Nutritional Therapy Diploma

Properties, Composition and Naturopathic Effects

The merits and disadvantages of wheat, milk and meat are carefully analysed and exposed from the standpoint of both scientific and also naturopathic considerations. 

There will be much here to ponder, whilst the scientific evidence leaves little to doubt.  You will look rather exhaustively at the merits, nature and composition of vegetables and fruits, not only as groups but also as sub-groups and down to the individual plants. 

You will find yourself in a position, when it comes to prescribing, to be directive when necessary about which individual fruits and vegetables it will be best to use. 

The groups of pulses, nuts, seeds, fish, shellfish and other seafood’s, as well as beverages, will be closely examined for their composition and suitability for prescription in treatment diets. 

Acidity and alkalinity in foods is carefully examined.  This Folder is “all about food” but it is also food for thought from beginning to end.

Areas covered

• The wheat grain and its milled fractions
• Types of bread
• Nutritional problems of wheat and wheat allergy
• Sprouted wheat and wheat grass
• Barley, oats and rye
• The composition of milks
• Milk as infant feed
• The variety of dairy products
• Nutritional and health problems associated with milk
• Milk allergy and intolerance
• Hidden milk in foods
• Vegetable mineral content and vitality
• Eliminatory effect of vegetables
• Composition of 49 different vegetables
• Potential hazards of plant foods
• Composition and nature of pulses, nuts and seeds
• The composition of different meats
• Naturopathic negatives associated with meat
• The composition of different fish types
• Fish as an omega 3 source
• Shell fish and crustacea
• Nutritional problems of tea and coffee
• The composition of fruits
• Strongly eliminative properties in fruits
• Acid and alkali-forming foods
• Using the food composition tables

Each and every member of the micro minerals group will prove a fascinating area of study and will face you at times almost with disbelief that such minute amounts of substance can exert such extraordinarily powerful effects upon the way the body works and therefore upon health. 

Each micro mineral displays its own particular pattern of effects arising from either deficiency or excess.  This is almost like a personal signature of the mineral.  These will be learnt now but employed later in diagnosis to help determine the likely patterns of micro mineral imbalances in your patients.

The role of all-important magnesium is examined together with the principles of using magnesium in therapy.  This element plays a key macro mineral role and exerts decisive control over naturopathic elimination. 

Areas covered

• Iron, zinc, copper, manganese, selenium, chromium, molybdenum, iodine, silicon, fluorine, vanadium
• For each of the microminerals where appropriate:

Body content; physiology functions; effects of deficiency or excess; toxicity; factors promoting retention or loss; occurrence in foods; different chemical forms; associated diseases; the use of the appropriate supplements

• Roles of magnesium in the body
• Magnesium in foods
• Effects, diseases and symptoms of magnesium deficiency
• Naturopathic expectations from magnesium therapy

It is possible to manage and manipulate the bowel flora – the bacteria that inhabit the intestines – so as to produce optimal benefits to health. 

Antibiotics and certain dietary errors appear to work in the opposite direction and encourage a flora that will generate more toxins.

This Folder deals with both scientific and naturopathic facts and technique and explains how to harness the potential that resides here for bringing better health or maintaining health.  It is a crucially important area of nutritional management.  Every case you will treat will need the possible prescription of bowel flora products to be reviewed.

The other part of this Folder is about the maintenance of health.  We provide a general round-up of this pre-clinical part of the course with an overview of nutritional requirements and wise practice in the design of those diets that may be intended to be “healthy” but not necessarily therapeutic. 

It includes examination of the special needs of vulnerable groups.  You can expect, of course, to meet patients of all ages and conditions and, often enough, you will be asked merely to provide guidance upon what type of diet will best maintain their health. 

It also reviews the production of toxin-free food and the hazards posed by the industrialization of food.   Finally, there is an approach to the use of supplements for health maintenance and a discussion of strategies for on-going cleansing and toxin avoidance so as to assist in maintaining good health.

Areas covered

• The naturopathic view of the benefits of bowel flora
• Effect of diet on the bowel flora
• The putrefactive bacteria
• Balancing lactose fermenters with other types
• Toxic amines
• Benefits of the acid producing species
• Negatives associated with antibiotics
• Breast feeding and the bowel bacteria
• Bowel flora products
• Overview of the British diet
• Nutrient requirements for the population
• Higher requirements for the health conscious
• Special needs of children and the elderly
• Special needs of vegetarians and vegans
• The requirements of pregnancy and lactation
• Organic growing
• Industrial food processing and food additives
• Maintenance supplements
• Maintenance cleansing

This Folder is divided into two parts.  The first gives a detailed understanding of the basis of diagnosis, while the second gives direct instruction in performing diagnoses. 

These two parts, taken together, comprise a major step in your induction as a naturopathic nutritionist.  The induction into technique and approach is an essential step, but even more than that, the moulding of your thought process is so very important. 

