True Foods Nutrition

Hello and welcome! My name is Maria Shaflender and I have a nutrition clinic in Bondi, Sydney. I also consult nationally and internationally via Skype/phone.
I am a fully qualified Clinical Nutritionist (Adv.Dip Nutritional Medicine, ATMS member #26566) as well as a MINDD trained practitioner and Fitgenes genetic testing practitioner.
My passion is to help individuals and their families find a truly healthy life through eating real food, improving their lifestyle, understanding body systems, genetics and existing health conditions.
I strongly believe these goals can be achieved by following a clean diet tailored to your needs as well as being empowered to take charge of your own health. Too often we delegate our health to others- by doing this we lose touch with how our bodies work and feel and what they really need. My job is to empower my patients to make positive changes in their life by choosing the right lifestyle. Taking a pill is not the answer, changing what you eat and how you lead your life is.
Before becoming a mum and a nutritionist, I worked in marketing at three multinationals which produce products made of toxins, petrochemicals and franken-food ingredients that people daily apply on their bodies and put in their kids lunch boxes. We do this because we are told that these products/foods taste great/are low fat/contain moisturisers, etc etc. Vast amounts of money are invested in food production and marketing of ‘food products’ that line our supermarket shelves, seducing us with addictive chemical flavours. We are bombarded with messages about these products from birth: we need to learn to look past them and focus on real food, not logos. Detoxing our lives is also one of my main goals.
Food, cooking and nutrition have always been my passion and my key interest is ‘food as medicine’- I truly believe that numerous health conditions that are prevalent today have a DIRECT relationship to our food, as well as environment and lifestyle.
Finding an optimum way of eating for health has been a quest for me. I was a sickly child, growing up with frequent bronchial infections, digestive problems and repeated rounds of antibiotics. I struggled with digesting food from birth.
In my teens I followed the ads on TV and shiny magazines and decided to ‘eat healthily': boxed cereals with soy or low fat milk, pasta with ‘light’ sauces and other low fat foods as well as hours on the treadmill at the gym. I thought I was following a healthy lifestyle- after all, this was what every TV ad as well as the food pyramid were telling me! A diet based on low fats and plenty of ‘whole grains’ became the dogma of my generation.
Couple this diet with the stress of high school study and you get a perfect environmental trigger combined with poor genetics: extreme gluten and dairy sensitivity diagnosed years later as IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome).
With a long family history of autoimmune conditions, type 2 diabetes and digestive disease, I knew that it was important to find a way of eating that benefited my health. My interest in nutrition and health developed into a passion for eating well, being healthy and pain free.
I began reading diet and nutrition books. Lots of them. All the time looking for answers. I’ve experimented with many ‘hit and miss’ approaches to eating, but never felt truly healthy.
I stumbled across the Paleo diet about 8 years ago and have never looked back. Following the birth of my two children, I’ve made a decision to pursue my passion for nutrition and health through becoming a fully qualified Clinical Nutritionist and founding True Foods Nutrition.
I am passionate about children’s health, which unfortunately today is in a very poor state. Through my volunteer work at the Mindd Foundation (www.mindd.org) I’ve listened to many leading scientists and doctors presenting research on autism, allergies, autoimmunity and obesity that are plaguing our kids. This makes for a depressing topic that’s hard to comprehend- it is currently predicted that this generation of children will have a lower life expectancy than ours. We need to take action to prevent this from ever happening NOW. Changing your life by eliminating damaging foods, chemicals and toxins and taking a step towards CHOOSING to be healthy through a Paleo lifestyle is the absolute minimum in terms of what we can do for our kids.
My nutrition philosophy is centered on a diet of nutrient dense wholefoods: organic, seasonal animal and plant foods every day, together with bone broths, pro-biotic foods and lots of healthy fats. Nothing processed, artificial, made in a factory. Nothing that has existed for less than 100 years in our food system or that my grandparents wouldn’t have recognised! One of my key rules for food choice is: ‘would my grandmother have recognised this and eaten it as a food?’ usually, if the answer is ‘no’ then I don’t eat it. I believe that when you thrive on:
Ethically raised grass fed meats and eggs
Wild seafood and fish
Healthy fats
Organic and local fruit and veg
Nuts and seeds
A daily dose of bone broths and pro-biotic (lacto-fermented foods)-then health and homeostasis (equilibrium) will be achieved in the body.
I teach my patients Paleo lifestyle principles: humans are designed to spend plenty of time in the sun, move their bodies, sleep well and consistently and enjoy relationships, the outdoors and a good mood. Many of these life essentials are missing today.
I truly believe that True Foods Nutrition will help you and your family become and stay healthy every day!