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.