I’ve been a Reflexologists for 33 years, a licensed massage therapist since 1988 and am a recent NTP graduate. As a practitioner who is in constant contact with the tissues of the body, I wanted more information about the influence of nutrition on all tissues. I filled in this missing aspect with the NTT program. Upon graduating NTA approached me and asked if I would provide an overview of reflexology and its integration with the Foundations. What follows is how I’ve married the two concepts.



Reflexology Overview During a first reflexology appointment, I measure the arch of the foot and then from the toe back to the heel with a Brannock measuring device. I check the foot’s width. I have them do a walking stride imprint on something resembling a giant ink pad while looking for how the client balances weight from side to side. Once that has printed on the paper, I have the client step over their imprint and trace the outline of their foot. I then take the shoe they came in with and place it over...

by Elaine Fawcett, MJ, NTP

It seems like a dirty trick. You’ve learned you’re gluten intolerant and are hoping a gluten-free diet will cure your eczema, diarrhea, or whatever niggling health malady vexes you. Transitioning to a gluten-free diet is hard enough: You had to replace your toaster, your cutting boards and stone baking wear, disinfect your pantry, toss a bunch of perfectly good food, and say a tearful goodbye to pizza deliveries and pints of beer.

 

But what’s this? Not long into your new diet you’re actually getting worse? Your skin flares up, your gut is doing circus tricks, your joints feel like they have knives stuck in them, or your newly gluten-free child is growing fangs and snarling at you.

 

Relax. Turns out what you’re experiencing—that storm before the calm—is totally normal for some people who give up gluten and casein (the protein in dairy).

 

“Twenty-four hours after I stopped eating gluten, I felt like I got kicked by a horse,” says...

Despite being the “staff of life,” gluten’s list of transgressions against good health is enough to fill several books, not to mention countless exam tables and hospital beds. As many now know, a gluten-free (and often dairy-free) diet is a good place to start when struggling with a health affliction.

However gluten, in all its nefariousness, is a bit of a fall guy. Although a gluten-free diet can go a long way toward resolving health issues, it might not score the touchdown. In fact, a gluten-free diet is to eating what marijuana is to drug abuse — the gateway to something more powerful.

To achieve true health, according to the book Primal Body – Primal Mind: Empower your total health the way evolution intended (…and didn’t) by Nora Gedgaudas, CNS, CNT, we must give up not just gluten but all grains entirely. This may have your friends and relatives rolling their eyes at the dinner table, but, as the book explains, we’re simply not physiologically equipped to handle grain. Archeology and anthropology...

Like a lot of NTPs, I have a subset of friends who only email when they have a health issue. This was a recent email from my friend Heidi:

 

“I ate one square of a Green and Black chocolate. Within 30 minutes I became nauseous. Then I was in bed, totally comatose, passed out. I was unable to get up until about four hours later. At that point I had a bad headache and I was really disoriented and confused. I was shaking violently all over. Visibly shaking hard. There was digestive upset as well, with diarrhea. Last time this happened I was sick for six days with vomiting and extreme fatigue.”

 

Luckily we both knew why Heidi got so sick. Green and Black isn’t using Chinese melamine, but instead wheat syrup in their filled bars. When this mother of five eats gluten she goes down hard which is amazing considering what a tough sell she was. She had long been an avid and accomplished baker and she bristled whenever I suggested her children’s autism symptoms, or her own poor health and slippery brain function, might be gluten related. Finally, after her teen daughter’s umpteenth violent outburst, she got the family tested, they all tested positive. They’ve been gluten-free ever since. Now just the tiniest bit sends her reeling.

...

As a Nutritional Therapist I am always looking for tools to share with my clients about weight loss and detoxification. In The Fast Track Detox Diet, Ann Louise Gittleman offers us a guide to detoxification and weight loss that is a simple blueprint to improve our health, vitality and longevity. In the beginning few pages she sums up her intention for writing this book when she asks the reader, “What is the point of struggling to manage our food intake if our organs are giving way under the strain of processing a toxic overload?”

 

The author clearly invites the reader to: Cleanse your system back to glowing health and vitality, get rid of unhealthy fattening toxins, and jump start your metabolism.

