Foundational to health is cellular nutrition. A malnourished cell, for any reason, is incapable of properly performing its purpose and becomes dysfunctional. This cellular dysfunction manifests outward as unwanted symptoms and given enough time, unwanted diagnoses. If cellular malnutrition is the problem, providing cellular nutrition is the solution. There do exist a multitude of factors blocking or interfering with nutrition being available within cells. While we ultimately want to eliminate or resolve these blocking factors, the first step to success is to ensure the consumption of nutrient dense food appropriate for your metabolism. The only methodology that I have found that can set the stage and accomplish this is Metabolic Typing®.

Metabolic Typing (MT) is a specialized area of nutritional science allowing for the development of highly effective, individualized, therapeutic approaches for a broad range of chronic degenerative health challenges. 

Research has shown that, due to infinitely variable hereditary influences, people have unique metabolic characteristics, and in turn, highly individualized requirements for food (nutrients). Clinical research has demonstrated that a nutritional regime tailored to a person’s ‘Metabolic Type’ is far more effective than traditional one-size-fits-all nutritional approaches.  

Modern research has demonstrated the link between diet and a number of serious degenerative conditions. Yet, in spite of modern science and research, clinical nutrition has failed to deliver on its ‘one-size-fits-all’ promise. Allow me to offer some proof that this dietary perspective is unlikely.

1. Published June 11, 2020 in Nature Medicine is ‘Human postprandial responses to food and potential for precision nutrition’ ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0934-0 ). This study:  

• Fed 1102 healthy people identical meals for two weeks including a number of twins to track genetic patterns

• Measured metabolic markers including glucose, insulin and triglyceride fats

• Also tracked sleep, exercise, hunger levels and took stool samples to look at gut microbes

What did they discover? The markers measured varied wildly, with up to a ten-fold difference. This means that a healthy diet for one person could be unhealthy for another. Tim Spector at King’s College London said, ‘Everyone reacts differently to identical foods.’

They expected to find a strong genetic component, but actually saw very little even among identical twin subjects. Spector said, “How we respond to a fatty meal has virtually no genetic component at all.’

What was important include gut microbes, circadian rhythms, sleep and exercise. These are all factors you can control. Meal timing also matters. They found that some people metabolize food better in the morning while others saw no difference throughout the day.

2. On May 25, 2017 TIME magazine published a surprisingly good article, ‘The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working.’ ( time.com/4793832/the-weight-loss-trap/ ) You can read the article yourself, it is rather good. Here are a few key points:

• In 2016, the National Institute for Health (NIH) funded almost $1 Billion in obesity research. Kevin Hall, a scientist representing the NIH said this regarding why weight loss can vary so much for people on the same diet plan, ‘It’s the biggest open question in the field, I wish I knew the answer.’

• Frank Sacks, leading weight-loss researcher and professor of CVD prevention at Harvard School of public health said, ‘Some people on a diet program lose 60 lb. and keep it off for two years, and other people follow the same program religiously and they gain 5 lb. If we can figure out why, the potential to help people will be huge.’

3. Within this TIME’s magazine article was the mentioning of a study published in 2015 by Dr. Eran Elinav and Eran Segal, researchers for the personalized Nutrition Project at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. They were interested in discovering the perfect diet that would manage blood sugar as that would contribute to preventing diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome. So what did they discover?

• They monitored the blood sugar levels continuously in 800 participants and found that the bodily response varied greatly. In total they assessed the responses of over 46,000 meals. They also tracked lifestyle factors such as sleep and physical activity along with an analysis of gut microbes.

• Eran Segal said, ‘The huge differences that we found in the rise of blood sugar levels among different people who consumed identical meals highlights why personalized eating choices are more likely to help people stay healthy than universal dietary advice.’

• What they also discovered is that there are no foods which can be definitively associated with elevated blood sugar. For instance, Participant 445 had a blood sugar spike after consuming a banana but no spike after consuming a cookie with he same amount of calories. Participant 644 had exactly the opposite results.

• The idea that there exists a one-size-fits-all approach to managing blood sugar is generally meaningless. There are other factors or perspectives that are lacking or being missed entirely.

Metabolic Typing offers a solution, because it has the capacity to address an individual’s unique biochemical imbalances with a high degree of specificity and precision. It is these biochemical imbalances rooted in cellular dysfunction, that drive chronic disease processes. 

Metabolic Typing is radically different in that it bypasses symptoms and standardized therapeutic approaches. MT has the capacity to resolve chronic health disorders far more effectively addressing them as a causative level. MT achieves this by identifying and resolving imbalances within the handful of regulatory mechanisms (Fundamental Homeostatic Controls - FHCs) that manage the vast number of biochemical reactions continually taking place within the body. 

Two primary FHCs include the Autonomic Nervous System and the Cellular Oxidative System. By keeping these systems in balance, Metabolic Typing can be used to ‘balance total body chemistry,’ and in turn address a wide range of physiological problems all at once.

Interestingly, the very same type of biochemical imbalance that occurs in one of the major FHCs can produce extremely different kinds of symptoms or disease states in different people. For example, an imbalance in the Autonomic System (sympatheticotonia) could produce high blood pressure in one person, tachycardia in another, hypochlorhydria (low cholesterol) in a third, muscle cramps and bone spurs in a fourth, etc. In this case, the same nutritional Metabolic Typing protocol, one that restores sympathetic/parasympathetic balance, would effectively resolve all of these problems, yet not specifically address any of them.

