Clinical Nutrition & Dietary Medicine
Food and nutrients have long been recognized as powerful influences on health. Combining herbs, nutrients, and dietary strategies for therapeutic purposes is a time-honored art and science practiced for thousands of years in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and many other healing traditions. Today, modern research is expanding our understanding of how these approaches work at the molecular, cellular, and systems levels.
There is good reason to use herbs and nutrients together. Herbs can influence specific biochemical processes in the body, helping to support optimal function across body systems, while nutrients provide the raw materials needed for those processes to occur. Skillful combinations of herbs and nutrients can therefore offer benefits that go beyond the effects of either alone.
Mederi Care® draws upon clinical nutrition and dietary medicine as therapeutic modalities alongside botanical medicine. Clinical nutrition focuses on identifying and addressing individual nutritional needs through targeted nutrients, cofactors, and precision supplementation. Dietary medicine takes a broader food-as-medicine approach, using whole foods and specific dietary strategies to support health and address underlying imbalances. Together, these approaches go beyond conventional dietary recommendations to consider how specific foods, nutrients, and plant compounds influence health and cellular function.
Food as Medicine
We honor the traditional wisdom expressed in Hippocrates’ well-known teaching, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” while incorporating current research into the biological effects of food and its constituents. Increasingly, research in nutrigenomics is revealing how dietary components can interact with cellular signaling and gene expression, helping us better understand the relationship between nutrition, genetics, and health.
This knowledge allows nutritional strategies to become increasingly individualized. Rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all diet or following the latest “fad” or alternative diet, we consider each person’s unique needs, health history, genetics, lifestyle, and goals. Specific foods, nutrients, and dietary compounds can be selected and combined to support healthy cellular function and the body’s natural capacity for repair and resilience.
From Food to Therapeutic Nutrition
The same compounds found naturally in foods can also be concentrated and delivered as highly purified nutraceuticals when clinically appropriate. In targeted amounts, specific nutrients and plant compounds may be used to influence biological processes associated with chronic disease, including inflammation and oxidative stress.
This creates a continuum between food and medicine, prevention and treatment, and clinical nutrition and botanical medicine. Dietary strategies may form the foundation of a therapeutic plan, while targeted nutrients, nutraceuticals, and botanical medicines can provide additional support when more concentrated or specific interventions are needed.
At Mederi Center, we view nutrition as more than a matter of what to eat. Through individualized dietary strategies and targeted supplementation, we use nutrition as an important therapeutic tool to support whole-person health, from cellular function and healthy aging to emotional and spiritual well-being.
>> Read more about the Mederi Care Approach to Diet
>> Read Dr. Susan Saccomanno's blog "The Importance of a Balanced Diet: A Guide for Cancer Patients"
