Ms. Corinne Bush is the CEO and Co-Founder of The American Nutrition Association and a Certified Nutrition Specialist. A national leader in personalized nutrition for chronic disease prevention and reversal, she holds a Master of Science in Nutrition from Rutgers University. She has spent decades translating nutrition science into practical clinical and community programs. Ms. Bush has led nutrition education and professional training initiatives through the American Nutrition Association and maintained a private practice while overseeing nutrition operations at a large compounding pharmacy and wellness center. Her work emphasizes the concept of food as medicine, personalized care, and sustainable lifestyle changes — core principles for improving vitality and independence in later life.
We are experiencing a shift from one-size-fits-all medicine and nutrition to personalized medicine and nutrition, which can truly transform your health.
Consumers have been powerful change agents towards this personalized model that enables us to turn the tides of the chronic disease epidemic sweeping our nation and the world.
My Path to Personalized Nutrition
I’ve been a nutritionist throughout my 30-year career. I started in practice working with a local physician, counseling patients about their diets using the only tools that I was taught in the conventional foods and nutrition model of the time — the food pyramid and dietetic exchanges. I don’t think this approach created breakthroughs for anybody, but it was all I knew.
But then, five years later, my mom was found to have pancreatic cancer, resulting in a devastating course of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy that left her “cancer-free” but with a severely impaired GI tract. She died of malnutrition two years later.
My lack of foundational knowledge, coupled with the prevailing thinking 25 years ago that nutrition had no place in cancer therapy, meant that I had little to offer her but my love and support. Which, of course, meant a lot but was not enough to save her from the misery of those last years of her life.
That experience mobilized me to refocus my training with years more schooling in personalized nutrition, an approach that taught me how to look deeply at the foundations of complex chronic disease — the greatest cause of death and disability in America.
The Price of Chronic Disease
We are now deeply immersed in a chronic disease epidemic of huge proportions — diseases including cancers; autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel diseases; type 2 diabetes; Alzheimer's disease; heart disease; and nebulous syndromes like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, which have only recently been recognized as “real” rather than “in your head”. In fact, about half of all adults around the world have chronic diseases. Not only that, but one in four adults has two or more chronic health conditions severely impacting their quality of life.
And what’s the price tag? Well, you can’t put a price on your health — it’s priceless — but to put this in perspective, 90% of our healthcare dollars in America are spent treating chronic disease.
And the treatments we’ve had up until now haven’t worked, largely because we are treating symptoms and not root causes. To add insult to injury, we know that symptom-relieving medications often cause negative side effects in the short and long term.
So, let’s check in with you right now- how do you feel at this moment? Are you firing on all burners from the standpoint of energy, vitality, and well-bein,g or have you gotten used to a diminished quality of life in some areas — is your sleep sound or disturbed; is your energy level high throughout the day, or do have periods of low energy or even extreme fatigue that makes getting through a day difficult; is your brain clear and focused or do you notice changes like confusion and forgetfulness; is your mood balanced or do you struggle with anxiety or depression; is your digestion sound or do you have heartburn and bowel problems; are you mobile and active or do your joints ache; do you naturally maintain your weight or is this an up and down (mostly up) battle?
The issues I just pointed to are signs of subclinical (under-the-radar) manifestations of dysfunction that can persist for years before a disease is identified and diagnosed, with nothing to assign a diagnosis code to. Often, the recourse is to treat symptoms with a pharmaceutical medication, sometimes even an antidepressant, given the nebulous nature of these symptoms.
Most of us do have areas of discomfort/dysfunction. Often, we chalk it up to genetics/fate or aging, but aging needn’t mean diminished vitality, and 90% of disease is related to nutrition and lifestyle, only 10% is genetically determined.
It’s Not All in Your Genes!
We can’t change our genotype — that's our inherited genetics passed down from our parents and ancestors, coded in our chromosomes and DNA. But through nutrition and lifestyle, we can change our phenotype (the genetic expression that manifests in health or disease).
Personalized nutrition can actually turn your genes on and off, allowing the expression of health-promoting genes and quieting disease-promoting genes. And this intervention is powerful, no matter where you are on the spectrum of symptoms to disease.
This is not “eat your peas and carrots” nutrition, but rather deep therapeutic intervention grounded in nutrition science and your biochemical uniqueness.
To a person, those of us who practice personalized medicine and personalized nutrition recognize the power of personalized nutrition and are passionate about and experts in providing transformative care.
I’m thankful that my mother’s death gave me purpose and the impetus to seek out tools to help others on their healing journeys — and to work with our American Nutrition Association’s family of organizations, bringing our message of personalized nutrition to you.