 

The Fast Track is a guide for the professional looking for an organized tool to support their clients/patients who desire to lose weight, or the lay person looking for an easy-to- use guide to better health and weight loss.

 

She suggests that any diet that does not support...

We are in the midst of an incredible paradigm shift that paves the way for placing Nutritional Therapy Practitioners with eye care professionals. Amazingly, the government and the American Medical Association are behind this move. The bottom line means more job placement opportunity for emerging Nutritional Therapy Practitioner professionals in a relatively new profession.

The occupation of Nutritional Therapy Practitioner is still in its infancy. Lifestyle education, nutrition, supplementation, and complementary therapies are escalating exponentially around us providing tremendous opportunities. We can create a position for ourselves where none existed before with eye care professionals who are not accustomed to having an NTP on staff or doing nutritional work in practice. It takes far ranging vision to spot developing trends – like the paradigm shift we are in the middle of – thinking and acting creatively to solve future needs.

“Finding needs and filling them” is one of the great definitions...

History  

 

 

Preparing cultured foods and beverages (a.k.a. superfoods) dates back to a time before humankind developed modern preservation methods to prolong the shelf life of foods such as pasteurization and refrigeration. In fact, human beings were probably culturing foods well before discovering fire!

 

Ancient societies had no way of knowing about the microscopic life responsible for culturing their foods. Yet, they praised them for their amazing health benefits. The Turkish prized kefir as a health enhancing, anti-aging tonic. It is well documented that the Bulgarians consumed copious amounts of yogurt to increase immunity and longevity (hence the name of the beneficial microbial species Lactobacillus bulgaricus). Even Weston A. Price, the nutritional pioneer who studied and observed isolated cultures around the world, discovered that cultured foods were an integral part of most, if not all native diets. His findings revealed that traditional peoples cultured everything...

In the 1930’s and 40’s a brilliant nutritional pioneer, Dr. Weston Price, visited diverse native groups around the globe to try to find the common dietary thread connecting their diets—diets that were supporting populations that enjoyed a level of health we in the modern day can only dream about. Price, a Cleveland area dentist, had launched his project out of concern for the rapidly deteriorating health of his patients, particularly the young. The insights in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, are far-ranging and deserve a thorough reading. In this article I look at his work on minerals, but it should be noted that his investigations turned up other important common factors in these diets that are beyond the scope of our discussion here.

 

Price discovered upon analysis of the foods consumed by these native groups that they were found to contain at least four times and up to ten times the macro-mineral content of the standard diet of the day in America. Linger there for a moment with...

Living in darkness is not our genetic heritage. Until recent times covering our skin was to protect ourselves form the cold – not the sun. Our transportation evolved from horses to cars preventing the rays of the sun from reaching us. It has only been in the last 30 years that we began using sunscreens and avoiding the sun altogether.

 

The most potent steroid hormone in the human body is Vitamin D. When you are deficient in Vitamin D the genes designed to protect your health can’t work properly. Our physiology is as closely linked to the sun as plants. Plants use sunlight to photosynthesize chlorophyll. Our body uses a similar process to photo synthesize Vitamin D. Sunlight and Vitamin D touch virtually every aspect of your bio chemistry and physiology. Following is just a small number of the vital roles that Vitamin D plays in your health: Regulates and assists in calcium absorption, energy metabolism, muscle strength and coordination, reduces C-reactive protein and other markers of inflammation,...

There are those who argue it is ridiculous to consider how honey was used in ancient times as being useful in modern day. Others may preach how the chemical breakdown of honey has a negative nutritional impact on the body. Some will even dismiss bees and their products as being “nonsense”, not really having any healthful properties. Consider for a minute how many things in nature have been proven helpful to mankind in easing ailments; wheat-grass, Aloe Vera, for that matter, all herbs used to support and heal our bodies, along with fruits and vegetables. Why couldn’t honey be useful internally? As society becomes fed up with being overdosed, dumbed down, overfed and numbed a revitalized interest in natural cures is making a come back. The possibility of the many uses of honey is being studied and has been supported by research. In recent years, more information is coming out in favor of honey as a better alternative sweetener because it is not refined sugar.

If one wishes to argue that honey is “manufactured...