Nutrition education can help support a variety of needs for patients. But many don’t realize that learning how to properly eat can help with therapeutic programs.
The basic components of any nutrition education program include knowing how certain foods impact your weight, medical conditions, and mental health state. However, patients and their caregivers may want to consider how, and why, these educational programs create long-term impacts on therapy outcomes.
So what are nutrition education programs? What should caregivers do to successfully include nutrition education into nutritional therapy?
What is Nutrition Education?
Nutrition education by its most basic definition is a set of learning experiences that help individuals learn eating habits, routines, and behaviors that lead to improved mental or clinical outcomes.
When creating an educational program to improve patient’s nutrition, it helps to establish a particular set of goals on a patient-by-patient basis. For example, a patient may need to improve their diet in order to lower high blood pressure and other chronic disease indicators. A few goals that are effective for patients of all ages include:
- Creating positive attitudes about food to encourage healthy dieting
- Improving the consumption of fruits and vegetables steadily
- Increasing physical activity and setting weight-loss goals in addition to new food types
- Adding new meal types and restricting harmful foods to improve medical conditions like obesity, high blood pressure, metabolic issues, and other nutrition-related issues
- Learning new skills to purchase affordable and healthy food options, and learning how to budget for healthier meals
As you can see, nutritional education covers a lot of bases in terms of wellness, health, and dieting improvements. But it is important to know how nutritional education ties into nutritional therapy.
How Does Nutrition Education Support Nutritional Therapy?
Nutritional education is a major part of any nutritional therapy program for patients. However, it is not the only part of a truly holistic therapy program.
Nutritional therapy includes patient education, physical activity, and behavioral intervention to improve overall wellbeing. Most patients that have troubling controlling diet or weight may likely qualify to participate in a nutritional therapy program. A therapy program can help to address underlying issues including patients who are underweight, overweight, struggle with self-esteem related to nutritional issues, and other mental health factors.
Addressing behavioral-related nutrition issues requires a strong nutritional education program for a number of reasons:
- Fact and evidence-based nutritional education helps patients redefine logical dietary decisions
- Learning new types of information about food and diet can put perspective on a person’s current nutritional struggles
- Creating better lifestyle choices, including more frequent fitness and physical activity, requires proper nutrition to maximize results
In a nutshell, nutritional education is the main patient education branch of any successful nutritional therapy program.
Where Can I Find Nutritional Therapy Services in Portland?
Patients that want to either explore nutritional education near Portland or see if they can add on to other wellness programs, may want to contact Crestview Recovery. At Crestview Recovery, we offer nutritional therapy services in coordination with addiction treatment, physical therapy. If you have more questions about nutritional therapy, please learn more here, or call us directly at 866.262.0531.
