What is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP)?

Nutritional Therapy Practitioners are paraprofessionals who use holistic nutrition to help their clients improve the foundation of their overall health.

FNTPs have the additional letter F because they use a functional approach.

FNTPS can:

1.     Assess the unique needs of a client, based on their current symptoms and health goals.

2.     Craft a strategy to make a healthier lifestyle attainable and doable for them. This way even tiny lifestyle changes can yield great rewards, because the changes are strategically picked.

Individualized recommendations are the most efficient way to achieve results as they take into account one’s resources, time, and personal preferences.

A perfect nutritional plan is completely useless unless it can be put into practice and maintained! This is why a one size fits all approach can lead to frustration and stalling as well as feelings of shame and inadequacy.

FNTPs understand this and this is why they create a plan that is tailored to where the person is at through their advice they try and indicate some achievable steps to improve one’s lifestyle and reach one’s goals.

Another great thing about FNTPs is embedded in their first letter, F stands for Functional, to describe the importance of their functional approach. Functional nutrition represents a shift from only focusing on anatomical structure, and recognizing that a structure can look fine to the naked eye, while not functioning correctly or working as well as it could. Moreover, a functional approach translates into focusing on the whole system and looking for the root cause of an issue.

This way of working allows FNTPs to craft personalized recommendations that take the whole body and its surroundings into account while addressing the roots of one’s symptoms. In practice, this results in much more than just dietary advice, as FNTPs can provide strategies to improve one’s sleep, movement and manage stress, and much more.  

APA references

Firth, Joseph; Gangwisch, James E; Borisini, Alessandra; Wootton, Robyn E; Mayer, Emeran A (2020). Food and mood: how do diet and nutrition affect mental wellbeing?. BMJ, (), m2382–. doi:10.1136/bmj.m2382

Pappas, Apostolos; Liakou, Aikaterini; Zouboulis, Christos C.  (2016). Nutrition and skin. Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders, 17(3), 443–448.         doi:10.1007/s11154-016-9374-z   

Grindel CG. Fatigue and nutrition. Medsurg Nursing : Official Journal of the Academy of Medical-surgical Nurses. 1994 Dec;3(6):475-81, 499. PMID: 7874210.

Hoolihan, L. E. (2003). Individualization of Nutrition Recommendations and Food Choices. Nutrition Today, 38(6), 225–231. doi:10.1097/00017285-200311000-00008