Recovery Nutrition
Recovering from surgery can be one of the most physically and emotionally challenging times of your life, and yet the critical role that good nutrition plays is often overlooked. Just think about the meals typically served to most hospital patients in New Zealand — although prepared with the best of intentions they are often lacking in the ingredients that best support healing, and worse — can contain ultra-processed foods that actually set your recovery back.
Thankfully a growing body of scientific research is now confirming what previous generations have long understood — that the nutrients in the food that we eat profoundly influence our ability to recover on a cellular level. From our cardiovascular and our skeletal systems to digestion, tissue repair, immune strength, pain modulation and energy production, every bite of food that we take shapes how well and how quickly we heal.
My book Heal Better, Heal Faster explores this in detail, but because there was so much that couldn’t be included due to page restrictions, the articles in this part of the blog expand on that information, and delve much more deeply into ways that patients can reduce systemic inflammation, create a diet for themselves that is entirely focused on recovery nutrition and support their gut health, which is increasingly being recognised at the driver of long-term immunity.
How To Make Sure You’re Eating Enough Protein After Surgery
One of the most common things I see after almost all kinds of surgery, especially major surgery, is that people simply aren’t eating enough protein in the days following their procedure.