Any of you visited a NUTRITIONIST in your life?

The question is straightforward and ask yourself, have I visited a nutritionist anytime in my life?

Answer yourself before reading further. If you have answered yes, then you don’t need to waste your precious time reading this article.

Skip it and read something useful to you.

The one asking this question i.e. me, if I ask myself, I know what answer I will get.

Let me be frank, I haven’t taken a nutritionist appointment in my lifetime of more than 60 years for me or even for my family.

Yes, it’s TRUE. I am not lying here. Because I didn’t see the need for it.

Yes, we don’t take nutritionist appointments routinely like we take with doctors.

If I am not wrong, I think, ONLY MOVIES STARS OR SPORTS PERSONS OR FEW PEOPLE WITH NUTRITIONAL AWARENESS visit the nutritionists regularly.

How many of us can claim that I haven’t taken a doctor’s appointment in my lifetime.

Practically NONE, probably.

Forget taking appointments, you are delivered by specialist doctors. Mostly, we are dying in the hospitals unless you are met with a fatal incident.

So, birth and death are happening in hospitals.

I don’t know for what reasons this attitude that WE KNOW EVERYTHING regarding food is inbuilt in our minds.

When it comes to food, we FOLLOW OUR PREFERENCES and eat accordingly and not ACCORDING TO OUR NEEDS.

When there’s a problem in health area the first thing that comes to our mind is VISITING A DOCTOR not a NUTRITIONIST.

For my son also I haven’t taken him to a nutritionist even until today, but I had made several rounds of general physicians and specialist doctor visits to correct his health concern.

His doctors never said to me that I should make an appointment with a nutritionist to find his nutritional needs or even they themselves didn’t ask me about his food habits.

Why blame doctors?

It didn’t even occur to me that I should take him to a specialist nutritionist not a specialist doctor. It maybe because of my work background, being a drug discovery scientist myself I wanted to correct his health through medication only not through diet plan.

Why is this?

Somehow, it’s ingrained in our individual minds and in the societies around the world as a whole that we need to see the doctor first not the nutritionist for health concerns.

It’s a brand created. HEALTH equals to DOCTOR.

HEALTH = DOCTOR.

Funny thing is even when we are in the midst of health issues we don’t consider visiting a nutritionist.

I am talking about majority people here, not the outliers here and there.

Readers out there please correct me if I am not correct. I will make corrections to this paragraph. ‘Medium’ allows us to modify the article even after it’s published.

When everything is going well you don’t realize how important it is to maintain good health.

GOOD HEALTH IS EVERYTHING.

IT SHOULD BE THE TOP PRIORITY FOR EVERYONE.

Good health requires good balanced nutrition.

When we have diseases then we run after doctors otherwise we don’t see them either.

So, even before running towards doctors, you should check your nutrition at least occasionally.

We all have different nutritional needs at different ages. I believe, we should make nutritional adjustments once in a decade at least.

Because when you are in trouble you can’t sit and evaluate your nutrition. So, the right time is when everything is going well.

Compared to before internet days, nowadays everyone has information at their fingertips. Go ahead and research your nutritional needs according to your gender and age.

If you have a health concern and can’t figure out your nutritional needs or don’t know what modifications are required to correct the health concern, then you should sit with a nutritionist and design an INDIVIDUALIZED NUTRITION PLAN (INP) like individualized education plan (IEP) for special education students.

‘You are what you eat’. Several of you have already heard about it. This quote coined nearly 200 years ago back in 1826 by the French lawyer Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. This only indicates that our mental health is governed by the food we eat apart from physical health.

So, when you sit with your nutritionist you should evaluate your macronutrients and micronutrients intake, especially if you already had a health concern.

Everyone knows about FOOD PYRAMID wherein you have macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Vitamins and minerals come under micronutrients. Everyone needs them in balance in their nutrition if you want to lead a healthy life.

These days different food pyramids are created for different lifestyles. Check them out.

If any of your nutrients are out of balance, then your health will be out of balance.

We should FIX THE NUTRITIONAL IMBALANCE before running for the doctors. Even after having a balanced diet if you are not well then, it’s time you visit your primary care physician.

We need more NUTRITIONISTS than more DOCTORS.

It’s apt to say, we need more SPECIALIST NUTRITIONISTS than more SPECIALIST DOCTORS.

Don’t get me wrong about DOCTORS. According to Indian philosophy ‘Vaidyo Narayano Harihi’ which loosely translates to ‘doctor is supreme God.’

Originally, I thought of start writing about supplemental changes which helped my son’s ADHD as mentioned in my previous post but then this nutritional imbalance dawned on me. Then I thought, first I should address it.

So, now onwards I’ll not write in advance what I am going to talk about.

Will just write what comes to my mind. This way I am not burdened with my expectations.

Cheers until the next post.

Vara Chamakura