Metabolic Typing: The Key To Improving Metabolism

Metabolic Typing is the science of discovering the fundamental way in which your body produces energy from your food. It is the explanation of why "one person's medicine is another’s poison."

The second principle of Metabolic Typing is that any nutrient can be acidifying or alkalizing, stimulating or inhibiting, depending on your metabolic type. This process varies from person to person.

The benefits of eating according to your metabolic type are not just weight loss. Metabolic Typing is used by healthcare practitioners to help many conditions, including: weight problems, chronic fatigue, allergies, chronic pain, diabetes, heart disease, and rheumatic disease, just to name a few.

The naturopathic doctors of Houston's Natural Health Innovations analyze the following variables to determine your individual metabolic type:

Oxidative Rate

Oxidative rate is a very important dominant variable. This tells us how quickly or slowly we metabolize (or oxidize) food.

Autonomic Nervous System Dominance

The ANS is the part of the nervous system that controls everything that occurs automatically, from blood pressure and blood flow, to breathing and blinking. For instance, you do not tell yourself to breathe or increase your heart rate during excercise. Your body just performs these functions automatically. The extremes of ANS dominance are the Type A personality who is always on the go (sympathetic or adrenaline dominant) versus the Type B personality, laid back person who needs a boost to get them out of bed (parasympathetic or acetyl-choline dominant).

Blood Type

Most people know the importance of blood typing with regards to receiving a blood transfusion. Likewise, foods can cause agglutination because of the presence of lectins on their cell surfaces. Lectins are sugar-binding proteins that agglutinate or clump cells. Foods contain different lectins. Knowing your blood type will help your naturopathic doctors, and you yourself, determine what foods may not be beneficial for you because of lectin incompatibility.

Body Type

Body type refers to where you tend to gain weight. Certain hormone systems are considered dominant depending on your Body Type. The four Body Types are classified as gonad, thyroid, adrenal, or pituitary. This is the reason why some people gain weight in the hips, while others are extremely skinny, but have that little pouch around the middle

Sometimes Body Type can be determined just by appearance:

How many metabolic types are found among people? The number ranges from two to ten types. The most commonly used theory among researchers is that there are three metabolic types: slow, fast, and mixed.

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Nutrition - Insight into Metabolism

Nutrition