I am excited to welcome you to Healthier Appetite Nutrition. I decided to rebrand my nutrition counseling business because I want the name to reflect my passion of helping patients get healthy through nutrition. As always I will continue to promote science-based, plant-based nutrition counseling, but what exactly does that mean?
Science-based means that I evaluate research, selecting evidence from well-designed, randomized control trials, known as the "gold standard" within the scientific community. Nutrition research is especially difficult to design. For example, if you want to study low-fat diets, you need a control group and an intervention group (low-fat diet). But you have to make sure the low-fat diet group is eating the same amount of calories as the control group to ensure that the results are not from eating fewer calories. So what if you replace the calories with protein? Now how do you know if the results are from the low-fat diet or the high-protein diet? You can see how it is challenging to design a good nutrition study and why you need an expert to separate the good from the bad. You may hear about the results of a new study in the news but the reporting is rarely accurate. Many fad diets are based on flawed research or incomplete information.
A plant-based diet is composed of only plant-based and plant-derived foods like fruits, vegetables, legumes (beans), mushrooms, grains, nuts, seeds, etc. I recommend a plant-based diet for three main reasons: 1) There is overwhelming evidence that suggests it is the healthiest diet, 2) It does considerably less harm to the environment than diets which rely on animal agriculture, 3) The treatment of farm animals is horrifically cruel.
Whether you are already vegan or vegetarian or just have an interest in eating healthier, 2018 can be the year that you finally learn to eat right. Please get in touch with me (remote counseling available) so I can help you achieve your health goals.