Renewed Hope for Aids/hiv: Nutrition for Aids and HIV Infected Patients

This is a continual piece of my AIDS article series: Little known facts about AIDS, and Understanding AIDS/HIV: Unveiling the hidden facts.

Known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS is a complicated disorder, in which the patient is infected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. This virus kills white blood cells causing the immune system to be compromised to a stage that it is not able to fight off infections.

While ongoing research is still carrying on to help find a cure for AIDS patients, there is currently no cure for this unpredictable health condition. Scientists have worked painstakingly to find vaccines and drugs which may help delay the progression of this deadly disease which takes millions of lives worldwide every year.

AIDS and HIV infected patients are constantly facing a threat on nutritional deficiency and rapid weight loss. At times, nutritional and lifestyle changes, as well as supplements prescribed or recommended by health professionals might be a possible way to help curb AIDS to progress rapidly towards its chronic stage.

Nutrition therapy with an emphasis on a proper and balanced diet can help maintain a stronger immune system and proper functioning of cells, thereby reducing the progression of the disease, particularly in preventing symptoms and health problems related with HIV/AIDS. This nutritional approach should take a high priority from the moment one is diagnosed with HIV positive. Considering the patients are prone to malnutrition due to reduced food intake in the early stages of HIV infection, this therapy may be more effective in comparison to the chronic stage when the patient’s nutrient stores is depleted by repeated infections and hypermetabolism at a tremendous speed!

Lifestyle Change

Most AIDS/HIV patients have a major risk of experiencing wasting syndrome, whereby they tend to lose strength easily and lean body mass. In such a case, anabolic steroids are utilized to address this complication. Since the infection can cause a gradual result of lean muscle implying a sign of advanced AIDS, the patients are advised to undergo progressive resistance training including weight training to substitute the medication therapy.

In order to increase lean body mass, patients are recommended to have about 3 times per week of resistance training (such as weight-lifting, and push-ups) for eight consecutive weeks. The research has proved that those who had resistance training 3-4 times per week were able to help slow down AIDS progression to death.