• Are you confident about the quality of supplements you recommend? Do you make specific brand recommendations?
• What if you determined your patient needed magnesium? Would you know which magnesium is best suited to them – oxide, glycinate, taurate, threonate, aspartate, citrate, chloride, malate, or sulfate? Dizzy yet?
• What about B vitamins? Are you up on when methylated versions are better or when they may actually be contraindicated? (PS – it’s not just about MTHFR).
• Do you think all women of childbearing years need iron in their multivitamin? And how do you feel about starting a prenatal vitamin when you’re trying to conceive – even before you’re pregnant?

Our conventional nutrition education has prepared us well in key areas like general anatomy & physiology, lifecycle nutrition, macro and micronutrients, body systems; cardiovascular, blood sugar, liver, digestion, etc, and of course, specialty medical and overall healthy diets. The emphasis is on getting nutrition through a good varied diet; one that provides the RDAs for all the essential nutrients. But what about when diet and RDA standards aren’t enough?

A good segment of our clients are on some sort of specialty diet at any given time and sometimes long-term: low calories/low fat, restrictive diets often lacking variety, or even omitting an entire food group, and of course, there are some who simply prefer highly processed and/or convenience foods.

About 75% of the US population don’t consume the recommended intake of fruit, and more than 80% don’t get the recommended intake of vegetables. That’s just the tip of the iceberg!

What’s deceiving is even with healthy foods are consumed, there can be a depletion of nutrients, what with overcooking/over farming, and over processing. There are also nutrient changes over time that can occur from long-term shipping over multi countries.

Well, according to the concepts of orthomolecular medicine, rationale for using supplements include:

• Dietary deficiencies
• Absorptions defects
• Enzyme defects
• Effects of disease
• Drug-induced deficiencies
• Genomic polymorphisms

There’s also microbiome imbalances we’re learning more about every day, increased needs based on stress effects, and even exercise demands.

It also doesn’t help that while these inadequacies can result in clinically overt symptoms, they may also present covertly making it difficult to detect clinically. For example, much literature confirms micronutrient inadequacies could elicit symptoms of general fatigue, reduced ability to fight infections, and impaired cognitive function (i.e., attention, memory, and mood).

Micronutrient inadequacies may also have important implications for long-term health and increase one’s risk for chronic diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, osteoporosis, and age-related eye disease.

In this training series, we’ll explore assessment modalities including laboratory biomarkers and clinical signs/symptoms that aid us to best determine our patients’ needs for supplementation and provide the basis for responsible recommendations. Likewise, the importance of follow-up to adjust recommendations over time.

Given the myriad of reasons for nutrient insufficiency, it becomes increasingly evident why assessing nutrient status though dietary intake alone is simply not enough anymore! Furthermore, considering the physiologic action of nutrients occur at the cellular level, it’s often not even enough to assess general serum/plasma levels. In this training, I’ll be sure you’re well informed on:

• Biomarkers that assess cellular sufficiency (did the nutrient get into the cell)
• Biomarkers of metabolic activity (did the nutrient do its job in the cell)
• And, in the case, where our body can produce the nutrient, reasons for physiologic blocks that impede a nutrients production