Clinical Nutritionist/Nutritional Therapy, and Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, Lorna Ryan, is joining us for Nutrition and Hydration Week. Today’s topic is Nutrition in EDS and HSD!
The following information should not constitute medical advice, dietary advice, or treatment. Individuals should consult a healthcare professional before making changes to their nutritional plan.
“I’m asked a lot in my clinic, what nutritional plan should you follow with EDS or HSD? What should I eat? What is proven to help EDS or HSD? I’m here to say actually that there’s no established diet recommended for EDS or HSD. There is research going on, and as part of the Diet and Nutrition Working Group of The International Consortium, we’re very committed to research and seeing if we can get to a place of evidence for a diet protocol or knowing that certain vitamins are going to help you.
“What we do know is that dietary recommendations should be personalized because every single person in the population is different from one another. Let alone, if you have EDS or HSD. Yes, you might have the same diagnosed condition as somebody else but how symptoms present for you might be different. Therefore, what you need to consider nutritionally and dietary may need to be personalized just to you.
“It’s important to know if you do have EDS or HSD and you have some health concerns with that. Are there any dietary changes are best made under clinical supervision? This is because your medical team or your nutritionists and dieticians will know you and they’ll be able to monitor how you respond to certain dietary changes and make sure that,
- a) that they’re appropriate
and;
- b) that they’re safe for you.
“No single diet type of food or fad will improve a person’s health. That goes for everybody with an EDS or HSD too. There is no certain type of protocol with umpteen supplements that we can say is going to work for you. What we do know is that making dietary choices to optimize your nutritional status and health will benefit you and support the functions that your body is doing every day.
“Appropriate nutrition is a long game, not a daily sprint. This is important to understand when we’re talking about the basics of nutrition for EDS or HSD. It’s not that what you eat Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is going to make you feel super duper good on Saturday and Sunday. It’s from day to day, week to week, month to month. Then over the course of six months, you can look back and hopefully see that you’ve improved some of your symptoms.”
Tomorrow, we’re going to look at what you can eat for the basics of daily life. Watch Lorna’s talk on nutrition and hydration now, in full, here.
Lorna Ryan is a Clinical Nutritionist/Nutritional Therapy, and Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner who has a clinical practice based in London, UK, and online internationally. Lorna is the Chair of the Diet and Nutrition Working Group of the International Consortium on the Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes (EDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders.