You have to move into the particular “observer” position, mentally, from which the diagnosis is best carried out.  The first part of the Folder both provides the “nuts and bolts” of nutritional diagnosis but it also provides the mental positioning to enable you to carry it out with confidence and expertise. 

The diagnosis requires understanding of the “constitution”, defined both naturopathically and genetically.   An optional side book covers both the miasms and the Chinese 5 elements in respect of their bearing upon diagnosis within nutritional therapy.

Fundamental to the practical aspect is the technique for taking case histories and then interpreting them along combined naturopathic and scientific lines. 

This logically leads onto the next stage – treatment – in a rational sequence.  This Folder contains five “demonstration” case histories.

This is in many ways the crux of the whole course. 

However, being released into nutritional treatments – with their full power – without having made the most thorough preparation, would be most unwise. 

Absolutely every topic that has been covered before is required in one way or another at this point.  It is here that the interpretation of the case history becomes translated into a prescription of diet and supplements that is honed in a sensitive way to the patient as an individual. 

We outline a number of “levels” of the diagnosis that feed into the treatment decisions.  There is a “whole person” level, a “weak organ” level, a “metabolic imbalances” level, a “nutritional deficiencies” level and, finally, the lowest in the hierarchy, a “named diseases” level.  

We also introduce here the profound concepts of intensity, direction and level as they apply to the very basis of Nutritional Therapy prescriptions.  All these contributions must converge to provide the best overall treatment. 

The focus at this point is on defining the dietary guidelines and the careful orchestration of the essential minerals and vitamins that are to be used. 

However, this is also the point at which various named treatments are considered, including bowel cleansing procedures, bowel flora treatment and some of the contributions towards Candida treatment. 

These options are set out here and then developed more in the later Folders of Part Two.  Special approaches such as the liver cleanse are also considered here along with amino acid therapy, antioxidant therapy and the anti-inflammatory prescription. 

We also provide guidelines on how detailed analysis of the composition of diets, and the design of special diets based on such analysis, can contribute to treatment.  This Folder provides the “core” of all this, with various modulations and variations being available from the subsequent Folders for “fine tuning”.

There is nothing quite like practice where case histories are concerned.  To be able to study them with great facility and insight and then discern the routes by which they lead towards exact treatment – that is to be your aim here.  The Folder provides the challenge of “interpreting” a number of case histories, with help and with feedback. This is an approach that can lead you towards confidence and competence in this task, which is at the centre of practitioners’ daily work.  Approaches and solutions are presented.  This Folder gives 11 abridged case histories and 20 fully detailed case histories for analysis by the student, 31 case histories in all. These are selected to provide a variety of different types of treatment situation including some that are special or unusual.

In covering the prescribing of supplement programmes in Folder 9, you will have been focused primarily upon those that rank in orthodox nutrition as “essential nutrients”, particularly minerals and vitamins. 

However, Nutritional Therapy is enormously enriched by a wide range of other biochemicals that cannot be classified as “essential”.  Life does not stop without them, yet they can be extremely helpful, especially to individuals with compromised health. 

These are more often metabolic intermediates than recognised nutrients, but they can be extraordinarily valuable for organ-directed therapy.  Many of these involve up-to-the minute discoveries. 

We teach about phytonutrients in foods (eg carotenoids, flavonoids, proanthocyanidins, isothiocyanates, organic sulphides and curcuminoids) and about the possibilities, when necessary, to provide them in supplement form.

Herbs are covered too in their special role of support-therapy to Nutritional Therapy, usually in an organ-directed or system-directed role.  Echinacea, silymarin, aloe, ginkgo, bromelain and St John’s Wort are just examples of these herbs. 

We also teach the use of herbal combinations for specific purposes.  This wide choice of “extra” items is the subject of specific instruction in this Folder.

Having got the treatment going, there is a need for specific instruction in the on-going task of monitoring the patient’s condition and reacting accordingly with adjustments to the therapy. 

Patient and practitioner alike have to be aware that the first prescription is likely to be just the start of a process.  Reading the signs of change looms large in this instruction and familiarization.  Responding to them is the second part.  Here there is a need to understand the terms “intensity” and “direction” in therapy.  “Intensity” refers to the degree of healing and naturopathic pressure being applied and “direction” refers to the aims of the particular choice of treatment being applied. 

You will learn to distinguish between situations that call only for a change of “level” and those that call upon you to rethink and change “direction” when the patient’s progress levels off as this may then initiate a new burst of healing changes. 

Another way to break out from the “plateau” situation is to assess the exact nutrient composition of the whole diet – an action that is too detailed and time-consuming to do with every patient and usually not needed. 

A part of the Folder is about drugs, when and when not to encourage their use, and how to manage the drug-dependent patient.  You need to acquire at least a passing familiarity with the main classes of prescription drugs, which are explained in this Folder.

This Folder also provides information on Laboratory testing procedures that may be recommended to patients.

Finally we offer subjects of crucial importance to working practitioners, namely a study of “The Therapeutic Relationship” and “Practice Management – Running The Practice as a Business”.