Dietary Guidelines: The Alpha Nutrition Center:

Alpha Nutrition on Nutrition

Re-Thinking the Nutrition Paradigm

Modular Nutrition

Nutritional Programming

These discussions of nutrients and nutrition are continued in the Alpha Nutrition Program, Nutrition Notes and other publications in this series.

Four texts are included Professional Starter Pack

Food and nutritional issues are complex and genuinely difficult to understand. But often, it is conventional nutritional advice, turned into dogma that opposes intelligent, well-thought-out methods of diet revision. For many years we lived with the "four food groups," a nutritional dogma taught at universities for over four decades. The new pyramid scheme in the US official food guide improves on these old recommendations but retains the negative features of the old four food groups.

We recommend studying the US official guide to our students. We suggest that they approach the guidelines as a theoretical structure and as advice to a population of people with diverse needs. The advice is less applicable to individuals whose nutritional needs may not be met by these recommendations and whose health may be at risk if they follow the food selection advice. A skillful nutritional therapist will think of the guidelines as just one way to organize food selection but will also know the many exceptions to these rules and use other methods of diet design such as the Alpha Nutrition Program. usa phone number

Food-Related Diseases are Prevalent

The American Surgeon General's report on Nutrition and Health (1987) asserted that at least half of all deaths in the USA are related to faulty diet and described: "... the convergence of similar dietary recommendations that apply to prevention of multiple chronic diseases. Five of the ten leading causes of death in the USA are clearly related to wrong food choices. Diseases of nutritional deficiencies have declined and have been replaced by diseases of dietary excesses and imbalances-problems that now lead rank among the leading causes of illness and death, touch the lives of most Americans, and generate substantial health care costs." Freezerless refrigerator.

These problems include diseases generally acknowledged to be diet related, such as heart disease, alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes as well as other common disorders not generally acknowledged to be diet-related. Changing patterns of food-related illness are recognized. Food contains both old and new problems; the new food-related illnesses are a consequence of our changing, maladaptive food-production and consumption habits.

The improvement in the diversity and availability of foods has been a mixed blessing with major problems emerging to negate the potential benefits. Food is the most intimate part of the environment because food is ingested. When something goes wrong, it makes good biological sense to look at the flow of substances through the mouth for the source of the problem. Adverse reactions to food are common and produce many disturbances by a variety of mechanisms. Diagnosing adverse reactions to food is an important task of clinical medicine and needs to be taught in medical schools.

Often, the potential benefits of diet revision in the solution of health problems are ignored. Many food and nutritional issues are complex and genuinely difficult to understand. But often, it is simply nutritional dogma that opposes intelligent, well-thought-out methods of diet revision. For too many years we lived with the "four food groups," a nutritional dogma taught at universities for over four decades. The four food groups (meat, milk, grains, and vegetables-fruit) were promoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1950's as the proper, official method of achieving a "balanced diet". The US FDA collaborated, teaching this system to the nation, and a remarkably strict nutritional dogma emerged in the USA and Canada. However, the four food groups can now be viewed as an obsolete set of recommendations with a poor health record.

In the 1990's official dietary recommendations in the USA and Canada have changed to a food pyramid which gave more value to eating fruits, vegetables and grains. Harvard's Walter Willet reviewed the new recommendations and stated: " The dietary pyramid released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture attempts to translate current nutritional knowledge to a recommended eating pattern in terms of food groups. Inevitably, such a document represents a mix of well-supported findings, educated guesses, and political compromises with powerful economic interests such as the dairy and meat industries."

Willet's conclusion is that "...optimal health can be achieved from a diet that emphasizes a generous intake of vegetables and fruit. Such plant-enriched diets, as embodied by other cultures can be not only healthy, but interesting and enjoyable as well." This approach has been taken in designing Alpha Nutrition.

A majority of health problems are food-related; so these problems get a lot of our attention. There are two aspects to nutrition:

The normal play of nutrients in the body
the real story of complex food-body interactions with disease-causing problems.

Anyone with an interest in Nutritional Therapy will want to read about, understand and use Alpha Nutrition Program . This deceptively simple technology solves the common food-related health problems.