Dr Kasia Kines – Philosophy Who is Holistic Nutrition Naturally?
I am not a medical doctor, I do not claim to diagnose nor treat diseases. I support the whole person with nutrition and lifestyle interventions.
Mission Statement
“My mission is to stop human suffering. I help people who are really hurting find the root causes of their complex conditions, help them heal, and empower them, so they can finally move forwards and live an amazing and fulfilling life and follow their dreams. One person at a time, we are healing the planet.” Kasia Kines
Honoring Natural Processes
I agree with the philosophy of naturopathic medicine: a symptom communicates an imbalance, so it is important to find its true cause (be it emotional, spiritual, or physiological) and find long-lasting solutions. The body’s intrinsic capacity and desire is to heal and be in balance, also called homeostasis. That is why I work with a whole person rather than a sum of their symptoms or diseases.
How I Chose my Schooling
The nutrition profession is quite complicated and political in this country; each state has a different licensure, while a few states have none. I decided to go against the job security and not become a registered dietitian as I was more interested in naturopathic medicine and functional medicine. I chose the best naturopathic school in the country, Bastyr University, because it had pioneered natural science-based medicine, and it had a tremendous reputation, being called “the Harvard of Natural Medicine”, while it happened to also offer the best clinical master degree in nutrition in the country.
A few years ago, Dr. Liz Lipski approached me saying she was masterminding a doctoral level clinical program in functional nutrition through Maryland University of Integrative Health. I joined the very first cohort she opened to learn the best and newest information available in my field and graduated as a Doctor of Clinical Nutrition in 2017.
Nutrition is the Backbone of Health
The core of my life and my work is the fact that Food is Medicine. Food IS medicine. It is, it was, and it always will remain, no matter who we are and what we believe in. We now know that up to 80% of chronic disease stems from nutritional imbalances (think: deficiencies and excesses) that can be corrected. Food has a power to destroy us, and it has a power to transform us down to the cellular level. Food will influence your thoughts. All our functions, literally, depend on what we put in our mouth, and even more, on what we can absorb, or extract from the foods. Science shows us that food is information on the most cellular level, that something as simple as broccoli can “tell” the DNA to “not mutate” thus preventing cancer. What you put in your mouth impacts your thyroid, joints, quality of sleep, inflammation, and more. This is why I am a nutritionist and I help people heal. I have chosen Functional Medicine and Functional Nutrition and see myself as a Functional Nutritionist because these address the root causes of most of your ailments, without addressing which, we only patch holes.
Why I am a Functional Nutritionist?
Because Functional Medicine is the best way we have learned to address and repair the complexities of your health challenges, and because chronic disease generally starts in the gut even if you may not think so. Functional Medicine is Personalized Medicine where each client is treated as a unique individual. It is a new paradigm in medicine that is client-centered and looks at all systems communicating with each other and influencing one another. Your endocrine system talks to your neurological system as that talks to your gastrointestinal system and back. Your body is not a sum of organs but a complex, intelligent living multi-system organism! As a Functional Nutritionist, I literally investigate, like a private eye, how and why things may not connecting appropriately. This takes patience and time, constant study, detailed work, some testing, experience, and a committed client who will help me do their part (we are partners). When you suffer from asthma, elevated cholesterol and skin rashes, rather than jumping to three medications, a Functional Medicine practitioner will investigate the root cause behind this situation in order to address the imbalances and fix them and will create a Personalized Nutrition Protocol for each client. And guess what, at the core of Functional Medicine is…nutrition.
My goal is to help you find the cause of your pain, repair the damage, improve your quality of life for good, and save you thousands of dollars in medical bills when you have been told that “you are fine” or that it is all “in your head”.
My passion is to find what we can do to help you achieve the best and healthiest life. I am not in this business to give you a diet. I am in the business to improve and change lives. It is the most beautiful and the most rewarding thing I could ever experience – watching you recover and thrive. Your success is my success. That is my business.
Food is My Medicine
At one of the Institute of Functional Medicine conferences I attended a number of years ago, Dr. Mark Hyman, MD said something that stuck with me, that if you practice medicine but you are not practicing nutrition, you are not practicing medicine. That is why at the very last moment, I chose a nutrition degree over naturopathic medicine. When my brother was a child, my mother discovered he was grinding teeth at night and fed him a whole lot of blueberries until he flushed his parasites out with his stool. That is all she did. It is a true story, and it did take a whole lot of blueberries. You see – food alone can have a profound effect on the human body. So how could I not become a nutritionist when Food is Medicine?
