Isabelle Maës Nutrition

Nutritional therapy

Nutritional therapy is the art of safeguarding or restoring health through food.

The macro and micronutrients provided by food and drink are what enable our bodies to function.

A good diet, which I define as a natural, diversified diet that is antioxidant and anti-inflammatory by nature, enables it to do this optimally. Conversely, a bad diet, based on processed products of low diversity and inflammatory nature, disrupts its functioning.

Our body is a formidable machine! It produces hormones, neurotransmitters, enzymes, antibodies, destroys dysfunctional cells, rids us of toxins, etc., all based on biochemical processes that rely on nutrients. A good diet enables it to manage all this in the best possible way, and offers preventive virtues in relation to disease, as well as curative values for successfully fighting most pathologies.

Nutritional therapy is becoming increasingly fashionable, and so much the better for its enormous potential for our health. But it's by no means a recent invention: it has its origins in antiquity, with writings from ancient Greece, India, Persia and China.

Unlike conventional medicine, which is often described as allopathic, its aim is not to treat the symptoms of the body's dysfunctions, but to identify and treat their underlying causes, in a holistic approach that also combines physical exercise, stress management and sleep management.

Most of the illnesses we suffer from today are not infectious diseases, but result from our denatured modern lifestyle. Nutritional therapy seeks to re-establish a balance that sustains health. The nutritional therapist helps the person concerned to re-establish good habits over the long term.

FNutritional therapy also differs from dietetics. Dietetics is primarily based on a caloric approach, and establishes diets and meal preparation techniques. Nutritional therapy, on the other hand, seeks to re-establish or maintain the body's proper functioning through diet.

Image credits: Alexandra Andersson fruit salad, Mariana Medvedeva stuffed eggplant, Joseph Gonzalez egg toast, Eiliv Aceron cereal and fruit salad, Mariana Medvedeva jar salad, Yoav Aziz poke bowl