Dr. Darren Schmidt

Dr. Darren Schmidt is a Chiropractor who has been focusing 100% on clinical nutrition since 1998. He owns the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor and is also a professional speaker on health.

Dr. Schmidt grew up working on his family’s farm beginning at the age of 9. He graduated from chiropractic school and started practicing in 1997. He uses nutrition to get to the root cause of health problems since nutrition is the foundation of all health. He currently has a practice called The Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor. His purpose in life is bankrupt drug companies by helping lots of people become healthy.

The reason Dr. Schmidt approaches health care the way he does comes from his experiences working on the family farm for 17 summers. First, because everyone in his family was either farmers or teachers he didn’t have a relative in the medical field to influence him. Second, he learned that if there was a job to be done and you couldn’t get it done, it simply meant you needed to get the tools, knowledge, and abilities to do it. Excuses were not acceptable. For example, if a doctor needs to cure asthma and he cannot eliminate it permanently with medications, this means he simply does not have the right tools to get rid of it completely. Dr. Schmidt finds what it takes, gains the knowledge, and acquires the tools to handle asthma and many other “incurable” conditions. Third, he saw how applying pesticides to plants created super-pests. He learned from his Dad that the genetically engineered crops needed to be sprayed more because they attracted more pests. The lesson learned was that the more you veer from Mother Nature’s laws, the more you suffer.

Dr. Schmidt wanted to become a doctor so he studied pre-med at Ohio State University. Before applying for medical school, he began to ask questions of medical students and doctors about their profession. Out of 12 people he surveyed, none encouraged him to follow in their footsteps. He decided to investigate other health professions like podiatry, optometry, and veterinary and ultimately he decided to attend chiropractic school. He had spent a few hours with a chiropractor in his hometown and liked the natural and holistic approach. He graduated in the spring of 1997 from the National College of Chiropractic in Chicago. He then opened a practice in Toledo for 3 1/2 years. He moved to Ann Arbor in 2000. Dr. Schmidt is originally from Swanton, Ohio.

While in Chiropractic college, Dr. Schmidt attended nearly 50 seminars in 24 months searching for the most effective therapies to get a person well. This is when he discovered the power of nutrition. He saw the effectiveness and the huge need for good nutritional work in this country. He also looked at other doctors and saw that the best doctors had a holistic view and were using natural therapies and muscle-testing and functional lab work.

He gives lectures and workshops to private, church, school and business groups and to the general public. He attended Toastmasters meetings and the National Speaker’s Association to learn speaking skills. He has been in newspapers including USA Today, Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, The Ask Dr. Nandi Show, and Ann Arbor News. He has taped five 30-minute TV shows on community access television, one of which was requested by the public and replayed over 40 times. He has also been on the radio for interviews; both live and pre-recorded.

Dr. Schmidt has co-founded two other business. One is the Good Fat Company (www.goodfat.bar) which makes a ketogenic snack bar. The other is Power Nutrition Practice (www.powernutritionpractice.com) which trains office staff and practitioners of nutrition clinics.[From his bio on his website http://thenutritionalhealingcenter.com]

Some of my Easy Recipes

The recipes that I bring in this website are very simple and are intented to give you an inspiration of what you can do with old family recipes. I am not a chef, but by showing you some samples of what I cook I can demonstrate how simple the ketogenic diet can be.


Ketosis and the brain

In essence, a ketogenic diet mimics starvation, allowing the body to go into a metabolic state called ketosis (key-tow-sis). Normally, human bodies are sugar-driven machines: ingested carbohydrates are broken down into glucose, which is mainly transported and used as energy or stored as glycogen in liver and muscle tissue. When deprived of dietary carbohydrates (usually below 50g/day), the liver becomes the sole provider of glucose to feed your hungry organs – especially the brain, a particularly greedy entity accounting for ~20% of total energy expenditure. The brain cannot DIRECTLY use fat for energy. Once liver glycogen is depleted, without a backup energy source, humanity would’ve long disappeared in the eons of evolution. The backup is ketone bodies that the liver derives primarily from fatty acids in your diet or body fat. These ketones – ?-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), acetoacetate and acetone – are released into the bloodstream, taken up by the brain and other organs, shuttled into the “energy factory” mitochondria and used up as fuel. Excess BHB and acetoacetate are excreted from urine, while acetone, due to its volatile nature, is breathed out (hence the characteristically sweet “keto breath”). Meanwhile, blood glucose remains physiologically normal due to glucose derived from certain amino acids and the breakdown of fatty acids – voila, low blood sugar avoided!

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