EAT YOUR HEART OUT

This article appeared in Nursing Standard

Common sense tells me that we can never achieve the ideals of adequate and affordable health resources for everyone, while they are directed chiefly towards repairing damage that has already been done.

What seems to be lacking is a strong and authoritative body of opinion in the health service urging that the way forward is a greater focus on preventive medicine.

One of the most effective tools of preventive medicine is nutrition education and intervention. Government health agencies do aim to educate the public on healthy eating goals, but the progress in getting the message across is dishearteningly slow.

It is no secret that changing the eating, and lifestyle, habits of the nation would cut the figures for heart disease, diabetes and cancers dramatically in the long run. But this message is having to fight against better funded and highly successful campaigns by the food manufacturing industry, which pushes processed foods which are fatty, salty, sugary and burdened with unnecessary additives at us and our children.

NUTRITIONAL INTERVENTION

Preventive medicine, principally nutritional medicine, has more to offer than cutting mortality figures. Doctors’ waiting rooms are filled with people hoping for a pill for their ill. Yet many of these ailments can be successfully avoided in the first place, or treated before they become too serious, by nutritional intervention. The waiting room queues could be slashed!

Arthritic inflammation, headaches and migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, dermatological conditions such as eczema, PMS, and common childhood complaints such as glue ear and asthma all have a strong nutritional component to their aetiology, and can be alleviated in a large number of cases by nutritional management. This approach primarily encourages healthy eating guidelines, but is also focussed on the individual by looking at the their health strengths and weaknesses, and by seeking to make specific recommendations using foods, and sometimes vitamin and mineral supplementation, for their therapeutic effects.

But even if the medical profession embraced nutritional medicine, there is till a major obstacle to achieving this idealistic picture. People have to be convinced that they must be responsible for their own health from the moment they pour cereal out of the packet for breakfast, to the time that they have their night-time tipple.

Unfortunately, it usually takes a crisis in a person’s life for them to start looking seriously at embracing ways of preventing further degeneration.

HEALTH MANAGEMENT

But there is hope. Interest in complementary medicine suggests that people are increasingly willing to play a role in their own health management. I think that this has resulted in the medical profession taking a new look at nutrition. A huge body of well-conducted research is now supporting the use of nutrition as a vital health management tool.

To encouraged this basic philosophy throughout the health service, nurses and doctors should be given the relevant nutritional grounding and access to nutritional advice should be easier for everyone. By championing preventive medicine, we can look forward to a future where the NHS is not an ill-health service, and those who work within it are not weighed down by unreal expectations, unfair criticism and an almost impossible burden of work.