The recommended doctors on this website incorporate nutrition in their practice to various degrees and may have a nutritionist in their office; you may want to try them if you live in the Los Angeles area.

I will have recommendations for nutritionists soon, but here are some things to consider when making a decision about whether or not you should should explore nutritional counseling:

Why is it important to have a nutritionist analyze your diet and supplements?

Some of us try to do maintenance or fix our own cars, but we all know that it is a gamble depending on how much mechanical knowledge we have. However, most of us understand that it’s best to use a qualified mechanic. The better you take care of your car with regular maintenance, proper tune-ups and use the highest quality oil, water and gasoline, the better and longer it will function with good performance.

Well, we should do nothing less for our bodies, actually a lot more since we cannot trade them in for new ones (not yet anyway).

The bottom line is that if you want to function optimally physically and mentally, reduce your risk of all avoidable diseases and live a highly functional long life, you have to optimize what goes in your body every day: the right kinds and amounts of foods distributed properly throughout the day. Your food and nutritional supplements plan also has to be appropriate for your physical activity, genetics, lifestyle and your particular health conditions.

Important qualifications to look for in a nutritionist

A qualified nutritionist is one that gives advice based on solid scientific facts, has a thorough education and keeps up to date on nutrition science. It is also very desirable that he/she pays attention to your special health, genetics and lifestyle needs and helps you manage your nutrition in the most practical way for you and your family.

It is important that your nutritionist knows how to work closely with other health care practitioners that monitor your health (doctors, therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists/herbalists) and knows where the role of nutrition ends and the need for another practitioner begins. A good nutritionist is aware of all the medications (prescription or over the counter) that you have been prescribed and all potential interactions with the nutritional supplements you may be talking.

Obviously the goal is to support you to improve your health and body function so that you may need fewer medications, a lower dose or completely eliminate their need. However this must be done responsibly under the supervision of the doctor that prescribed those particular medications. Sometimes it may be useful to get a second opinion from a different doctor that understands the potential of nutritional supplements (see the “Recommended doctors” section on this website).

1. A few more reasons you need a good nutritionist:Most laymen (and many professionals) have not had the chance to get a good basic education in nutrition because this is not properly taught in many schools (for example: teaching simple food pyramid concepts that are very outdated right now).
   
   
2. The nutrition information advocated in the media, including an immense number of books and diet systems are very confusing because they tend to be contradictory of each other, are often incomplete, and most importantly, not based on good scientific evidence (often ignoring  the more recently published research).
   
   
3. Aging-related changes, as well as lifestyle and environment challenges, will always create a need for adjusting your nutritional plan and support from nutritional supplements. It would be wisest to have periodical nutritional testing in order to get the optimal “tune-up” for your program.