My Nutrition Studies

As many of you know, in the fall I enrolled in the Bauman College Holistic Nutritionist Certification program. I’ve been learning loads of interesting, valuable, and applicable things about health and how our bodies work. Since the course is distance learning, I can go at my own pace. You might imagine that means slow and easy; but I have a habit of devouring information, so my “own pace” is more of the swiftly and intensely variety. I appreciate being able to move along quickly, not being held back while waiting for other students to catch up with me.

I have discovered in the course of my studies that the founder of Bauman College, Ed Bauman, has a sensibility much in sync with my own. Although he delivers all the audio lectures that I have “attended” in my distance learning, and although I have learned a great deal about him through the lectures, he knows nothing about me. We have never met. Perhaps I will visit the Bauman College campus in nearby Penngrove one day and meet him in person.

I want to share some basics about the Bauman approach, called Eating for Health (E4H). The E4H Model is not a diet but a way of life. Bauman describes E4H as “a relationship to food based on consciousness, gratitude, sound science, and positive energy.” E4H stresses that the most nutritious food is seasonal, organic and whole, unadulterated by toxins, and locally grown. E4H encourages consumption of a diversity of foods from seven food groups daily. Take a look at the E4H Model, provided below. It doesn’t look like the Food Pyramid or My Plate or any of the standard “food group” models we are accustomed to seeing.

Notice what Bauman refers to as booster foods, which I believe are an innovative feature of the E4H Model. When consistently added to the diet, booster foods increase energy, detoxify, and reduce inflammation. These regenerative foods enhance the healing of tissue damaged by toxicity (caused by environmental contaminants, stress, and trauma) as well as malnutrition (caused by previous poor eating habits including eating poor quality food).

The specific constellation of food eaten following the E4H roadmap will look different for each individual person. The individualization inherent in the application of the E4H Model is my favorite aspect of this approach to nutrition. What we eat and how we eat is personal and must correspond with our own unique physiology, culture, taste, and spirit. E4H would be used to improve health through transformation of food choices, eating habits, and philosophy about nourishment and wellbeing. From this glimpse into my course, perhaps you can see why I am so excited about my studies and the new directions opening up before me.