Nutritional Balance = Optimal Health

By: Jonathan Tait, D.O.

The correct balance of essential nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants is critical for achieving and maintaining optimal health. The biochemical individuality of each patient, and how nutrient deficiencies can contribute to disease development and progression, must be understood by health care providers in order to effectively treat the root cause of disease.

Nutrient deficiencies can occur for many reasons:

• Inadequate intake in the diet
• Inhibitors within cells that don’t allow proper use of the nutrient
• Loss of nutrients through excretion or sweating
• Increased needs of working tissues

Standard serum (blood) tests measure the quantities of vitamins and minerals, essentially whether it is present at “normal” levels or not. This type of test provides little insight into the intracellular level and function of these nutrients.

Functional deficiencies can occur when a nutrient is present, but cannot be properly utilized for many reasons:

• Not transported to the cells where it is needed
• Cannot cross cell membrane into cell where it is needed
• Insufficient cofactors or enzymes needed to properly utilize the nutrient
• Poor absorption in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract

A functional deficiency can then be anything that decreases the amount of the nutrient, or its ability to perform its role in vital biochemical pathways. As a result, these defective pathways working at a less than optimal level over months to years can manifest as symptoms and/or actual disease states.

Masking the symptoms, or treating the downstream deficiency found on standard laboratory tests, is not a sustainable treatment to achieve optimal health. The flaw in this theory is that it does not address the nutrient imbalances and functional deficiencies that may have contributed to the manifestation of the disease state in the first place. This would be similar to covering the service engine light on your car’s dashboard to “fix” the problem instead of having a mechanic look under the hood to determine what triggered the light to turn on in the first place.

Following The Pain Free Diet is an excellent way to establish a foundational lifestyle eating plan that can make sure you are getting a good variety of essential vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants to combat inflammation and pain, and restore optimal health.

When you’re ready to go deeper level, we can do some specific testing to determine your individual nutrient profile and where we can intervene with more targeted nutritional interventions through diet and sometimes short-term use of supplements.

The test I use most commonly in my practice is the Spectracell MicroNutrient test. It is a simple blood test that evaluates your body’s lymphocytes (white blood cells) to determine deficiencies within these cells. It can also determine how these nutrients are working to maintain normal cellular function essential to your immune system and overall health.

By testing rather than guessing, this tool helps us evaluate your unique nutrient profile and provides a scientific basis for recommended supplementation, dietary changes, and lifestyle modifications. This allows targeted treatment of the specific genetic, metabolic, biochemical and physiological requirements of each patient to more quickly restore health and optimal function.

If you feel this test may be right for you, and you live in Southwest Arizona and would like to see me as a patient in the office contact us.

 

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