America spends more per capita on medical care than any other country, yet we still have a low ranking on health outcomes. What can be done to fix this problem? That’s the question the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute is trying to solve, by combining the resources of various types of healthcare, science, and technology. The individual human body is complex and so should be the way we think about caring for it.
Proper nutrition information, personalized for the individual patient, is a crucial part of healthcare. Many health professionals –from different fields like homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, along with standard Western medicine– are starting to incorporate into their practice. Good health starts with a good foundation and should be easily accessible to all!
Sadly, many states have measures in places that severely restrict nutrition counseling, limiting it only to “registered dietitians” (RD). That is, only those who have credentials from a private trade association now known as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), formerly known as the American Dietetic Association (ADA) are allowed to provide nutritional counseling. Whatever happened to that old saying, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?’
It turns out that those states with an AND monopoly on nutrition information typically have far higher rates of obesity than those where there is no monopoly. Isn’t this something that should not be happening in America? What about anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws? It’s easier to get around those laws than you would think. AND promotes its own interests over the health of individual Americans by spending lots of money and energy pushing through self-serving federal regulations. This means that non-RD health professionals are not allowed to offer advice about an item that is not even a controlled substance, but one that’s available for all to purchase without a license: Food.
Read the entire article here: One-Size Nutrition Profession Doesn’t Fit All
