What Is Functional Nutrition, Actually?

Written by Molly Ostrander, MS, RD, LD, IFNCP

I get asked this question all the time; usually right after someone tells me about the three different diets, two supplements, and one elimination protocol they tried before landing in my inbox. So let's clear it up.

Functional nutrition is the practice of looking at your body as one connected system instead of a collection of separate symptoms. Bloating isn't always just a gut issue. Fatigue isn't always just a sign that "you need more sleep." 

Your period and hormones, digestion, energy, mood, skin, and metabolism–all of these are talking to the same nervous system, hormones and gut lining in your body. 

Rather than focusing on relieving a symptom, functional nutrition asks an important question: Why is this happening in the first place? 

For example, if you visit your healthcare provider because you are experiencing bloating, you may be advised to take an antacid, or told to eliminate certain foods like gluten, or perhaps told to add fiber and see what happens. These strategies could absolutely be appropriate, but this approach could be incomplete. 

A functional nutrition approach looks deeper and asks what is actually driving the bloating. 

• Is it low stomach acid? 

• An overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine?

• Is chronic stress keeping your nervous system in ‘fight-or-flight’ mode so digestion never gets the green light? 

• Are blood sugar swings influencing gut motility? 

  
  

Instead of stopping at symptom management, functional nutrition works to understand the factors that are driving the symptom. 

A functional dietitian is looking at your sleep, stress and mental health, movement, relationships, health history, and yes, your food. Your body doesn't compartmentalize the way our healthcare system often has to. A gut protocol that ignores the fact that you're not sleeping and running on cortisol fumes isn't going to hold.

Digestion, hormones, metabolism and mental health all affect each other. Sustainable, lasting improvements often require looking at the whole picture. 

Functional Nutrition & Women’s Health 

At Potomac Nutrition, we frequently work with women who are struggling with changes in their weight or weight distribution (i.e. more weight around the belly or hips). 

Women often report that as they age or change seasons in life, what used to work in their 20s or 30s to maintain weight and energy is no longer working. 

These concerns are especially common during perimenopause and menopause, when hormonal changes can influence metabolism, body composition, sleep, appetite, insulin sensitivity and the gut microbiome (and we can experience this too, as dietitians!).

The gut, hormone, and energy symptoms that show up in your late 30s through 40s are frequently dismissed as "just aging" or "just stress," when there's usually a very identifiable, very fixable mechanism behind them. Estrogen shifts change your gut motility and microbiome composition. That's biochemistry, plain and simple. 

Functional nutrition helps to identify patterns, prioritize interventions and create a personalized plan based on what is happening in your body and not what worked for someone else. 

So what does functional nutrition look like?

Rather than jumping from one diet to the next, functional nutrition encourages you to: 

• Stop treating your symptoms like a whack-a-mole game and start asking what's connecting them

• Get curious about root cause before you commit to another restrictive diet

• Use appropriate testing to guide decisions instead of guessing your way through another elimination round

• Look at the whole picture: sleep, stress, hormones, movement, gut health, and nutrition

  
  

The goal is doing the right things, in the right order, based on what's actually happening in your body instead of what worked for someone else's. 

Functional nutrition can do this for you! Improve your health, wellbeing, and get to the bottom of concerns like weight, energy, hormone shifts, or just confusion regarding meals and planning them. 

Molly Ostrander, our newest dietitian, is an Integrative and Functional Nutrition Certified Practitioner (IFNCP) specializing in women’s health. She accepts most major insurance plans and is passionate about helping women better understand what their bodies are trying to tell them.

 If this article resonated with you, we’d love to help. Contact Potomac Nutrition or Molly directly to learn more about working with her.