“Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body.”– Masanobu Fukuoka
Our diet constitutes a key part of our overall health and despite an overwhelming amount of information regarding diet and nutrition now available to us, each person’s body is unique and will react differently to every diet, supplement and food item. In addition, our environment, which also has a role to play in determining what types of food are best for our health, is in constant flux, especially in England and perhaps more so in large cities like London. Well4ever in South West London is excited to offer lab tests for food intolerance testing, information about Chinese medicine, diet and general nutrition. This local Putney clinic also has a number of health supplements, foods and drinks in store.
Food Intolerance
It goes without saying, a key part to adapting our diets to suit our individual needs is learning to avoid foods that do not agree us. This can be very difficult to determine given the many factors which affect our everyday health, such as exercise, stress, environmental factors and illness. Food intolerance symptoms tend to be discrete and slow to manifest, making it even harder to locate the culprit. When we have a food intolerance we are unable to properly break down and digest some ingested food or drink, resulting in a number of different repercussions for our overall health. To resolve these difficulties, Well4ever offers a wide range of lab tests to determine food intolerance . With Lorisian labs, you can test for up to 150 or more food items enabling you to detect any food intolerance you may suffer from and adapt your eating habits accordingly. All results come with a support package to help manage any recommended changes in your diet. We also provide gluten sensitivity Array 3 tests with Cyrex, offering the most comprehensive analysis currently available for gluten sensitivity. Here is a non-exhaustive list of tests available:
- Gluten Sensitivity (Array 3)
- Cross-Contamination (Array 4)
- Immune Function
- Food Intolerance
- Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
- Homocysteine
- Allergies
- And More
Nutrition and Chinese Medicine
Diet from a traditional Chinese medical perspective considers the whole person and their unique constitution. The focus is on acting preventably, to avoid illness and disease in the first place, instead of retrospectively, as well as restoring and maintaining health. In pre-communist China, doctors were paid by clients as long as they were healthy, but stopped receiving payment when a patient became sick! It can be understood as the real meaning of health care, whereas conventional medicine is more concerned with illness care. From the point of view of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), our digestive system is regarded as the ‘digestive fire’, which must be nurtured and looked after in order to effectively digest food and transport nutrients throughout the body. Unfortunately, we often eat mindlessly, discarding the need to check in with our bodies to see what we really want to nourish ourselves and support our gut or digestive fire with. For example, people living in the UK are often affected by a weak digestive fire due to dampness, which can cause feelings of fatigue and fogginess in the head. Eating suitable foods to reduce the work on your digestive system (such as traditional stews and soups) can reduce physical ailments appearing elsewhere in the body.
Guy, our acupuncturist, herbalist and primary practitioner at Well4ever combines his extensive knowledge and practice of TCM, including acupuncture and Chinese herbalism with advice and recommendations on what and how to eat and what to avoid. He can provide and support you with a food diary if appropriate. At Well4ever we provide food intolerance tests, offering a Western-style diagnosis. If you so wish, we can then combine the results with Chinese medical treatment, ensuring that the root cause of any imbalances are detected and treatment is directed towards solving the cause of the problem, not just the symptom. The body is a hugely complex organism and any impact on one area will have a reaction somewhere else. Meet Guy here and and get started with Guy’s nutritional advice.