Natalie: I have always loved food and grow up in a family, in Italian family and anytime we were going to celebrate, who is going to be around the dinner table, someone was cooking, we have to eat, so I was bringing food over, so I always been a food enthusiast and then when I was in college I was majoring in international business and I was enjoying the classes but I felt like may be it wasn't great a great fit for me and at the same time my dad had been going through some health issues having a lot of stomach problems and he started reading several nutritional books and I kind of picked one up one day and he has told me what I did learning and so as part of my interest in often I enrolled in the just basic nutrition classic college and that's really history. So, I graduated with a degree in nutrition and my passion to help others becomes popular.
The nutrition is really the foundation for health, I honestly believe that any physical condition, any diagnosis, any disease is going to be traced back to some nutrition element if you have high cholesterol is because you are eating a high fat diet or your liver is not working properly if you are overweight is because you are excess of calories and you are not burning enough if you have diabetes its possible that you are overweight and that you have a high sugar diet and that's influencing how effective your pancreas is and secreting insulin and keeping up with all the sugar that's going in your system. So, I believe that there is just a fundamental element to help and that is nutrition and when we leave that out, I really believe that will cutting our life short by lots of years.
We have, I don't know, hundred trillion cells in our body and each of our cells needs the 45 essential nutrients are going to be the vitamins. We need all of the macronutrients and macronutrients carbohydrates, proteins, essential fatty acids, there are all these things are our cells need. So, if we are getting them in our food our cells are suffering our hundred trillion cells that are summing around our bodies are getting the nutrients that they need.
So, no wonder we have all these health conditions and no wonder people are dying early and no wonder 20-year olds are complaining of inflammation and I knew someone who is 32-years old diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and its all going back to the fact that we are putting food in our body that has not fueled for ourselves and not as really what we have to look at us, we have to few food as fuel for ourselves. Now if we are just eating because we like to taste the food and we just enjoy being with family and friends, we have to incorporate somehow healthy foods into our diet, otherwise we will die early.
I knew nutrition consulting, its just a way to help people see what they are consuming and what they are taking on a daily basis so a lot of times I will go on to two week journal and chart everything they are eating, everything that they are drinking even if it's a little peppermint I want them to write it down and then after the two weeks we can look at it and I can assess how many calories and how much protein, how much sugar are they getting because a lot of people don't really understand how much they are eating or how many calories they are getting or what kinds of foods they are eating because it's just they are going through the day, they are busy, they are focused and they are just eating and then I like to also take some grocery shopping and this is a good way to just take products, our better choices.
If their favorite food is spaghetti, I can take him down to the neuro isle and show them whole wheat pasta, may be they have never purchased before they were not just familiar with it and they don't know if its going to be brand or if its going to taste okay.
So I can get my pointers on that and the spaghetti sauce you know show them ones that are lower in sugar and have more vegetables and have low sodium so its really helpful for them to kind of branch off from what they are used to buying and then also I like to go into their homes and look in their pantries and get rid of all of the stuff that is calling them in the overnight all of the high sugar foods and the high fat foods and then we kind of follow that up with the grocery shopping to work things so that they can find better choices they had keep in their house because if its in their house that's we are going to spend a lot of your time, so if you don't have cookies at home then you are keeping you from that temptation.
I was working for an enzyme company in Houston and it was a supplement company and they are focused on researching increasing digestive enzymes and now is the fist job that I have right at a college so it was a little skeptic about supplements because my whole education was about focusing on food, getting nutrients from food and really staying from supplements and herbs because they could conflict with medications and so when I started working for this company I was doing all this research, I was in the clinical and technical support division and is started seeing this recurring theme that these enzymes topped with a variety of health conditions and at that time my grandfather had been diagnosed with kidney disease and he had to really high which is a byproduct of protein and normal range is I believe 2.2 and his was up to 6.8 and which is definitely evidence that the kidneys are not functioning properly and so he was really desperate and I wanted to help him.
We had a research clinic at the company where he worked and so I brought him in and did some simple nutrition testing and determine some digestive enzymes that would help him break his food down better and get nutrients dissolves and he just had a dramatic change. He went from being grace in color really not having no appetite, losing a ton of weight, all of his medical tests and blood tests were showing evidence that he was starting to and was not going to be around much longer but it was probably about six weeks went by and we had wonderful things going and his cheeks were pink and he ate better 2.5 plates of big scooping meal and you know that was about a year and half ago and he is just doing fabulous. He has gone back I don't know almost every month to get more blood work done and stayed much lower than 6.2.
Actually it's in the high fours which is still elevated for the normal individual but his doctors say that I mean for his age and where he is right now that he is holding stable and everything is looking great, he is still living by himself, he eats like a horse and he has great energy and its so sweet because every time I go see and spend time with him makes really teary eye because he always says that I saved his life but really was just taking at condition and helping someone digest their food better which you wouldn't necessarily think that there is a correlation between digesting foods better and kidney disease but they are absolutely was in this space and he is although better for it.
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