𝗦𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲:
The translation of the video will be made available as soon as possible.
The main objective of functional nutrition is to answer the question “Why are you ill?”. A functional medicine model is a form of alternative medicine that determines how and why illness occurs. This model is an individualized, patient-centered, and science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote wellness. The approach of functional medicine focus, essentially, on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness. By addressing the root cause, rather than symptoms, practitioners become oriented to identifying the complexity of the disease. As a result, functional medicine treatment targets the specific manifestations of disease in everyone.
The disease can have different causes, in other words, the diagnosis can be the result of more than one factor. For example, depression can be caused by many different reasons, including inflammation. Likewise, a cause such as inflammation may lead to several different diagnoses, including depression. Only treatments that address the right cause will have lasting benefits beyond symptom suppression. Functional medicine providers spend time listening to you and gathering your medical history and they use this information to identify the root cause(s) of the illness, including triggers such as poor nutrition, stress, toxins, allergens, genetics, and your microbiome. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalized treatment plans that lead to improved outcomes.
Also, food, as we all know, is an integral part of staying alive and can bring added value to our health. Daily consumption of functional food, food containing beneficial bioactive natural products, delivers an effective dose of such components with the potential to ameliorate debilitating diseases. Consumption of agricultural products with adequate amounts of bioactive compounds will aid in the fight against obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, inflammatory diseases, cancer, metabolic syndrome, and Alzheimer’s disease. Fruits, vegetables, berries, and others generally regarded as safe plants play an important role in filling this space occupied by functional foods. In the same way, the increase in the number of elderly people has determined a desire for quality-of-life improvement. As we have seen, a diet comprising functional foods could help not only to improve the life quality of an aging population, as these foods play an important role in keeping one healthy with a better quality of life; but they could also reduce health risks or delay the onset of serious pathologies.
Functional medicine seems to be a very promising path, and for this reason, it is gaining more and more followers. And you, are you ready to make a real change in your health, from the inside out?
In this fourth webinar of our 4th cycle “You are what you eat“, we talked about what is functional medicine, how it can be approached, and how it can influence our health; and highlight the latest technological advances and challenges yet to be overcome in this area of research.
