IFM 2016 annual conference and the sunshine vitamin

It’s been a very interesting week in the USA for two of our team, namely Meleni Aldridge, our executive coordinator, and myself. It’s my fourteenth consecutive visit to the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Annual International Conferences, and Meleni’s twelfth. So you could say that we are old hands now, though, in fact, we are merely middle-aged hands given IFM celebrates its 25^th year of providing functional medicine education!

This year, the conference was held in San Diego and focused on those aspects that are often ignored, in particular sleep, movement and exercise, as well as restoration practices. Find out more in Meleni’s selection of key take-homes. While a cluster of tools and aides were offered for use by practitioners with their patients and clients, we can all benefit by making some simple changes to lifestyles. Simple changes that can make huge differences to our health. It’s very important to not think of dietary and lifestyle modification as some kind of marginal approach to healthcare – it’s the main show in town!

This week, we also submitted our response to EFSA’s vitamin D consultation. We’re not willing, like thousands of integrative and functional medicine clinicians the world over, to accept the EU’s conclusion that a trivial 15 mcg (600 IU) is all that’s needed daily to achieve optimum blood levels of vitamin D in the absence of sun exposure. You have to ignore a bunch of published data and virtually everything the world’s leading vitamin D experts are saying to come to that conclusion. But that’s what EFSA have done. Find out more.

Around lectures and workshops, we also had numerous meetings and are looking at establishing trials that incorporate dietary and lifestyle modifications in the US. After leaving San Diego, we visited our colleague Dr Jeanne Drisko (also Chair and Medical Director of ANH-USA ) and her team at the Integrative Medicine unit at the Kansas University Medical Center . The team are doing amazing work and we spent most of a day looking at ways in which we can collaborate to further our respective missions and increase adoption and acceptance of natural health approaches among the public.

Get the rest of the week’s natural health news – stay active, sleep well, restore your body, be mindful and make or ingest plenty of vitamin D from the sun or in supplements while you’re at it!

In health, naturally

Rob Verkerk, PhD

Founder, executive & scientific director