Culinary Medicine and Nutrition

NCE 522 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Providing health care professionals with a strong foundation in Culinary Medicine including what constitutes a healthy diet and how to find, obtain, and prepare healthy and delicious food is a key part of educating health professionals to support patients in achieving better health outcomes. This course is designed to expose medical students to the fundamentals of cooking to both improve personal health and develop the skills to successfully counsel patients on healthy eating while taking into account culture, time, and resources. The goal is to provide students with lessons about healthy diet, tasty food preparation, and dietary behavior change while teaching them to effectively counsel patients via motivational interviewing to do the same. The emphasis of this course is on using fundamental culinary skills for the basic preparation of healthy and delicious whole foods. This course will focus on a whole food, plant-based diet and encourage this through the lenses of different world flavors and culinary traditions. The course this course has a multidisciplinary team of instructors: physician, registered dietitian, and executive chef.

This course will bring together nutrition and culinary knowledge and skills to allow medical professionals to assist patients in maintaining health and preventing and treating food-related disease by choosing and preparing high-quality, healthy food in conjunction with appropriate medical care. Through chef demonstrations and hands-on practice of fundamental culinary skills, students will learn the basics of preparing delicious, healthy food that rivals and surpasses the crave-ability of the ubiquitous, unhealthy fare that they are exposed to daily. The course will be designed around the Culinary Medicine Curriculum written by Michelle Hauser, MD, MS, MPA, FACLM, Chef and published by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. This culinary medicine class will provide an applied, laboratory experience as part of a nutrition curriculum for students.