London nutritionist to speak at health and nutrition summit

A leading London nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston will join dietitians, professors and doctors speaking at VegfestUK at Olympia on Saturday 10th October about evidence based advantages of a plant based diet and vegan alternatives to popular nutrition supplements and vitamins

Organiser of Vegfest UK Tim Barford, who recently joined the Vegan Society Board of trustees wanted to offer health professionals the chance of easily accessible evidence based CPD to bring dietitians, doctors and nurses up to date with the latest innovations when treating health issues.

"There are great facilities at London Olympia and we want to make full use of them"

Realising the gap between fact and perception among some health professionals on Vegan diets, the Vegan Society and the British Dietetic Association have signed an agreement with a commitment to ensure more practitioners are fully educated about and have the most up to date information on vegan diets.

Nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston, an author on the Vitabiotics weaning guide says that "unfortunately when vegans get pregnant many of them feel overwhelmingly pressured by nutritionists, dietitians, midwives and other health professionals to adopt a more popular high fat standard diet. One can only assume this is often because of a lack of knowledge about the advantages of plant based diets, that these practitioners feel under pressure from obligations of due diligence to stay on the side of dietary information they are more familiar with."

VegfestUK are on a mission in London and Glasgow to encourage as many health practitioners as possible to address that imbalance of information. By offering free or very low cost CPD (continued professional development) training sessions with leading experts speaking on key issues and offering latest research findings, they hope to attract practitioners who can sometimes pay hundreds of pounds to attend training courses to fulfill their CPD obligations.

Yvonne reports that even when there are serious clinical nutritional imbalances in a person there a now a number of plant based alternatives to standard nutritionist's tools that nutritional therapists could use.

Supplement manufacturers now produce high strength EPA and DHA essential fats from algae, vitamin D3 from litchen, a range of high strength human strain dairy free probiotics, effective sub lingual vitamin B12 sprays as well as vegan versions of the usual array of multivitamins and minerals.

"There's no reason why a vegan baby can't be healthier than a baby reared on a typical standard diet. Whereas the stress caused by forcing mothers to go against their instincts and learning, could be very detrimental to both mother and baby."