Approved for All healthcare & wellness professions

Functional Nutrition

Functional Medicine recognizes and addresses the root cause of many chronic illnesses that can begin and end in the diet. Evidence-based protocols and the most up-to-date science of nutrition are the basis for using food, digestion, and nutritional supplementation to correct many kinds of chronic disease, including weight issues, cardiovascular disease, hormonal problems, and gastrointestinal and autoimmune conditions.

Functional nutrition is more than just general diet and supplementation guidelines for specific conditions. It recognizes individual food sensitivities and genetic and epigenetic factors that might be unique to the individual and not just to the disease or condition itself. 

Clients often seek functional nutritionists because conventional nutrition approaches haven’t worked. Functional nutritionists go beyond generic diet advice and help individuals find precise solutions to optimize their diet for their unique biology.

Health Coaching Foundations

Traditional health coach training is often insufficient for treating clients with complex chronic diseases. We believe health practitioners must be trained with significantly deeper health knowledge than the standard health coaching programs to truly affect chronic disease states.

With that said, relationship building is an essential component of Functional Medicine, and we find basic health coaching tools helpful for practitioners of all levels. We train our practitioners with essential health coaching tools and a simplified coaching process model to engage clients in their healing journey. 

This module is a comprehensive overview of effective, evidence-based health coaching and how to engage clients more deeply in their journey into health.

Digestive Optimization

While eating the right foods is crucial to health, optimizing digestion is equally, if not more important. Health is not just about what we eat. It’s about what we digest, absorb, and assimilate. This module is a deep dive into all the digestive systems, including the stomach, liver, pancreas, small intestine, and large intestine, and how they interact to move nutrients throughout the body.

Digestive optimization is influenced by myriad lifestyle factors that often go overlooked, including stress levels, hydration, digestive motility, intestinal wall integrity, and gut biome. As functional practitioners, we help educate our clients about the nuances of digestion and how to investigate lifestyle patterns that perpetuate a poor digestive process. 

The gut microbiome is the new frontier of Medicine, and its depth and influence are hard to fathom. We carry 39 trillion microorganisms in the gut, which outnumber human cells by about 10 to one. The gut biome is truly an ecosystem, interconnected to almost every aspect of our health, just as soil quality dictates the health of plants that grow on our planet. The gut biome is the missing link in so many “mysterious” cases we see in the clinic. 

The microbiome gives us an entirely new lens to see digestion. The nutrients you eat are not necessarily what gets sent into your blood and absorbed into your body. We are in a renaissance of scientific discovery around the microbiome, and practitioners must have deep knowledge and confidence in this subject.

Cellular vs. Organ Detoxification

The average person in the US has thousands of chemicals in their body that didn’t exist 100 years ago. We’ll study how this “toxic burden” is one of the underlying causes of chronic disease and how to utilize advanced, evidence-based detox protocols.

Environmental Chemicals in our food, water, air, cosmetics, furniture, homes, and workplaces are not the only things that need to be eliminated from the body. In the ordinary course of cellular life, metabolic wastes can build up in the tissues and the metabolic wastes from an unhealthy gut microbiome.

All these chemicals can be the root cause or the complicating factors to inflammation, pain, fatigue, and/or immune and hormone dysfunction. Detoxification processes occur at the cellular, tissue, and organ levels and require a clear understanding of the different biochemical and organ system processes.

Nervous System Attunement

The nervous system is one of the primary “controlling systems” of the body, responsible for transmitting signals between different parts of the body, coordinating their activities, and maintaining homeostasis. Proper communication and coordination are crucial for the body to function optimally.

The role of the autonomic system is now recognized as having a dominant effect on the development of disease and its role in mitigating healing. The role of the autonomic nervous system has a profound impact on how well we heal, repair, detox, fight infection, regulate our hormones, weight, digest, and balance our mood and mental states. This course will help you understand the profound role this aspect of the nervous system plays in heal and healing. You’ll discover environmental and lifestyle factors that dysregulate the nervous system. You’ll also learn practical mind-body tools to quickly and efficiently bring the nervous system back into optimal attunement.

Hormonal Optimization

Blood, Lymph & Chi

Proper blood circulation is vital for delivering oxygen and nutrients to all tissues and organs, supporting their function, and promoting overall health. The blood system carries nutrients absorbed from the digestive system to the cells for energy production, growth, and repair. Functional Medicine recognizes the importance of healthy blood flow and addresses factors that may impede circulation, such as inflammation, oxidative stress, and lifestyle choices.

Blood plays a central role in regulating inflammation and oxidative stress, which are underlying factors in various chronic diseases. Functional Medicine recognizes the importance of balancing these processes. It addresses lifestyle factors, nutrition, and stress management to minimize inflammation and oxidative stress, promoting overall health and reducing the risk of chronic conditions.

The lymph system removes metabolic waste products by transporting them to organs like the lungs and kidneys for elimination. Functional Medicine focuses on supporting the optimal movement and elimination of toxins through the lymph system to reduce overall toxic load.

Clinical Practice

This module is a crash course on developing an effective clinical process for delivering Functional Medicine to real-world clients. 

