Our Story
Navigation Nutrition evolved from a very personal place. Part of what makes this program so unique, so intimate, and so successful for our clients is that we didn’t start this process envisioning that the end result would be a thriving business. It is the byproduct of following our intuition when a familial crisis hit our lives and the steps that we took to end a myriad of generational health problems. Navigation Nutrition truly manifested by taking action on our instincts and really leaning into our faith. As a result, we were able to narrow our focus to be intentional about who we wanted to be in this world and how we could best serve others in the healthcare arena.
“… just the deck of cards you were dealt.”
Both of our fathers had heart attacks within a year of each other. Both had very similar stories from two different hospital systems: “Hey, this is not your fault, this is genetic. There is nothing you can do to prevent this… just the deck of cards you were dealt. You will be back here in 10-15 to do this all over again.”
The messaging from the cardiothoracic surgeon sounded like it had been on perpetual repeat for the majority of his career. There was absolutely no interest in engaging our family on either the root cause of the heart attack or how we could even begin to prevent this from happening again to our fathers or even us, or our children in the future.
We have spent the majority of our careers in healthcare.
Robert as a Registered Nurse and Family Nurse Practitioner and Hollie as an Operations Executive in the Post-Acute Healthcare setting. This patient facing view of healthcare has allowed us to see an intrinsic truth played out repeatedly over years: The universal acceptance that certain chronic diseases will simply occur at some point in all of our lives as a natural progression of aging…. and that there will simply be a pill or procedure to manage it. In fact, our billion dollar healthcare economy relies on it.
On the contrary, we have also witnessed that our bodies are capable of astounding things, especially if we really become intentional about making healthy lifestyle decisions. Take smoking for example: Individuals who stop smoking immediately start improving their lung function, their blood pressure, their arterial function, their cilia function - so much in fact, that within 15 years their risk of developing coronary artery disease is equivalent to a non-smoker. A complete reversal of a disease process that would have eventually become a chronic condition managed by the healthcare system.
This exact correlation during a desperate, pivotal moment of fear, sitting on a hospital floor after hearing such bleak messaging from the cardiologist was the catalyst for a very important consideration: Why wouldn’t heart disease have the same algorithm? Moreover, why wouldn’t other chronic lifestyle illnesses?
This precise thought process led us to a vast world hidden in plain sight: Lifestyle medicine and nutrition science. Over the past three years we have experienced profound effects from healing ourselves, our family members, and patients in the community through addressing the root cause of various disease processes. We discovered that we have the ability to not only prevent chronic disease, but also in some cases, completely reverse it. We have experienced the results both anecdotally and through significant biomarker changes, from cholesterol and triglyceride levels and blood pressure measurements, to the dissolution of carotid artery plaque seen on arterial scans. Along the way we have strived to be the embodiment of the message we are promoting: The virtue of food as medicine and its critical impact on our health and our vitality.
Our greatest blessing has been the ability to serve others in this journey.
It has truly changed the course of our lives, spiritually, personally, and professionally. The amount of people in our local community alone, who have reached out to us has been astounding and a significant driver in the realization that our mission is vital to our community.
As we continue to nurture the reach of Navigation Nutrition, we are confident in its ability to impact our greater healthcare community; not only in the provision of much needed education of our healthcare practitioners, but to also begin to elicit the structural changes that are desperately needed to our existing healthcare system.
We are grateful for all of you,
Robert and Hollie