Nutritional Psychotraumatology: The Science of Nutrition and Trauma by Alice Benskin
Agenda:
- Evidence regarding trauma, particularly in early life, and long-term health outcomes
- Impact of chronic stress on eliciting structural brain changes, and impacting on key markers
- Biological approaches to trauma – HPA axis activation and interaction with other key axes in the body (i.e gut-brain axis)
- Psychological approaches to trauma survivors – stress as a maladaptive and adaptive experience; attachment styles and different responses to trauma; deficit vs positive psychology, and how this can impact on practitioner’s approach
- nutritional deficiency in trauma survivors in response to chronic stress
- supporting trauma survivors – 3 case studies exploring working with trauma survivors living with chronic illnesses
Learning outcomes:
- to understand the biological mechanisms and psychological theory surrounding trauma
- to cultivate awareness of conscious and implicit biases towards trauma survivors and their health
- to understand how chronic stress depletes the body of key nutrients and increases risk of chronic disease, and how this creates health inequities for survivors
- to explore cases studies compassionate approaches to working with individuals using evidence based personalised nutrition, psychology and lifestyle interventions
Speakers
Alice Benskin
RNutr
Alice Elizabeth Benskin is a registered nutritionist with Association for Nutrition in the domain of Nutrition Science. She has a BSc in Nutrition Science and MSc in Personalised Nutrition from Middlesex University / CNELM, and has worked over the past 10 years in the food industry, agriculture, nutrition education and research. Most recently she was at University of Oxford, where she did research investigating breast and bottle feeding nutrition and nociception in neonates with a neonatal neuroscience team at the John Radcliffe Hospital. She is currently an MSc Psychology student at University of Wolverhampton.
Benskin has a keen interest and passion for research in the area of nutritional psychiatry, and is advocating for the field of nutritional psychotraumatology, which explores the connections between nutrition, mechanisms of chronic stress, acute and complex trauma and biohorology. Aside from Nutritank, she works in a freelance capacity as a Nutritional Scientist, doing consultancy work, as well as volunteering in a variety of roles for not-for-profits and charities. Overall, her ambition is to empower others to live healthier lives using nutrition and lifestyle strategies, contribute to the field of nutritional psychiatry as a researcher, and see more women empowered to pursue careers in research and education in the field of nutritional science.
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