Food as Medicine: Prescribing Food and Teaching Kitchen Education Courses
Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives: Stanford, Kaiser Permanente and Local Doctors Take Steps to Prescribe Food and Cooking Courses for Health.
Teaching Kitchens are bringing doctors, patients and educators together in the Bay Area to learn about healthy eating as a prescription for feeling good.
There’s a widely held impression that nutrition-rich foods go hand-in-hand with better health. Numerous studies have shown that poor diet and nutrition contribute to the critical increase in such maladies as diabetes and obesity. Nutritionists, food scientists and dieticians have worked to guide our eating habits with research and outreach to highlight the nutritional value of eating certain ingredients and food groups, with titles such as “super foods” and “super grains” meant to communicate their health advantages for our bodies.
What has been slower to emerge are the direct ties between medicine—both preventive and curative—and the food we eat. In the Bay Area, many are welcoming some large steps toward bridging this gap by organizations such as Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente, as well as local doctors and practitioners, to make the promise of offering “food as medicine” a reality.
“Food as medicine is no longer fringe, it has gone mainstream,” proclaims Christopher Gardner, a renowned nutrition scientist at Stanford Prevention Research Center (SPRC), a division of the School of Medicine. And incorporating nutrition and culinary medicine in everyday medical health practices is shifting too. Christopher notes, “It’s not just going to be medications, surgical procedures or devices. It’s going to be food.”
In an effort to have food play a bigger part in medicine, local programs are popping up that range from medical professional training and university-led medical student education to hands-on cooking courses with specific foods and ingredients being prescribed directly to patients.
Teaching Hands-On Preventative Nutrition to Medical Students
“Our healthcare system is screwed unless we do more prevention,” says Christopher. One growing way to combat the issue is an emphasis on nutritional education, quality food and culinary skills, for medical professionals and medical students.
Stanford University is starting with their medical school curriculum and how nutrition is taught in medical schools. In 2020, Stanford will begin operating a dedicated teaching kitchen as part of its new Center for Academic Medicine.
Dr. Michelle Hauser, clinical associate professor of medicine with Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef herself, has been instructing Stanford medical students via her own teaching kitchen elective. Michelle shares Christopher’s enthusiasm for a teaching kitchen on campus to instruct healthcare professionals to impart healthy food choices and cooking skills to patients. This structural investment builds on Stanford’s collaborative initiatives with national programs like the Menus of Change, led by the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Having taken Stanford’s teaching kitchen elective in spring 2017, fifth-year medical student Kiley Lawrence appreciates the benefits of hands-on food education for medical professionals. “Nutrition and lifestyle play a huge role in preventive health and the management of chronic medical problems,” Kiley says. “By teaching medical students how to prepare quick, simple and healthy meals, the teaching kitchen gives us tools to talk to patients about the ‘how.’ We can truly partner with our patients to develop strategies for their personal health goals, food preferences, schedules and lives.”
The Rise of the Teaching Kitchen
Since 2006, the annual Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives Conference in Napa, sponsored by a collaboration of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America, has championed the need to educate doctors and healthcare professionals in the kitchen. Through these conferences, over 6,000 participants have learned new skills and healthy cooking habits to take home to their patients.
“If we can change the behavior of health professionals, they’re much more likely to bring these ideas into their workplace and communities,” says Dr. David Eisenberg, director of culinary nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. David projects that 50% of future participants will build a teaching kitchen in their hometown.
Dr. Jyoti Rau of Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara brought what she learned back home from a Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives Conference. “The goal for me is to have a teaching kitchen and teach patients and doctors to prescribe healthy foods and recipes,” Jyoti says. “At Kaiser, we have started with cooking classes at the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose and cooking classes for doctors as part of wellness initiatives.”
Teaching doctors what to cook and how to cook offers some smile-producing observations. “It’s amazing how many surgeons don’t know how to hold a knife to chop an onion,” says Sophie Egan, director of health and sustainability leadership at The Culinary Institute of America. Continuing nutrition education, including both cooking and ingredient planning, bode well for improving the overall well-being of both doctor and patient. Having dedicated teaching kitchens is central to offering this type of hands-on education.
In 2015, the Healthy Lives, Healthy Kitchen Conference professionals did indeed find out that many of their registrants had or planned to build teaching kitchens in their respective organizations. With each teaching kitchen sometimes organized in isolation, the conference leaders formed the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative, a network of existing and planned teaching kitchens, to share strategies and research to encourage more kitchens and nutrition curriculums to be built.
There are currently three Teaching Kitchen Collaborative participants who have physical kitchen locations operating here in the Bay Area: Google in Mountain View, Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) in Palo Alto. The Google facility provides nutrition and cooking classes for their employees, promoting health and wellness. Medical facilities like Kaiser and PAMF offer courses for both medical professionals and patients.
Integrating Culinary Medicine into Treatment and Practices
“The traditional paradigm in medicine has been to treat disease rather than keep people healthy in the first place,” says the CIA’s Sophie Egan. “Culinary medicine is blending culinary arts with evidence-based nutrition and behavioral sciences.”
Unlike some other medicinal alternatives, culinary medicine can be crafted to taste delicious too. Sophie says the outcome of the CIA’s programs and collaborations is encouraging: “There is a desire to create an unapologetic elevation of deliciousness as a public health and global sustainability imperative. To give people agency with the tools to make food taste really good to reduce disease risk and ideally replace unhealthy habits.”
Food as Prescription—First Steps
What about prescribing food to cure what might ail you? Food as prescription, if you will. Michelle is beginning to find ways to impart her culinary medicine training to her own patients. As part of the primary care medical practice at Fair Oaks Health Center (FOHC) in Redwood City, she and other doctors prescribe going to the Wellness Pantry for patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. A participant might receive a prescription for a lentil soup recipe instead of a drug. Patients in need can receive free healthy food for themselves and their families, along with cooking instruction and nutrition information.
There’s a long road ahead to bring doctors, educators, scientists and patients together to make food as medicine an everyday reality. In the Bay Area, there are some choices available now and new options on the horizon. Someday soon a delicious, nutritious meal or snack might be just what the doctor ordered.
