Our Vision

......is to provide high quality education and training in nutritional therapy and science so that graduates are able to provide professional nutrition support for individuals, organisations and communities in a manner that honours the views of clients, other health professionals and relevant agencies in the development of individualised support, corporate and community based projects.

The Centre seeks to:

• Provide a supportive learning environment for students whatever their age, background, or mode of attendance to enable students to achieve their potential and maximize on their prior learning;
• Raise the profile of the nutrition profession both at national and international level;
• Help develop the published clinical evidence base for nutritional therapy in collaboration with academic partners;
• Raise awareness of the Functional Medicine model in clinical practice and public health;
• Seek integration of nutritional therapy and science with mainstream healthcare and industry;
• Provide a forum for the nutrition professionals to share experiences and expertise;
• Provide continuing professional development for nutrition professionals and other health professionals through postgraduate work based learning study;
• Promote lifelong learning and ongoing education opportunities for graduates and staff;
• Provide a resource for local health professionals and the public seeking information about nutrition and health and nutrition clinic services

Our Philosophy…

We believe that what you eat combined with where you live and how you think, drink, breathe, move, work and play, underpins the expression of health or illness.

We believe that the genes that we inherit from our parents are important determinants of health and illness. However, we believe that many chronic illnesses that have been shown to have a genetic basis are mostly triggered by diet and lifestyle choices.

Already personalised healthcare is becoming possible for many people at risk of certain chronic illnesses based on understanding our genetic inheritance, diet and lifestyle. As genetic research continues to develop this field of preventative healthcare should expand.

Our approach to helping individuals towards a state of health is to:

• Identify their beliefs and attitudes about health
• Identify their health goals
• Identify, through detailed consultation, events in their life that might have contributed to a state of ill health or just feeling below par; and not just what has occurred immediately prior to a health problem. This would include long term diet patterns, environmental exposures, emotional and physical stressors.
• Explain and negotiate a way forward, taking into account their view of the world and ability to implement and sustain diet and lifestyle changes.
• Review and modify recommendations in context of their progress and preferences.

Our understanding of the scientific data and clinical experience also leads us to conclude that:

• Coaching clients to make sustainable change is as important, if not more so, than nutritional recommendations given.
• Changing diet and lifestyle are the most important interventions
• It is not easy for people to obtain all the nutrients they need for good health from food alone.
• Nutritional products can be supportive as an adjunct to a good diet.
• Nutritional products should be used with care, and are capable of causing harm if used inappropriately and out of context.
• Laboratory assessment is invaluable in:
o Understanding unique nutritional requirements, thus helping to tailor individual nutritional programmes
o Monitoring client progress
• Treating the underlying cause of ill-health is a better approach to the prevention and management of chronic illness and that this requires an individualised approach

At CNELM, our educational approach to nutritional therapy is functional medicine (FM): a medical paradigm emanating from the Institute for Functional Medicine in the US that aims to incorporate complexity, bio-individuality and clinical evidence to produce a revolution in 21st century healthcare.

For more information on the functional model please visit the Institute of Functional Medicines website - http://www.functionalmedicine.org/

If you share our philosophy then you should find that studying with us is right for you.

Research Centre....

For nutritional therapy to mature as a clinical discipline it must embrace evidence based medicine (EBM). CNELM has a deep commitment to the development of evidence based nutritional therapy, and aims to overcome the current limitations of randomised control trials (RCTs) by using a class of advanced statistical techniques known as statistical machine learning (SML): these are at the cutting edge of how computer scientists deal with non-linear data.

SML techniques are new, many of the best performing have only been developed over the last 15-20 years; their young age reflects the rapid growth in computer power that was required to make the usable. They have already had considerable uptake within the biological and medical sciences, which also have to deal with non-linear data and the limitations of RCTs.

Nutritional therapy is a form of functional medicine: an approach to medicine that treats each patient uniquely and addresses their biochemical imbalances through dietary and lifestyle changes and supplementation as appropriate. Functional medicine considers how these changes work together, and necessarily alters many interacting variables. RCTs, the current gold standard of EBM provide evidence about how one - or at most a few - variables affect an individual, and it is this limitation that the more advances techniques of SML overcome.

Much of biology over the last century has focused on identifying the individual components of biological systems; however increased computer power has now made it possible to build simulations to study how these parts interact: this field is known as systems biology. Functional medicine is a systems biology approach to medicine, and as such, it makes perfect sense to use many of the techniques used in systems biology when studying the efficacy of functional medicine and nutritional therapy.

At CNELM our aim is to build a research centre, with active postdoctoral, PhD and MSc researchers focusing on this integrated approach to evidence based functional medicine. However, our aim is also to build bridges between academic communities: bringing together researchers in SML and systems biology with practitioners in nutritional therapy and functional medicine. This, we hope, will facilitate a revolution in healthcare that will bring nutritional therapy and functional medicine squarely into the mainstream.

The Nutrition Practitioner journal....

Founding Editor: Kate Neil

The Nutrition Practitioner professional journal was first published in 1999 and is to the best of our knowledge the ony journal in the UK that focuses only on the science and art of nutrition to support nutritional therapy practice. The journal is a substantial publication and is published three times a year.

Graduates of nutritional therapy courses are the main subscribers as are students from the various training colleges. Doctors and other health and education professionals interested in nutritional therapy also subscribe. Interested and informed members of the public find this journal of great value.

You can visit www.nutprac.com to review some example articles. You can download a subscription form.