Nutritional Support with IV Drip Therapy

So, yes, the whole diet is vitally important. But with respect to nutrition, there are times when even that alone might not be enough.

Is your body getting all the nutrients you give it?

As we noted last time, many factors can affect nutrient absorption. For instance, some genetic variants can cause issues. MTHFR mutations, for instance, affect folate uptake, while HFE variants affect how we absorb iron.

Age is another factor. As we get older, B12 and magnesium absorption tends to go down, and vitamin D becomes harder to synthesize.

Medication use can likewise have a negative effect on nutrient levels. Different genders at different times have different nutritional needs. Alcohol, caffeine, and even stress can alter how your body processes the nutrients it gets.

This is why it can be helpful to get a full nutritional workup from a well-trained integrative physician – so you can identify and address any barriers to optimal nutrition, as well as be more aware of your unique nutritional needs.

But it’s also another reason why IV nutritional drip therapy can offer such a boost to your health.

Unlike food and oral supplements, which require the involvement of your gastrointestinal system to get nutrients into your blood, drip therapy bypasses the GI tract all together. The nutrients go right into your bloodstream so they can go to your cells to do the work you need them to do.

While drop-in and mobile clinics with their standardized menus have become a thing, what they can’t offer is the individualization and customization that a physician can.

At a clinic like ours, you can know that the specific nutrients being delivered are medical grade and provided in the right amounts for your particular needs. We take the time to get to know you as a person, as well as your health history, situation, and goals.

More, because components of a drip can interact negatively with certain natural or pharmaceutical medicines you’re taking, customization helps minimize the risk of a bad interaction.

Meantime, the blood levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients you get intravenously are many times higher than the levels you get from taking them orally. They’re at levels that support Radiant Health.

Of course, we do have some off-the-shelf options available – hangover relief, say, or jet lag recovery – as well as blends for supporting detox of heavy metals and other environmental toxins. These include ozone, hydrogen peroxide, and glutathione drips.

Patients in our West LA clinic report numerous other benefits following IV drip therapy. These include increased energy and improved performance, better sleep and reduced anxiety, and healthier skin.

Nutritional IV therapy is safe and painless (well, except the initial needle prick). You just sit back and relax in our cozy drip room, and our supervising staff will see to your needs. Within the hour, you’re done.

Your body will thank you.

Image by Robert Geiger, via Flickr

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It’s the Whole Diet that Matters, Not Any One “Superfood”

As we were saying, your body needs real food. Can we take that a step further and see food as medicine?

You’ve probably heard the saying “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food” – an idea that’s usually attributed to Hippocrates. In truth, though, the phrase doesn’t seem to turn up in his work. In fact, it may only date back to the early 20th century.

Regardless of the source, though, the phrase can be a little misleading.

Of course, the broad idea is sound: What you eat is a major driver of health and illness. Your body needs nutrients to operate as it was designed to do. When we fail to regularly give it what it needs – including wholesome, healthful, real food with a minimum of processing between field and plate – we not only deprive it of what it needs. We wind up feeding it with products that, over time, can interfere with its optimal function.

But the idea of food as medicine also overlooks the fact that food is more than just medicine, just as it’s more than mere fuel. Its emotional, social, and cultural aspects provide their own kind of nutrition.

At the same time, we shouldn’t take the idea to mean that food has pharmaceutical-like effects. Yet when we’re bombarded with the latest hype over each new “superfood” that comes along, it’s all too easy to make that leap. Headlines touting “the healing power” of this food or that – chia seeds, turmeric, avocado, acai, quinoa, and on and on – come at you fast and furious through your social media feeds or news sites and blogs every day.

But what are we really talking about when we talk about “superfoods”?

The common understanding is that these are foods that contain compounds that are considered especially beneficial to your health. But this doesn’t tell us much. As one blogger put it,

By that definition, pretty much any plant food could be considered a superfood. Pretty much all plant-based foods contain compounds that are innately good for us. Antioxidants, fiber, nutrients—we thrive off of plant-based diets. Each fruit, vegetable, grain, and legume has its own uniquely healthful properties. Blueberries are rich in anthocyanins. Brown rice contains essential minerals. Lentils are dense in protein. And beets are loaded with iron and nitric oxide.

To deem any one of these foods more super than the others is not only incorrect, it’s also extremely misleading.

Indeed, what “superfood” really is, is a marketing term. It came into use back in the early 20th century when the United Fruit Company started promoting bananas for their “food value.” Bananas, after all, were their major import.

Initially the company had advertised the practicality of bananas in a daily diet, being cheap, nutritious, easily digested, available everywhere, good when cooked and not cooked, and sealed by nature in a germ-proof package. To get people to eat more, they suggested adding bananas in cereal for breakfast, in salads for lunch, and fried with meat for dinner.

Then the medical community got into the act, suggesting that bananas could be used to treat disease.

Soon, physicians began treating conditions like celiac disease and diabetes with bananas. Children with celiac disease, for instance, gained weight and grew taller while on a banana diet, and these findings were highlighted in medical journals. Erroneously, scientists attributed these results to the special properties of bananas and not the removal of gluten from the diet.

No matter. The United Fruit Company, in turn, cited the doctors and sold even more bananas. Ever since, many other superfoods have come to the fore, often falling out of fashion for a time before being rediscovered by later generations.

One factor fueling this is the simple fact that nutrition science is “a wickedly difficult field,” as Harvard nutritionist David Ludwig has put it. The challenges are many, starting with the fact that we seldom eat single foods in isolation but as ingredients in recipes and meals made from multiple recipes.

Studying that in any useful way would be extraordinarily difficult and cost-prohibitive.

More, the real impact of diet doesn’t show up right away. Often, you don’t see the significant results of your food choices until much later in life. Meantime, you’re exposed to an array of other factors that can impact how much nutrition you may actually get from your diet, from toxic exposures to genetic variants.

And where those are concerned, no single food will fix things, no matter how super.

As ever, it’s the whole diet that matters – not to mention the other keys of Radiant Health. That might not be as exciting as a clickbait headline, but it does have the virtue of being true.

Images by Eric Astrauskas, via Flickr; Steve Hopson, via Wikimedia Commons

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