Once you realize that many of your patients will benefit from dietary supplementation, the next step is to make sure that your patients get supplements that actually benefit them.  It's not my intent to make this article a seminar on nutritional supplements, but there are several pertinent facts that should be emphasized so that you and your patients get the maximum results of any supplements that you recommend.  If your patient’s don’t see results from your recommendations then they will lose confidence in your abilities and you will lose confidence in dietary supplements, even though your patient’s would benefit from them.

The controversy over the advantages of natural supplements vs. synthetic supplements has been raging since chemists first discovered the chemical structure of organic compounds and began synthesizing them in the lab.  The chemists were able to synthesize vitamins, enzymes, and hormones with chemical formulas identical to those found in nature.  They were able to manufacture these substances at a significantly lower cost than it took to isolate them from natural sources. The assumption was, and is, that these synthetic supplements are just as effective as natural supplements, because they are chemically identical.

Nutritional counseling and supplementation is a vital component of a Lifestyle Medicine (LM) practice.  But it is much more than just prescribing a multi-vitamin supplement for your patients.

Proper nutrition is best achieved through proper diet, knowing what to eat and, just as importantly, knowing what not to eat.  The field of nutrition is still in its infancy and there is so much more that will be discovered in the future.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include nutritional products in your treatment program. By applying what we already know about nutrition to your patients you can greatly improve their health.

Lifestyle Medicine is defined as the application of environmental, behavioral, medical and motivational principles to the management of lifestyle-related health problems in a clinical setting.  In practice it means that by improving overall healthy living, the patient can prevent, manage, or even reverse a wide variety of diseases.  It is not a new concept for many alternative healthcare providers, but in the world of allopathic medicine it is a relatively new idea.

Only recently has there been a big push to prevent diseases by the medical establishment.  There has been no incentive for doctors, or anyone in the medical field, to prevent diseases or manage them through lifestyle changes.  The first attempt to influence overall health was, and is, through the campaign to prevent or stop smoking.  Very recently there has been an increased push to educate the American public on a healthy diet and reduce the number of calories in the typical diet in order to fight and prevent obesity.

Let’s use the definition of alcoholism provided by the AMA approved by the Boards of Directors of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc. (February 3, 1990) and the American Society of Addiction Medicine (February 25, 1990).:

“Alcoholism is a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations. The disease is often progressive and fatal. It is characterized by continuous or periodic: impaired control over drinking, preoccupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite adverse consequences, and distortions in thinking, most notably denial."

Can you substitute the word ‘obesity’ for ‘alcoholism’ and ‘eating’ for ‘drinking’ and still make to definition accurate?  Most patients dealing with obesity and healthcare professionals treating obesity would clearly answer the question with a resounding ‘YES’.