Should health professional students learn about culinary health?
In this interview, Scott Fishman, MD, sits down with Tim Harlan, MD to discuss how nutrition and culinary health impacts the lives of health professional students and their future patients. Incorporating culinary medicine into health professional education, he says, will create better prepared and healthier students.
Dr. Harlan is a chef, author, and Associate Professor of Medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, where he teaches healthcare professionals and the community about the intersection of food & health. He also serves as the Executive Director of the American College of Culinary Medicine, the Director of the George Washington University Culinary Medicine Program, and helped develop the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University.
Transcript:
This transcript has been autogenerated
Dr. Fishman: you know, when I went to medical school, nobody talked about we talked about the molecules in food.
Dr. Harlan: Right.
Dr. Fishman: We really didn’t talk about the entity of food, but we talked about the molecules, right. And the molecules in the body that interacted with the molecules in the food. But we certainly didn’t talk about how the food was prepared or the art of it. So there’s been an evolution in some way in that direction, to now an awareness of the need for, this kind of understanding, if not training.
Dr. Harlan: So we do episodic care. We do interventional care really, really, really well. In the last 50 years, we’ve gotten fantastic at it. The challenge is that in that same period of time, there’s been a concomitant rise in calorie dense, nutrient poor, relative, easily accessible food that is causing illness, causes probably 70% of the patients who sit down in the examination room are there because of a food related illness. So we just, you know, we need to make this part of our toolbox now, where we’ve never really had to think about that as much before.
How do you see culinary medicine evolving in healthcare education?
Dr. Harlan: Well, I think the idea of teaching health care professionals to cook is a really sound idea. And we have data that shows that that it makes better prepared students, that it makes healthier students.
There is some data that says as physicians, if we walk the walk ourselves and then we talk the talk about the walk that we walk, our patients listen to us at a higher rate, especially if we share that personal, you know, experience and so a lot of the concept around teaching health care professionals to cook is a bit of a hook, you know, to here’s the skill set that everybody should have.
They should be able to, you know, cook for themselves, you know, read a recipe, parse a recipe, build a weekly shopping list, build a menu for the week, go grocery shopping, plan for leftovers so you don’t have to cook all the time, and then go home and cook for themselves.
So there’s that kind of skill set that if we know about that ourselves, we’re able to relate that better to our patients what might work for them in in a shared decision making environment, right? You know, using really great, well-established motivational interviewing techniques that help us get our patients to a healthier diet, healthier consumption habits, and in the nice thing about the learning medicine programing is you do that, hands on cooking piece together in teams, right?
So it’s team based learning, but it also incorporates case based learning, which is how we should learn. I think that we shouldn’t be doing that in silos. I think that that if you’ve got 16, 20 students in a teaching kitchen and they’re learning these concepts, some of those should be nurses, physicians, pharmacists, police, you know, we should be trying to create interprofessional and interdisciplinary programing because, again, food is our shared experience. And it’s a way for us as health care professionals to connect with each other at a much deeper level than than we ever have before.