HEALTHY LIFE AND NUTRITION
Hello everyone !
I am very glad to present you this new section dedicated to health and wellness, especially linked to nutrition.
Through the articles, we will discuss the different ways that nutrition offers us to maintain or regain excellent health, to prevent many diseases, to have more energy, to regain good mood, or simply to lose a few pounds.
In this first article, I would like to introduce our company and tell you more about our health business that we are running here in Pattaya for more than 10 years. Then we will address a topic that has the wind in its sails, nutritional medicine.

Our story at a glance
In 2008, my wife Manee and I founded the Nutrition Club, a health concept that I imported from Belgium where I was active in the food supplement industry since 1992.
We have started to help many expats by offering nutritional check-up and diet plans with the use of food supplements. Members of various associations of Pattaya already know us very well thanks to our weekly presence at the Pattaya Expat Club for nearly 10 years, our conferences and our events organized over the years. Since 2012, we started to manufacture some products such as Kefir drinks and yogurts, then gradually we expanded our range and opened a health products shop. Today the Nutrition Club became the Pattaya Health Club and we developed our own brand, HealtHut. We currently offer more than one hundred health products, mainly imported from Europe and we manufacture more than ten “homemade” items. All products are natural, almost all organic, so they are pesticide-free, preservative-free, gluten-free, and almost all vegetarians. In parallel, we continue our coaching activities and specific nutrition plans such as detox programs, weight control, and balanced nutrition for adults and children, etc. All these services and natural products fit perfectly into the concept of nutritional medicine, itself prescribed by nutritionists, naturopaths and doctors who practice so-called functional medicine.

Nutritional Medicine
Nutritional Medicine is a part of the alternative medicine family. The Australian Naturopathic Practitioners Association (ANPA) describes it as “a holistic approach to the interactions between nutrition and the environment on human health.” The main idea is when the body is supplied with the correct balance of foods, vitamins and minerals we remain healthy. But to remain healthy we need to take in consideration the impact of external environmental factors, such as the exposure to toxicity from heavy metals, fertilizers, pesticides, synthetic chemicals including pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. In addition, food additives, flavourings and colourings or particular foods themselves may lead to sensitivities, allergies and intolerances. Chronic parasitic, fungal, bacterial and viral infections can disturb our internal environment. Poor sleep and psycho-social stresses also affect and our ability to cope effectively and impact on our health.
Living an optimally healthy lifestyle provides the best conditions for the body to both prevent and heal from disease states. Improving our diet by eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains and drinking plenty of filtered water is a good start. Foods may be depleted in antioxidants, vitamins and minerals as a result of depletion in our soils, green harvesting and cold storage and all too often we consume foods that are highly processed and overcooked or of poor quality and little nutritional value. Our bodies are then affronted daily by excessive production of free radicals caused by our polluted environment and stressful lifestyles. As a result oxidative stress has now been shown to be the root cause of over 70 chronic degenerative diseases.

Nutrition plays an important role in virtually every medical condition. It follows that correcting nutritional imbalances is fundamental to the prevention and treatment of many common conditions.
Source: https://anpa.asn.au/nutritional-medicine/

Pascal DEVILLE
HealtHut Managing Director