Functional Nutrition Alliance’s founder Andrea Nakayama shares that we’re missing an important piece in the healing puzzle. It isn’t just the pills, the protocols, or “that all-knowing practitioner”. One should also consider purpose. Among the benefits of knowing the latter includes reduced risk of dementia, inflammation, and sleep problems. Alright, but what’s up with the comment about all-knowing practitioners? Sounds like she’s low-key dissing MDs, which is bold knowing the controversies that surrounds her “medical” practice. Review continues below.
NEXT: Compare This To Functional Medicine
But before I spill the tea about these controversies, here’s an overview on her Functional Nutrition Alliance program first. At its core, the program provides training in both the art of functional medicine and nutrition. They market this practice as providing “personalized” treatment, whether it’s making a uniquely targeted diet and/or lifestyle modifications.
Says they’re accredited by American Association of Drugless Practitioners (AADP) and American Association of Natural Wellness Practitioners (AANWP), with the former commonly referenced as something used by diploma mills to make their dubious quasi-degrees look legit. With that said, I don’t think both associations are federally recognized.
Anyways, they offer two certification training in Full Body Systems (FBS) and Functional Nutrition & Lifestyle Practitioner (FNLP). The first one mentioned is their signature 10-month online nutrition training where you’ll be Functional Nutrition Alliance certified functional nutrition counselor.
The curriculum covers seven intensives as follows: Digestive, immune, urinary, cardio, endocrine, neuro, and reproductive intensive. You’ll learn it through twenty-six weekly audio classes, fifteen live sixty-minute Q & A sessions, and nine two-hour client cases sessions. Access to quizzes and a message board are also available. This offer of Functional Nutrition Alliance costs one payment of $5,950 or ten monthly payments of $645 each.
Meanwhile, the other offer in FNLP is a four-month advanced training course for graduates of Full Body Systems. Instead of intensives, the live weekly class will now be based on rotating program topics. They’ll also provide an avenue for their students to foster partnership with other practitioners.
The price of FNLP is one payment of $3,347 or three-monthly payments of $1,231 each. Both prices are exclusive of the $150 non-refundable application fee. This means they’ll keep the latter fee regardless of if you’re accepted in the program or not.
I’ll give Functional Nutrition Alliance credit on how they made their training student friendly. There’s a reason the reviews outside their website are also praising their teaching methods [and not only gushing about the misinformed curriculum]. Essentially, they’re doing a good job in teaching bad practice. Enough reason for me to not recommend them.
So, here’s the tea: Functional Medicine & Nutrition is bad practice. It’s no different to hypnotherapy, transformation therapy, and all the pseudoscience bull. They posed as evidence-based practice, even if they’re not. They do this by spamming science-y sounding terms in their copy and providing “research” that are reports that won’t qualify as scientific.
Their concept of evidence is inherently flawed. For instance, they once took credit of curing someone’s cancer [an 80-year old woman who is already on her way to healing due to conventional medicine] by injecting ninety-seven IV doses of vitamin C, pushing a rigid diet and buncha supplements [including oral vitamin C on top of those doses!], and doing hundreds of non-standard lab tests. Quackity quack, what in the placebo f*ck?
With all the untested pills and tests they shill for profit, they’re just as greedy as the “big pharmas” they usually criticize. If not that, they’ll push extreme detoxification, which is equally awful. With the latter, they’re presenting familiar foods as poison without substantial evidence to back them up. No wonder most of their clients developed EDs, gosh.
While their idea of considering a patient’s history and finding the underlying cause of health issues seems reasonable, it’s not necessarily a groundbreaking concept. Conventional medicine does that too, without all these aestheticized tree diagrams and “fixing the soil” analogy of functional medicine.
There are valid critiques towards conventional medicine like practitioners’ lack of empathy and consideration towards a patient’s feeling in practice. While this makes the “personalized” approach of functional medicine and nutrition sound enticing, don’t be fooled. The critiques are more of a call for conventional medicine peeps to do better, and not to have their quack equivalents take over and do much worse.
