Functional Medicine Archives - Sara Gottfried MD

We are experiencing a profound change in the type of disease that affects the general population, and it is the main reason why I believe we need a paradigm shift from the current model of mainstream medicine to personalized lifestyle medicine. Allow me to explain why. The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic rise…

In personalized lifestyle medicine, sometimes one person’s superfood is another person’s poison. Such is the case with oxalates, which are found in high concentrations in many presumed health foods. Once I started testing, I realized that many of my patients were experiencing the downstream consequences of excess oxalate intake, usually in the form of green…

Twelve years ago when I still worked in the trenches of conventional medicine (before I spun off to start my own integrative and functional medicine practice), I figured there had to be a better way to fill the gaps that patients encounter between what they struggle with and what mainstream medicine offers. Not everyone can…

Jennifer was a forty-four-year-old patient who arrived in my office feeling defeated, worn out, and “older than her years” as she put it. As a third-shift nurse who worked grueling twelve-hour nights – frequently picking up overtime – the stressful struggle to balance sleep, two kids, and an unemployed husband drained her sanity, and took…

My great-grandmother embodied healthy living. She was a whole foodist and yoga practitioner—way before these things were trendy. When she visited us, she came armed not with candies and gum like my friends’ grandmothers, but with kale, carob, and wheat-berry cookies. She drank hot water with lemon every morning and evening. She extolled the virtues of…