‘Still-believers’ look away now! One of the great myths, misconceptions & misunderstandings in nutritional medicine is that supplementation will produce change specifically in the one system, or pathway, that the practitioner believes would benefit most.   Let me explain myself a bit better. When we give patients any nutrient, and where it’s not simply to correct a global deficiency & therefore improve levels all round, it’s typically on the basis of a specific desirable therapeutic benefit, e.g. some magnesium to help their GABA production…, additional B3 would improve their mitochondria.  Beautiful on paper…but in reality, like sending a letter to Santa (I did warn you!)

Truth Bomb No.1: There are nutrient distribution pecking orders that have nothing to do with who you ‘addressed’ it to

This dictates that when something is given orally, for most nutrients, the gut itself has first dibs.  So the cells of your digestive tract meet their needs before any other part of your body gets a look in. Sometimes the digestive system’s needs can be quite substantial and leave little for any other part of the body…not mentioning any names (ahem) Glutamine!

Truth Bomb No.2: En route to the ‘target’, these nutrients get delivered and distributed to many other tissues – with possibly not so desirable or intended effects!

You may determine that a patient needs iron because their ferritin hasn’t got a pulse…so you keep giving them daily  oral iron to ‘fix’ this…not realising you’re making their GIT dysbiosis and gut inflammation worse in the process.  Wanting to nutritionally support someone’s thyroid, you know tyrosine is the backbone of thyroid hormones, so you include this in the hypothyroid prescription. Will it help? Who knows? Being a non-essential amino acid it’s subject to very complex regulated distribution & metabolism, with thyroid precursor availability being only one job on a very long list! And if this was in a patient who is regularly smoking cannabis, due to upregulation of the tyrosine hydroxylase enzyme – there is likely to be more of the supplement headed for even more dopamine production and very little or none reaching in fact your intended target.  Or you think a female patient’s breasts would benefit from iodine…but the lion’s share of this mineral will always go to their thyroid 🤔  

Truth Bomb No.3: The prescriber can not dictate the fate of nutrients  – when given orally or IV or IM

Instead our job is to read the ‘roadmap’ provided for every individual micronutrient, via learning LADME: Liberation, Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Elimination and factor in 3 elements that dynamically interface with this: Host Form Dose so that we know the true fate of the nutrients we’re prescribing and therefore their actual destination & impact!

Sorry, I know, it hurts right? But these are essential teachings, that tend to have been over-looked or under-played I find, in nutrition education, regardless of training: nutritionists, naturopaths, IM doctors, dual qualification practitioners remedial therapists.  Nutritional medicine is a wonderful & potent modality when it’s done well…but we need to revisit some core truths and principles that many of us have missed out on, to ensure that when we’re prescribing nutrients we’re not virtually writing wish-lists for our own imaginary Santa.

The Nutrient Prescriber’s Program

You can now claim your spot for our much-anticipated Nutrient Prescriber’s Program composed of 10 modules delivered across 5 sessions between Feb & June 2024. This program will introduce you to a much needed framework that will give you the confidence you’ve been seeking in nutritional medicine. At it’s core, using the highest quality scientific evidence, it addresses the questions no-one and nowhere else does: How much? How often? Which form when? And for how long? 

Early bird closes 8th November – don’t miss out!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash