Medical Nutrition Therapy Starts With A Nutritional Assessment.
Your provider takes your medical history and health status into consideration to determine the best nutritional approach to help you manage your condition.
You can expect to work together with your provider to outline dietary goals. For example, if you have hypertension, maintaining a target blood pressure will be one of the main goals. Most patients with chronic disease will have more than one goal.
For another example, many people with Type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese. In this case, dietary goals may include controlling carbohydrate intake and reducing overall calories to promote weight loss. If you’re carrying extra weight, losing even a modest amount of weight may improve how well your body manages your blood sugar.
During your therapy, you’ll attend regular follow-up visits. This will give your provider the opportunity to monitor your progress, order necessary lab tests, and evaluate the effectiveness of any medications.
Benefits of medical nutrition therapy
Medical nutrition therapy is very beneficial in helping manage certain chronic diseases. Here are some of the benefits.
Slow and possibly reverse chronic disease
Medical nutrition therapy can help slow, and, in some cases, reverse chronic disease. Targeted nutrition can not only help you reach health targets for things like blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, but good nutrition can also improve your energy, mental health, and fitness.
Help prevent the development of additional diseases
Unfortunately, having one chronic disease increases your risk of developing another. That’s because the same lifestyle factors that can contribute to the development of a chronic disease, if left unchanged, can eventually lead to the development of additional chronic diseases.
For example, if you regularly consume too much sodium, saturated fat, and added sugar, you may first become overweight. However, if your diet doesn’t change, you may then go on to develop hypertension, high cholesterol, prediabetes, and, eventually, Type 2 diabetes.