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Your
Nutritional Health and Surgery
Surgery
imposes unusual demands on your body -- creating new tissue and
blood vessels, repairing damaged tissue, manufacturing extra cells
needed to heal the wound and make repairs. If your body is short
of essential nutrients it won't be able to meet these demands as
well as it should. This may leave you more vulnerable to infection
as well as slowing your healing time. Fortunately, there are a number
of things you can do, both before and after surgery, to help you
strengthen your system to better deal with the extra demands placed
upon it by surgery.
Besides
making sure that you are generally as nutritionally fit as possible,
there are specific nutrients that may be especially needed during
the healing period, such as beta-carotenes, vitamin C, several of
the B vitamins, vitamin E (caution required), vitamin K, magnesium,
copper, iron, zinc, EFA's, amino acids, etc. It's best to get most
of these extra nutrients from food sources, rather than supplements
because it is easier to absorb them from food and some vitamin supplements
in high doses can not only be toxic, but may actually slow the healing
process. Seek professional advice.
Ideally,
you should prepare yourself nutritionally several weeks before surgery,
but even if you are not able to do that you can still have many
of the benefits of improved nutritional strength by beginning after
your surgery. Restoring nutritional balance is a very individual
problem. Because we are each biochemically unique, our needs for
specific nutrients vary greatly. Also, as we age our body chemistry
changes and requires that we take a very different approach
to nutrition in our middle and later years. Nutritional analysis,
such as my symptomatology questionnaire provides, is an important
first step in determining the status of your nutritional health
and beginning a customized program (either before or after surgery)
to correct your unique nutritional deficiencies. Additionally, you
can imagine that your body could be depleted of a number of essential
nutrients after the healing period and it is important to then continue
eating a very nutritious diet.
Vitamin,
mineral and enzyme imbalances together with other nutritional deficiencies
accumulate in our bodies over a long period of time and are usually
the result of many years of abuses such as eating too many refined
foods, fats, sugars, etc. and consuming too few fresh foods and
too little fiber. However, not all nutritional deficiencies are
due to poor diet -- some people enjoy a healthy diet but do not
absorb their dietary nutrients effectively, for various reasons
-- poor digestion being a common one (for more information please
see the "low digestive enzymes" link).
Diet
should be the prime focus of any changes you make. As well, there
are vitamin, mineral and herbal supplements and concentrated superfoods
that can help you regain your nutritional strength. But they must
be the right ones for you -- the ones that your body needs. Please
note that I do not sell foods, vitamins or any other nutritional
products -- I provide nutritional analysis and counseling. My recommendations
usually include specific foods, vitamins and nutritional supplements
that are available from your local suppliers.
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Some
extra information about nutrition and...
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Your
analysis will test you for symptoms of 54
nutritional imbalances.
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