What is Nutritional Therapy?
Nutritional therapy is the application of nutrition and health science to enable individuals to maximise their health potential. Nutritional therapy can help alleviate or remedy a wide range of health conditions and can play a role in prevention of disease and in optimising health and well-being.
Nutritional therapists recognise that each person is an individual with unique dietary and nutritional requirements and use a functional medicine approach to consider the relative importance and effects of different factors such as genetics and biochemistry on nutritional status and function.
How are Nutritional Therapists Different?
There are many different professions working within the broad field of nutrition. Only practitioners in nutritional therapy and dieticians are trained in clinical practice to give one-to-one personal advice.
Nutritional Therapists
Nutritional therapy practitioners are fully independent professionals who assess the whole health status of the individual and work with the client to achieve and maintain health through nutritional means. They often work with clients who have chronic health problems that conventional medicine sometimes finds difficult to treat. These include allergies, digestive and bowel disorders, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, depression or stress, auto-immune conditions, migraine and skin disorders. Increasingly, parents with an overweight child and/or a child with learning and behavioural difficulties may seek to support their child with nutritional therapy.
Dietitians
Dietitians work principally in the National Health Service and are regulated by the Health Professions Council. Their professional body is the British Dietetic Association. A dietician uses the science of nutrition to devise eating plans for patients with various medical conditions. They also work to promote good health by helping to facilitate a positive change in food choices amongst individuals, groups and communities. They may also specialise in the field of artificial nutrition support, or work in the medical nutrition industry or in private practice.
Nutritionists
Nutrition scientists (nutritionists) often work outside of the clinical context, in research, industry or education. The Nutrition Society is a learned society whose aim is to advance the scientific study of nutrition and its application to the maintenance of human and animal health. There is a national voluntary register for nutritionists who are qualified to provide general information about food and healthy eating but are not trained in clinical practice or to give specific information about individual therapeutic diets.
Nutrition Adviser/Dietary Adviser
Other practitioners of complementary therapy may offer general nutrition advice as part of advice on a healthy lifestyle, for weight management or to support another therapy, such as massage therapy. There are many short courses in nutrition advice designed to support other complementary therapies, but they do not meet the National Occupational Standard for nutritional therapy.
How does a Nutritional Therapist work?
Nutritional therapists assess nutritional status and functional capacity. They recognise that each person's needs are unique and depend on a number of factors, from inherited strengths and weaknesses to the influence of diet, lifestyle and environment.
Nutritional therapists work with clients with both chronic and acute health problems and provide advice on disease prevention and control. The nutritional therapist will take a comprehensive client history and may use biochemical and other types of clinical tests to assess and evaluate individual health, determine treatment aims and to formulate a safe and effective treatment plan, informed by the evidence base for nutritional therapy.
In addition to dietary and nutritional advice, recommendations may include guidance on methods to support digestion, absorption, detoxification and elimination, and also the avoidance of ingestion or inhalation of allergens or toxins. Many parents also now seek the help of nutritional therapists for their children with weight and behavioural problems.
Practitioners are required to update and develop their professional skills and knowledge through Continuing Professional Development (CPD). A nutritional therapist may also refer to, or liaise with, other healthcare professionals.
Nutritional Therapists also work in education, research and industry.
Practitioners listed on our register have achieved the NTC Certificate of Competence in Nutritional Therapy Practice; they have been assessed against the National Occupational Standard for Nutritional Therapy, set by Skills for Health.
