I believe many nutrition and wellness professionals started their journey after facing personal health challenges. I'm not an influencer, but I've lived this experience. Many functional medicine dietitians I know share a similar experience, or were drawn to this approach after encountering patients they couldn't help with traditional nutrition therapies.
For years before I embarked on my functional medicine journey and obtained my advanced practice credential through the Integrative and Functional Nutrition Academy, I was faced with patients consumed by extreme reactivity—frantically avoiding foods, creating elaborate routines, and obsessively managing symptoms.
Their forbidden lists grew alarmingly long: sugar, beans, nightshades, cheese, eggs, mushrooms... yet patients yearned for a different way of life. They came to me seeking freedom, and a return to normal life. Simply telling them it’s all in their head (it isn’t) and to start eating goes about as far as a lead balloon.
Having stood in both places, I strongly feel most mainstream nutrition advice is dangerously reactionary. I believe many protocols falsely insist that everyone must follow the same restrictive path. And I believe this has led to a pervasive misunderstanding of what functional medicine nutrition is, and how it is applied in real clinical practice.
From my perspective, the nutrition world divides into two camps:
Reactive Individuals—those trapped in self-imposed meticulous avoidance, clinging to rigid protocols and complex explanations that breed fear rather than healing. You've likely encountered these individuals on Instagram, influencers who passionately attempt to vicariously overcome their own illnesses by imposing their regimens on others.
Long Game Players—perhaps you're a registered dietitian new to community practice, encountering a patient for the first time with life-altering symptoms you and their doctors can't explain or diagnose, following a self-imposed regimen that's causing them to deteriorate. So you do some digging. And that’s where it starts. You start finding a more sustainable path focused on the root cause and rebuilding resilience and hormesis, rather than restriction. You begin to seek ways to help patients escape the prison of barely keeping their symptoms at bay like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.
Functional medicine nutrition is a systems biology, data-driven approach. It isn't about enabling or creating reactivity. It's about healing reactivity by addressing root causes, not imposing unsubstantiated restrictions in a reactionary, fear-based ideology. It is about guiding patients through research-based precision healing methods—advanced testing, medical food supplements, precision elimination-reintroductions (often more liberal than what the patient presents with), mind-body practices, addressing unresolved trauma through an integrative care team-based approach. Functional medicine nutrition allows for a “reconstruction” of health that evolves over time, involving things like gut healing protocols, and the reintroduction of foods as medically feasible. It’s about understanding, adapting, and finding a balance that most reactivity-focused approaches miss entirely.
Case study: A 70-year-old woman with breast cancer, undergoing chemotherapy, develops post C-diff colitis secondary to antibiotics used to treat chemo-induced infections. She presents with persistent diarrhea that is unresponsive to ondansetron, loperamide (Imodium), and other potent antidiarrheal medications prescribed by the gastroenterologist. The patient is losing significant weight, restricted on what she can tolerate, and is at risk for hospitalization due to her condition. Research was identified supporting the use of immunoglobulin supplements (IgA, IgG, IgM) to restore the colonic mucosal lining and calm the immune system. After two months of uncontrolled diarrhea, the patient began the immunoglobulin supplementation. Within two days, the diarrhea resolved. The product was called Mega-mucosa. It is sold OTC for $30 a bottle, and probably saved her life. This example is more of an acute case for those working in the clinical setting. However there are so many scenarios, especially with regard to food sensitivities, chronic inflammation, immune provocation, and gut health that may not frequently be encountered in the hospital setting and skilled nursing facilities, and yet are very real.
So I ask you, my esteemed colleagues: What would you do if faced with patients stuck in a cycle of reactivity? Would you keep digging through white papers and resources until you find the right custom protocol and interventions to provide a solution? If you answer yes, then you are a functionally minded professional.
One of my favorite quotes comes from a kids multivitamin I give my daughter. “Science never sleeps”. It can feel intimidating and even daunting in certain practice arenas to stay abreast of this emerging science. Words of wisdom from Dave Sackett, the father of evidence-based medicine: “Half of what you'll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half—so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own”. Also, “You are in for more fun than you can possibly imagine”. It is amazing to watch people heal, and see joy return to their lives.
As a call to action, I beseech my fellow RDN professionals to embrace the emerging science surrounding functional medicine nutrition. We need to stay curious and open-hearted towards individuals stuck in reactivity cycles. This is the landscape of community private practice in 2025. We need to keep seeking new ways to help our patients. We need to understand that our functional medicine RDN colleagues are not part of the problem. We are not in the reactive camp, but working to heal our patients through the long game.
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