Trouble in Paradise
They say you are what you eat. That is a great start, and I wish it were true. You are what you absorb. People are ill! They do not absorb well! We are overmedicated, overfed and malnourished and we do not even know it. More studies emerge on glyphosate detrimental effect on our gut and immunity (pesticide in Round up ready). We are insulted with chemical exposure, electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, herbicides, long working hours, intense long term stress, lack on sun, nutrient depleted soils, and mediocre foods that lack the nutritional density of the same food just 50 years ago. And as a result, many people’s ability to assimilate what they eat becomes compromised…I see deterioration of the gastrointestinal tract including leaky gut, and once that happens, you are inviting mounting food sensitivities, deficiencies and eventually diseases of various types or parasites or viruses (yes, nutrient deficiencies can reactivate a virus)… This is where many of my clients have to subsist. My goal is always to repair the GI tract and your food first, as these are your doors to health. Without a healthy gut, you cannot have optimal health, no matter what you eat. And just to warn you…health starts in the colon. If you do not move your bowels twice a day without straining, you have to agree that there is trouble in paradise and we have work to do.
How did an English teacher from a small coastal town in Poland became a Nutritionist
My mother, who is a retired nurse, has always had a keen interest in nutrition and Food as Medicine, and we discuss nutrition every time we talk on Skype. She still sends me books and articles on wellness or natural medicine and cut out articles about nutrition news from Poland. Now a senior, it seems that my mom is the only person she knows that is healthy, without medications, and eating consciously for her own wellbeing. She sits in the sun whenever she can and thus has never been depressed; on the contrary- she tells the best jokes, and a lot of them, and people flock to visit her for laughter therapy. And perhaps a little shot of vodka and some fresh herring.
From childhood till early adulthood, growing up in Poland, however, I experienced years of bouts with candy addiction (I stole money from my father for candy once…), endless tooth cavities and vaginal yeast infections, and when in college renting rooms, enough packaged foods for three lifetimes. When I bought a tiny condo in Gdynia and finally had full access to a kitchen (well, a kitchenette of a size of a half bath in the US)…to make my own foods, sugar and yeast cleared up.
I became much more aware of wellness, disease, and foods when I moved to the US (Michigan) in 1996 – I saw first morbidly obese people in my life, tomatoes tasted like water, and apples tasted like plastic. I missed the flavor of strawberries. My life in the US led me to ache to share with Americans what foods used to be and what they could be again: Food as Medicine. I invested in my own health and healed my chronic back problem with targeted chiropractic care, I had all mercury amalgams removed, and I cooked whole foods at home. After a successful 20 years+ in teaching and aching to contribute to natural medicine and to change the world, I could not see any other thing to do than just – nutrition. Fast forward two decades, and the decision to become a nutritionist has been the best professional decision I have made. My knowledge allowed me to provide the best healing support for my family and myself. The right tests, the right foods, the right supplements… I have been able to support over a thousand clients with multiple medical conditions…In short, I am grateful that my move to the US ignited my renewed love for nutrition so that I can now help people like you and support my own family towards better health.
Dr Kasia Kines, a person…
After living in Baltimore for 11.5 years and serving that amazing community, after graduating from the Doctorate program, in summer 2017 I moved back to our beloved Seattle WA, together with my husband and our companions a cat and a parrot (yes, they are friends together). When not studying my client’s cases trying to help them out or reading up on EBV or sleeping, I am probably in the kitchen cooking. I ask clients to find balance in their lives but I still struggle with my own balance just because the clients are suffering and I need to be helping them, and I so love what i do. If I am out and about, I am having tea with a friend or having a Vietnamese soup or Indian vegetarian food out with my husband. And now in Seattle, I am probably out and about in the beautiful NW outdoors or by the water of Puget Sound, preferably somewhere on the beach with my feet in water and my face in the sun (like mother like daughter). I was spoiled by growing up within 10 minutes’ walk from a public beach in Poland.
After finishing the doctoral program, now I have a long list of catching up to do. I plan to create more low cost online programs for client recovery, publish the EBV book, create a mentorship program for clinicians and train other clinicians and perhaps ND students about clinical complexities in real clinic, including EBV. I have a responsibility to continue publish in medical journals, especially successful nutrition interventions in EBV cases. I look forward to visiting my mother and the beach in our hometown more often, swimming with wild dolphins (at least once), playing more guitar, learning to play piano again, having a band (!!!), learning flamenco, traveling more with my husband and cooking more together, and getting him to dancing classes with me again. On my bucket list is to have my mother here for a while and to create a video cookbook of us cooking together to leave a legacy of her drive for delicious healthy foods. And my big goal is to have an amazing working kitchen with a fabulous vegetable and herb garden in our dream home- perhaps making videos of cooking for everyone and inviting various friends to show us how and what they cook!
Kasia Kines
Dr. Kasia Kines, Seattle based Nutritionist, CEO and founder of EBV Educational Institute
Virtual clinic serving the US and globally
[email protected]
If you want to transform your life, if you want health and wellness, if you want peace of mind, there isn’t a better investment than working with Kasia.~ Beth