The average primary care doctor sees 20.8 patients a day for an average of 18 minutes. This clinical environment is fundamentally unsuitable for treating chronic diseases and needs to be rethought from the ground up. This transition can be challenging for practitioners trained in a conventional clinical model. This module is about helping practitioners develop an effective clinical process that is designed to build deeper relationships with clients helping them truly approach optimal health. 

You’ll learn to handle difficult client cases when dealing with complex, co-existing conditions. You’ll also learn a process model for how to structure care to help meet clients where they are.

Functional Medicine Testing

This module is a deep dive into utilizing Functional Medicine testing. The availability of advanced testing has increased significantly, and Functional Medicine practitioners need to be well-versed in the testing landscape. 

You’ll learn testing strategies from senior clinicians and how to select tests and integrate the data to create precise, individualized health plans for clients.

There are hundreds of biomarkers to test for and dozens of labs that range in cost and efficacy. Our instructors use their decades of experience navigating the testing landscape to help you understand the best strategies for approaching testing.

While tests do not give a complete picture of someone’s health, they offer clients access to precision in their care, which is sorely lacking in the health and wellness landscape.

Autoimmune Spectrum

50 million Americans have an autoimmune condition, one of the fastest-growing chronic diseases. Conventional Medicine tells us this is purely a genetic process. However, Autoimmunity has risen 300% since 1960, suggesting it’s more influenced by lifestyle than genetics.

Autoimmune conditions can be complex and present as a confusing set of seemingly disconnected symptoms. These issues often fall between the cracks of conventional care, creating disconnected care that offers little help to patients. 

Functional Medicine has a completely different approach to Autoimmune, which identifies and addresses its root causes. Autoimmunity is not a black-and-white genetic diagnosis. From the Functional Medicine perspective, Autoimmunity presents as a spectrum. The autoimmune spectrum is correlated with the levels and ratios of inflammatory T-cells in the blood. Individuals can move up and down this spectrum, depending on their overall levels of inflammation. This is why symptoms of autoimmune seem to disappear and reappear mysteriously. 

Autoimmune conditions affect women disproportionally and often co-occur with other chronic health issues. As a Functional Medicine practitioner, you must deal with autoimmune symptoms in your practice. This module is about developing competence in understanding the underlying physiological processes which create Autoimmunity, and how to reverse it by addressing those root causes.

Cardiometabolic Disease

In the context of Functional Medicine, cardiometabolic issues refer to a cluster of conditions that involve both cardiovascular (heart and blood vessels) and metabolic (glucose and lipid metabolism) dysfunctions. Cardiometabolic issues often include conditions such as obesity, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), dyslipidemia (abnormal lipid profiles), and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Functional Medicine recognizes that these conditions are interconnected and share common underlying factors, such as poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, chronic inflammation, hormonal imbalances, genetic predispositions, environmental factors, and stress. Rather than viewing each condition in isolation, Functional Medicine takes a comprehensive approach to address the root causes and connections between these cardiometabolic issues.

Functional Medicine doctors focus on identifying and addressing the underlying imbalances and dysfunctions contributing to the development and progression of cardiometabolic conditions. They consider factors such as insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative stress, hormonal imbalances (e.g., cortisol, thyroid hormones, sex hormones), gut health, nutrient deficiencies, and lifestyle factors (e.g., diet, physical activity, sleep, stress management) when developing treatment plans.

The goal of Functional Medicine in managing cardiometabolic issues is to restore balance and optimize the overall function of the body systems involved. This may involve personalized dietary and lifestyle interventions, targeted nutritional supplementation, stress management techniques, exercise recommendations, sleep optimization, and addressing other underlying factors specific to each individual.

By addressing the root causes and interconnected nature of cardiometabolic issues, functional Medicine aims to improve metabolic health, support cardiovascular function, and reduce the risk of associated complications such as heart disease, stroke, and other related conditions.

Hormonal Conditions

Hormonal dysregulation is increasingly common and is finally being acknowledged as a root cause of many “mysterious” health issues. One study suggests nearly 1/2 of women suffer from hormone issues.

Your body uses hormones for nearly everything. Hormones fluctuate naturally throughout the month and also as we age. Conventional Medicine considers hormone issues “incurable.” However, that can be misleading. Lifestyle changes can dramatically affect our hormones, and it’s more accurate to say hormone issues are not reversible through medication.

Advances in testing have made it easier to get a precise insight into what’s going wrong. While hormones are complex, we help practitioners drill down to the root causes of hormone dysregulation.

Digestive Disease

Digestive imbalances co-occur with almost every major chronic disease. Digestive issues are linked to Autoimmunity, allergies, hormone issues, cancer, and even mental health issues like autism and depression. In this module, we’ll cover the pathophysiology of the most common digestive issues and how to treat them. This includes: 

• IBS/IBD & Crohn’s Disease
• Acid Reflux / Gerd
• SIBO & Dysbiosis
• Constipation, Diarrhea, and Bloating
• Leaky Gut

Digestive issues can also cause inflammation issues. Even if you have the healthiest diet, digestive problems can cause your body to process food to create inflammation. Addressing digestive issues is essential to reversing any health issue.

There’s typically not a single fix for digestive issues. It involves understanding digestion in depth and gradually reducing irritations. We help educate our clients on the nuances of digestion, treating it as a subject of inquiry and gradual optimization.