Most people are able to acknowledge the substantial role that nutrition plays in maintaining our health and know how health is undermined by malnutrition however, the bare facts about nutritional adequacy make up only the tip of a giant iceberg of knowledge that links nutrition with freedom from illness, recovery from illness and attaining a zestful vitality.

The most fundamental underlying principle of Alternative Medicine is that of promoting and supporting the body’s inherent ability to heal itself, to heal from within. That is what Naturopathy seeks to do. It seeks to clear away the obstacles to the body’s ways of self-healing. It also seeks to support and strengthen the forces within the body that are responsible for that healing.

The trouble is that within the modern orthodoxy, the potential role of nutrition is sadly underrated with nutrition is being thought of only as background information, not as serious treatment that may have more potential to treat serious chronic illnesses than modern medicine. To promote nutrition as treatment these days is often derided as a medical heresy, yet the deriding is done without knowledge of the subject and without evidence. In this matter, the medical orthodoxy is guilty of conducting itself non-scientifically. Open-mindedness is a duty of anyone purporting to work scientifically, but that duty is being laid aside in favour of negative bias.

Orthodox nutrition follows suit with orthodox medicine. Orthodox nutrition is concerned with people having enough of this nutrient or that, usually with a bias to keeping the recommendations low, rather than seeing what positive outcomes can be had from luxury nutrition. Usually, they address the question one nutrient at a time, overlooking the fact that the nutrients have to work together in combinations and within a balance within the cells of the body. When testing nutrients against named illnesses, they usually take them one at a time, like asking whether Vitamin C can cure or prevent the common cold. But that is not the way that any well informed naturopathic nutritionist works. They end up doing tests, therefore, under conditions that are inappropriate to the ways in which we practice.