Traditionally, nutritional advice tends to make certain foods "wrong" and can set up an adversarial relationship between you and your food, by narrowing your choices. At the Balancing Center, we think of food as a delight and a pleasure, and we hope to kindle your appreciation for a broader cuisine, rather than recommending limitations.

We have a very simple suggestion about what to eat: Eat what you enjoy. And, be sure you get enough cholesterol, enough salt, and enough fats and essential oils. While it is true that toxins can accumulate in fats, if the fats you eat are free from pesticides, hormones and antibiotics, they are nurturing, healthy, and safe.

When we talk about food with you, we start with what you like. Then we figure out if there is an allergic/addictive issue, or an emotional situation that may be causing you to choose foods that aren't useful. If so, together we may be able to change the basis for your responses, so that you will feel naturally drawn toward more appropriate choices.

We might suggest a mineral or a vitamin, or release a toxin that is interfering with your metabolic process. If your vitamins and minerals are not being utilized correctly for some reason, that could interfere with your absorption of fats, proteins, or carbohydrate foods.Your body-consciousness will tell you whether certain nutrients are being absorbed, and if some of them are not, it can guide you to a solution.

If you are ill, or have special dietary needs, we may be able to recommend a temporary dietary regime, perhaps juicing fresh vegetables, and putting specific emphasis on foods that would facilitate your healing. Eventually you could include more choices.

Sometimes there is an emotional reason for rejecting specific nutrients, even when they are being adequately supplied. On the other hand, you may just be lacking a few enzymes, or need to produce more acid, or more bile. We can coax your body to produce these substances more abundantly, in order to bring your digestive process into harmony.

Often people who experience heartburn, or acid reflux, as though they had too much acid, really just need to neutralize their acid with bicarbonate from the pancreas. As soon as the pancreas can be persuaded to release adequate bicarbonate, for many people the discomfort lightens up, and the digestive sequence can proceed smoothly from the acidic phase to the alkaline phase.

Diverse personal dietary preferences work perfectly as long as the body receives a full spectrum of minerals, B-vitamins, and adequate oils to carry the oil-soluble vitamins. Whatever you select as your favorite cuisine, ideally you will want to include fresh greens, root vegetables, grains, legumes, and a good source of protein. Our major concern, at the Balancing Center, is that your food is organically grown, is free from MSG and aspartame, and that your water does not contain fluoride, chloramine, lead, or other contaminants.

We can help you to regulate many internal systems by suggesting nutritional supplements such as trace minerals, B-vitamins, or detoxifiers. In this way we can facilitate the synthesis of some of the internally generated substances that you need, and clear away toxic interference.

As an example, below is a description of how we might facilitate a few of the neurotransmitters in your brain that regulate your mood and your clarity of thought.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that retrieves memory, and modifies and refines the accuracy of muscle movement. If your supply is less than optimal, it might mean that your folic acid is not converting to tetrahydrofolic, because that is required for the amino acid tyrosine to turn into dopamine. If your dopamine reads as excessive due to high copper, we would suggest increasing your zinc, molybdenum and manganese intake, to drive down the copper. Then your dopamine should be stabilized.

Serotonin would be in short supply if there were a catch in the tryptophan cascade. If so, we might need to clear a milk allergy, and suggest the trace mineral rubidium. On the other hand, the serotonin may really be present, but unable to enter the receptor sites because of an invasive attachment by a fluoride compound. Your body-consciousness would probably request DMAE to detoxify the fluoride.

These two rather simple changes could free the serotonin so that your depression could lift, and you could feel more optimistic and enthusiastic.

When your glutamine pathway is interrupted, the availability of GABA is diminished. The effect of low GABA is to make you feel hyperactive, jumpy and restless. We would ask your body if it needed the trace mineral germanium, and possibly you might need to resolve an oat allergy, or release fluoride residue, to allow an easy transition from glutamine to glutamate, and then to GABA.

If the glutamate reads too high, it could be due to the presence of monosodium glutamate. If so, we would offer N-acetyl cysteine to detoxify it. Detoxifying MSG can have other benefits. It often relieves a tendency to migraines as well as asthma, and allows acetylcholine (the major transmitter for memory and thinking and speaking,) to function optimally in your brain.

High glutamate could also be due to the diminished ability to convert it into GABA, and this might really prove to be just a shortage of germanium. Whatever the solution may be, lowering glutamate to the normal level will let you feel more relaxed and clear-headed.

Threonine is the amino acid that can't proceed down its cascade if you have a soy allergy. Soy allergy creates metabolic errors that are not visible, so you wouldn't be aware of it, but a soy allergy prevents the synthesis of the enzymes that allow threonine to create glycine and serine.

Resolving a soy allergy opens up the availability of glycine, the neurotransmitter that calms excessive transmission through the spinal cord, and regulates glutamate levels in the brain. Serine is synthesized from glycine, and its task is to protect you from arterial damage by reducing high levels of homocysteine. Serine, with B-6 as a cofactor, is able to move homocysteine on to the next compound, known as cystathionine. Without available serine, homocysteine accumulates. It is safe at low levels but becomes toxic at higher concentrations, injuring the linings of the arteries, which in turn draws platelets to repair the site. Unfortunately, platelets attract cholesterol. Then calcium slides by, clings to the cholesterol, and arterial plaque builds up.

Methionine is an amino acid that goes down a complex cascade. Unless you have a wheat or a meat allergy, methionine leads to the synthesis of the very useful amino acid, cysteine. From cysteine, with a trace of vanadium, you can make taurine.

Taurine is an essential neurotransmitter for regulating your heart-beat. It also needs to be present in the limbic brain, to sharpen your ability to focus selectively, and minimize extraneous impressions. When children experience a moderate shortage of taurine, they are diagnosed with ADD. A very serious shortage of taurine has been implicated in epileptic seizures.

After we open up these metabolic pathways vibrationally, you will do the rest. Your body can download vibrational changes into physical form. You are the one who creates all these molecules yourself, in just the amount you need, given precise nutritional support in combination with the release of the relevant allergies.

Below you can see diagrams of the above-mentioned molecules, as they follow down their path from the amino acids that they are derived from. Left to right, tryptophan goes to serotonin, tyrosine goes to dopamine, and acetylcholine (not derived from an amino acid) is on the next line. Glutamate goes into GABA, threonine gives us glycine, and cysteine creates taurine.

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