More DCs should offer nutrition guidance in their practices.
More DCs should offer nutrition guidance in their practices.Although there is a lot to know, you can help a lot of patients with nutrition guidance. With simple and basic things. When I started my practice, all I knew was to eliminate sugar from my patients’ diets and support their adrenal glands. That improved my results enough that I was able to stand out in my community, and I eventually had an all-cash, all-referral practice after learning just a few more things.
Of course, I worked at learning as much as I could from my patients so that I could help improve their body’s infrastructure. You have time. You can start by offering basic diet and nutrition advice and increase your suggestions to supplements and disciplines later. Every patient will teach you something. Just get started.
Change the diet
Many of the chronic health problems you see are self-inflicted. More than 35% of Americans are walking around in an inflamed state. Inflammation triggered by the COVID virus claimed a million people. All diseases are inflammation, and the best way to reduce inflammation is with diet.
My “don’t eat sugar” turned into the “caveman diet.” If it wasn’t available 10,000 years ago, it’s not good for you. If it comes in a bottle, box or can, don’t eat it.
I read about the alkaline ash diet and was told that eating 80% alkaline heals and 60% maintains health. I needed to stop telling people to look up the alkaline ash diet because many healthcare professionals have weighed in on the alkaline ash diet. Make it simple; fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are alkaline. Meat, grains, sugar and additives are acid. So, tell your patients who want to heal to eat between 70-80% fresh produce. Polyphenols heal.
For me, the final piece of the puzzle came after I read Elaine Gottschall’s book, “Ending the Vicious Cycle.” Her diet puts nearly half of patients with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis into remission. It also helps a lot of other digestive problems, like GERD and IBS. Complex carbohydrates are a problem for most Americans because we eat 200 pounds of refined sugar every year and half our diets consist of complex carbohydrates. The Paleo diet is almost identical to Elaine Gottschall’s, so I have patients eat Paleo for the first 30 days.
That is how I came up with the diet in my book “Roadmap to Health.” It’s not a perfect diet (no one has one of those), but it is a good enough diet. Not all the recipes and meal ideas in it are specific carbohydrate diet (SCD) friendly. If the patient has inflammatory bowel disease, I tell them to avoid those foods (the diet allows quinoa and sweet potatoes, which are forbidden on the SCD).
Just recommending the diet can produce wonderful clinical results. I had one patient with Crohn’s disease who was going to drive for several hours to see me. He asked if there was anything he could do while he waited to get in. I gave him the diet (minus the quinoa and sweet potatoes). He called a week later to cancel—and to tell me he had gone into remission.
Another fellow had gotten two sinus infections per year for the last 20 years. He went on the diet and stopped getting infections. It turns out he was sensitive to gluten. There was a five-year-old who kept getting ear infections. They stopped when he went on the diet.
All you need to do is say, “We need to get the inflammation down first.” Have them follow the diet for 30 days while you plan further therapy. Maybe they wake up in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep. You can give them thiamine and adrenal support. Maybe they react severely to MSG. You can give them B6. There is so much information available on PubMed and other websites you can easily put together an effective protocol during the patient’s first 30 days.
Alternatives to Ozempic
Amid all the hype on TV and social media surrounding taking diabetes medicine to lose weight, no one mentions that these patients are losing muscle and, if they quit the drug, the weight comes back on. Read the side effects of some of these drugs.
The reason this is “working” is because 100 million Americans have insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes. Most of them don’t know it; 89% of people with insulin resistance don’t know it and 25% of type 2 diabetics don’t know they have it. So, taking a drug that blocks sugar produces a “miracle.” You can do a better job by simply recommending the following:
- Light exercise and diet. Your patients should not eat anything with a glycemic load over 10. That is true of this diet (quinoa has a glycemic load of 11), but the diet is so rich in nutrients and polyphenols, which help control diabetes, they can just follow it.
- Magnesium. Insulin insensitivity interferes with magnesium absorption. Also, magnesium supplementation helps get blood sugar under control.
- Berberine. This supplement works like the prescription drug metformin to get blood sugar under control.
- Glucose multiple. Many nutrients, like B vitamins, vitamin A, vitamin D, magnesium and others help with blood sugar control. Most vitamin companies make a glucose multiple.
- No snacking between meals/no food between dinner and bedtime. When you eat, you produce insulin. Confine eating to mealtimes. If you can sell them on it, get patients to try intermittent fasting.
Final thoughts
As a DC, you can outperform medicine with natural alternatives for almost all chronic complaints. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry has patients using therapies that either make things worse or cause new problems. Also, your care doesn’t need to be “instead of medical therapy.” You should focus on fixing your patients’ infrastructure, not treating disease.
Paul Varnas, DC, DACBN, is a graduate of the National College of Chiropractic and has had a functional medicine practice for 34 years. He is the author of several books and has taught nutrition at the National University of Health Sciences. For a free PDF of “Instantly Have a Functional Medicine Practice,” a PDF of his book “Roadmap to Health” or a patient handout on the anti-inflammatory diet, email him at paulgvarnas@gmail.com.
