avoiding or removing the toxins/poisons which force the physiology of the host into a state of adaptation and illness and thus away from homeostasis.
Wellness nutrition is thus defined as the provision of necessary nutrients and the avoidance of toxic interferences associated with the genetic expression of homeostasis and health. Wellness nutrition is within the paradigm and scope of practice of wellness and prevention, and outside the paradigm and scope of practice of allopathic disease and symptom treatment. Wellness nutrition research and clinical intervention is homeostasis- or health-centred.
Nutritional therapy is nutritional or nutraceutical intervention aimed at providing treatment for symptoms or disease. Nutritional therapy is within the allopathic paradigm and scope of practice of symptom and disease treatment, and outside the paradigm and scope of practice of wellness and prevention. Nutritional therapy research and clinical intervention is centred on symptom and disease treatment. There is an important distinction between wellness nutrition and nutritional therapy, and neither the terms nor clinical application should be considered synonymous.
If wellness nutrition is about providing the required nutrients for, and avoiding the toxic interferences to, the genetic expression of homeostasis and health, then a wellness nutritional practitioner must have expertise relative to what these nutrients and toxins are.
THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
The two most important nutritional questions that a wellness nutritional practitioner must be able to answer are: 1) What nutritional choices are sufficient and pure and result in the genetic expression of health and vitality?; and 2) What nutritional choices are deficient and toxic and cause the genetic expression of illness and suffering?
These questions guided research for my book, The Innate Diet & Natural Hygiene. As logical as they might seem, my investigations revealed that these questions have not guided the research and clinical interventions of traditional allopathic nutritionists and dieticians or the development of food guides.
We have not been taught to eat based on the diet that fuelled human evolution or fed creation, or the diet that has been found to produce the healthiest human beings on the planet. Rather, we have been taught to eat according to food pyramids whose recommended foods and nutrient content are not founded upon scientific evidence indicating that such food choices match our genetic requirements.
The most important thing for you and your patients to understand is that how we eat has a direct impact on the function of our cells and thus our overall health, vitality, appearance, and longevity.
There is nothing magical about human physiology that allows us to eat toxic or deficient diets without adversely affecting our health.
CRUCIAL NUTRITIONAL FACTS
Everything you eat affects your cell function and determines whether you express health or illness.
If you eat incongruently with human genetic requirements you will express illness.
The average industrial Western diet is toxic and deficient. It is genetically incongruent. It is suicidal.
The current pandemic of chronic illness and suffering (chronic pain, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, depression, fatigue, infertility, impotence, etc.) is directly attributable to dietary and other lifestyle factors.
Scientific evidence clearly shows that the current government food recommendations are inadequate and often toxic and deficient.
If you begin to eat congruently with your genes, if you begin to follow the pure and sufficient Innate Diet™, you will begin to express greater health and vitality and experience less nutrition-related illness and suffering.
NATURAL LAWS
We have become convinced that we are somehow immune to the natural laws that govern every other animal species. Imagine if you fed a chimpanzee – which shares 98 per cent of our genes – the average industrial human diet. Would it get sicker or healthier? Why?
We have come to see ourselves as something other than natural animals, and this belief system is deadly. Many people now feed their children things they would not feed their pets! In Kentucky, animal rights activists recently took a dog away from a family because they were feeding it soda and potato chips. This was considered repugnant behaviour and inhumane. They left the children in the house who were being fed the same thing!
Editor’s Note: For full answers to Dr. Chestnut’s two most important nutritional questions confronting a wellness nutritional practitioner, pertaining to which foods to eat and which to avoid, consult The Innate Diet™ & Natural Hygiene or go to www.thewellnesspractice.com.•
CONSEQUENCES OF THE AFFLUENT DIET
Following are a few research quotes from The Innate Diet & Natural Hygiene:
“The foods we eat are usually divided into four basic groups; meat and fish, vegetables and fruit, milk and milk products, and breads and cereals.”
“Two or more daily servings from each are now considered necessary for a balanced diet, but adults living before the development of agriculture and animal husbandry derived all their nutrients from the first two food groups; they apparently consumed cereal grains rarely, if at all, and they had no dairy foods whatsoever.”
Eaton S. Boyd MD, Konner M. Paleolithic nutrition: a consideration of its nature and current implications.
N Eng J Med 1985; 312 283-289.
“DNA evidence shows that, genetically, humans have hardly changed at all (to be specific, the human genome has changed less than 0.02 per cent in 40,000 years).”
“Nature determined what our bodies needed thousands of years before civilization developed, before people started farming and raising livestock.”
“In other words, built into our genes is a blueprint for optimal nutrition – a plan that spells out the foods that make us healthy, lean, and fit.”
Cordain L. The Paleo Diet. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2002.
“(Affluent populations) habitually consume a diet that was unknown to the human species a mere ten generations ago. Compared with the diet that fuelled human evolution, the so called ‘affluent’ diet of today has twice the amount of fat, a much higher ratio of saturated to unsaturated fatty acids, a third of the former daily fibre intake, much more sugar and sodium, fewer complex (fruit and vegetable) carbohydrates, and a reduced intake of micronutrients. Worldwide, the adoption of this diet has been accompanied by a major increase in coronary heart disease, stroke, various cancers, diabetes and other chronic diseases.”
The World Health Report 1997: Conquering Suffering, Enriching Humanity, The World Heath Report, World Health Organization, Geneva.
Print this page
