Andrea Nakayama’s a functional medicine nutritionist and the owner and founder of the Functional Nutrition Alliance.
In April of 2000, Andrea’s husband, Isamu, was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor.
Andrea was seven weeks pregnant with their first and only child at the time.
Isamu was given about six months to live. Andrea kicked into high gear, studying how diet and lifestyle modifications might extend his life.
How does blood sugar levels affect tumor cells? What’s the connection between the gut and the brain?
There was so much to research and she was not a practitioner at the time so the learning curve was steep.
But by doing everything they could on their end, in addition to chemo and surgery, Isamu outlived his prognosis by two years.
That meant he got to cherish a full year and a half with their son, Gilbert.
It was an amazing, beautiful, rich time. Also a sad, devastating, transformative time, depending on the moment.
What broke Andrea’s heart was seeing her beloved husband treated like a brain tumor, like a walking dead man, instead of the man she knew him to be.
That was not okay for her. She decided: people are not their diagnoses. We cannot treat them like their diagnoses.
It’s the role of the functional clinician to ask why. To figure out what’s going on in the body.
And then use that science and that understanding to think through what the most appropriate recommendations are for each individual.
Andrea likes to say that there’s an ART to the functional nutrition piece. As in Assess, Recommend, Track.
Notice she didn’t mention diagnose, prescribe, or treat.
When you think functionally, you’re looking at the whole person: genetics, triggering events, mediators, sleep, stress, exercise, hydration, diet, relationships.
This way, you can fix the soil that affects the roots from which any sort of disease or dysfunction is eventually expressed.
Rather than, ya know, just trying to spray chemicals on a wilted leaf. Like, it’s a little late at that point.
Another pillar to this approach is elevating the patient to partner with you on their therapeutic outcome.
You do this through education.
They need to know how cooking their food affects their digestion. And what even is digestion and why does it matter? And what’s the deal with bloating? And on and on, so they can make the right choices going forward.
The third component is to work in systems.
Biologically speaking, everything is interconnected. The brain is connected to the gut. Hormones are connected to detoxification. Et cetera.
And what’s connected in the body is also connected to the patient’s history.
So when you’re recommending diet and lifestyle modifications, they need to pay heed to that spiderweb of connections.
Functional nutrition is ideal for people who have signs and symptoms but aren’t getting better.
They need some extra digging, some extra support.
Maybe they have crippling joint pain or constipation or fatigue or brain fog, and they’ve tried this and they’ve tried that, but it’s just not going away.
Full Body Systems, then, is Andrea’s 10-month online immersion program that provides everything you need to become the last stop on your client’s health journey.
- Course
- Training
- Mentorship
- A certification once you graduate
Cost is $5,950. Or you can do 10 monthly payments of $645.
Assuming that’s not an issue, my only hesitation is that they don’t provide instruction on how to market and sell your services.
It’s great to acquire this new skillset, but can you turn it into a profitable business? That’s the question.