Conversely, two people with identical symptoms or diseases may have completely different FHC imbalances. Two women might present with a given condition, hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol). One women’s condition could be the result of an Autonomic imbalance, while the other women’s condition could be caused by an Oxidative imbalance, with each requiring totally opposite protocols. Specifically, one women could resolve her high cholesterol, a problem in cholesterol metabolism, with a low fat, low protein, high carb diet. But the other’s cholesterol would only be lowered through a low carbohydrate, high protein, high fat diet. Customized nutritional protocols, made possible by Metabolic Typing, have proven to be uniquely effective in clinical settings.

Important to recognize is that there is no real food that is either good or bad for everyone. Whether a food is good or bad, or whether or not a food should be consumed for a certain condition does not depend on some inherent quality of the food, rather on the ultimate effect of the food on the dominant FHC in the given individual’s Metabolic Type. 

When metabolic imbalances occur, they originate from a certain level (mental, emotional, spiritual, environmental, biochemical, etc.). Because any given problem can arise from virtually opposite metabolic/biochemical imbalances in different Metabolic Types (two different Metabolic Types could have the same disorder), and nutrients can behave differently on different levels (calcium can be stimulating at the systemic level and sedating at the cellular level), and any given nutrient may have virtually opposite influences in different Metabolic Types (potassium is alkalinizing in an Autonomic Dominant and acidifying in a Carbo-Oxidative Dominant), without identifying the level of origin of a problem through understanding one’s Metabolic Type, predictable, reliably effective nutrient selection is not possible, and any success of recommended therapeutic protocol is due to chance, not scientific, objective predictability.

Many scientists and clinicians have contributed to the evolution of the what is now known as Metabolic Typing. It is the culmination of over 90 years of pioneering research on the part of many of the 20th Century’s most innovative nutritional investigators, including Francis M. Pottenger, Royal Lee, Melvin Page, Henru Bieler, Emanuel Revici, and William Donal Kelley, to name a few. 

In the late 1970s, a researcher named Bill Wolcott joined this group, and since then he has played a central role in significantly advancing the field through his Healthexcel System of Metabolic Typing.

In 1986, Wolcott founded a company called Healthexcel, an analytical laboratory. Bill developed computer-based ‘metabolic profiles’ for physicians, chiropractors, nutritionists and other health practitioners in the United States and Europe. These Metabolic Profiles enable clinicians to offer clients highly customized diet and supplement programs. Unlike conventional disease specific nutritional therapies, Metabolic Typing has the capacity to build, strengthen and balance all of the body’s adaptive and homeostatic regulatory systems simultaneously. This comprehensive and ‘non-specific’ therapeutic approach is uniquely effective because it addresses health disorders at a deep level, at their point of origin. Metabolic Typing relies upon the body’s own intelligence and facilitates the body’s own innate healing power.

While Metabolic Typing has been utilized and validated by some of the world’s leading physicians, and tested on tens of thousands of individuals, it has never been widely accepted. Like countless other scientific innovators, Metabolic Typing has thus far functioned primarily outside the medical mainstream. Metabolic Typing, like all ‘paradigm shifts,’ represents a significant departure from established belief systems and poses a challenge to those that strongly adhere to conventional approaches to nutrition.

Modern medicine excels in the treatment of acute (emergency) medical conditions such as traumatic injury, childbirth, heart attacks, appendicitis, and other kinds of problems that require surgical intervention or short courses of drugs such as antibiotics. In contrast, the healthcare system is very limited in its ability to offer effective therapies for chronic degenerative disorders, which compromise over 80% of all health problems in the U.S. Over the past few decades, the general public has become increasingly aware of this limitation. While they may not understand the exact reasons why, people are understanding that modern medical science has no ‘magic bullet’ solutions for the majority of human ailments, and that good health, vitality and longevity are largely dependent upon the individual living a healthy lifestyle. 

Millions of Americans are searching out non-traditional health care practitioners. With so many searching for answers, there has been an influx of ‘practitioners’ feeding upon the hopes and dreams of what is a very vulnerable segment of the population. Many practitioners  including functional medical doctors are marketing themselves as being able to manage health challenges directly with less invasive pharmaceutical protocols or they are relying on supplements as a replacement for pharmaceuticals. As noted above, supplementation will never overcome cellular malnutrition much less generally unhealthy lifestyle choices. 

Metabolic Typing is foundational to the health building process. Our poor health is the direct result of serious dietary deficiencies and related metabolic imbalances. These problems persist simply because modern medical science has lacked the clinical technology necessary to evaluate and correct nutritional problems on an individual or case-by-case basis. 

Fortunately, the technology to analyze individual nutritional differences now exists, in the form of Metabolic Typing. Metabolic Typing takes the guesswork and confusion out of nutritional science. Metabolic Typing moves beyond the overwhelming amount of contradictory nutritional information, to identify the highly individualized food and nutrient requirements of each person. Metabolic Typing is an extremely logical, methodology that provides what has been desperately needed: a systematic, repeatable, testable and verifiable means for each person to find an answer to the question: ‘What ‘diet’ is right for me?’

Metabolic Typing® along with my FDN®-based health coaching methodology does not treat disease, but rather seeks to build health and balance body ecology through a non-specific metabolic therapy, properly evaluating, identifying and addressing each person’s biochemical individuality, thus unleashing the body’s natural, inherent and powerful capabilities for restoration, rejuvenation and radiant good health, programmed into every one of the body’s 100 trillion cells, a state far beyond merely being free from symptoms.