Modern day conventional medicine often treats chronic disease with near permanent prescriptions of pharmaceuticals. We’ve all seen this happen—either in our lives or in those of our loved ones. However, dietary medicine offers the perfect alternative.

Naturopathic medicine specializes in understanding the physiological functions of the body that maintain health. The naturopathic process of diagnosis goes beyond recognizing disease; it provides a deeper understanding of physiological activities that form the root of disease. Corrective balancing of these physiological functions promotes natural healing mechanisms of the body. This is the benefit often missed by reactive pharmaceutical medications, which often prove toxic for the body, making it weaker and dependent over time.

Food is medicine that provides nutritional components, which help correct functional imbalances that have developed into chronic diseases. Simply put, we eat food every day. In turn, we have two to three opportunities every day to provide our bodies with optimal nourishment to stimulate our self-healing capacity and reduce our dependence on medication. Here are some examples:

• Our heart muscle gains energy and healthy contraction from Co-Q10. We can obtain this enzyme in foods like broccoli, cauliflower, soybeans, oranges, strawberries, eggs, beef, herring, and chicken.
• Proper blood sugar balance is essential to treat diabetes and prevent cancer. By eating foods like green leafy veggies, fenugreek seeds, fennel seeds, bitter gourd, and buckwheat, we improve sugar balance.
• Arthritis pain increases and decreases with inflammation. We can help to control inflammation with such foods as root vegetables (beets and carrots), brassica family vegetables (cabbage and mustard leaves), and raw coconut oil.

The Ayurvedic approach further fine tunes our treatment by individualizing dietary recommendations based on a person’s constitution. Constitutional evaluation through Ayurvedic tools helps us to understand each person’s physiological tendencies and susceptibility to disease. Therefore, at Natural Rhythms Integrative Medicine, we’re offering personalized dietary medicine to enhance innate healing systems.