Functional Diagnostic Nutrition


What is FDN?

Functional Nutrition is a model of holistic health care that seeks to identify and correct the root causes of disease using functional lab tests, dietary and lifestyle changes, and natural supplements to rebuild the body. It views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of independent organs divided up into medical specialties. A Functional Nutrition practitioner is a “health detective” who searches for clues to determine the underlying causes of symptoms and disease, instead of managing or masking the symptoms as conventional medicine does. If your blood sugar, blood pressure, or cholesterol are high, the first question a Functional Nutrition practitioner will ask is “why?” Although conventional “allopathic” medicine excels at treating trauma and acute illness (broken bones, appendicitis, etc.), medical doctors receive little to no education in nutrition, and are not trained how to use natural therapies to prevent and reverse chronic illness. Furthermore, medical doctors use standard lab tests that look for pathology (disease) instead of functional lab tests that look for optimal function. With conventional medicine, you are either sick (in a state of disease) or you are healthy. Functional Nutrition is ideally suited for those who fall between these two states, that is, those who are suffering from chronic pain and bothersome symptoms but have been told they “are fine” since their standard lab tests are “normal” (they haven’t yet progressed to an officially diagnosed disease).

Functional Nutrition practitioners spend time with their clients, listening to their histories and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, dietary, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and chronic disease. The Functional Nutrition approach is a partnership between the client and the health practitioner; it educates and empowers clients so that they are in charge of making positive changes to improve their own health.

Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® seeks to find and correct the underlying causes contributing to:

It focuses not just on an isolated set of symptoms but on causal factors such as: