COOKING UP HEALTH

The only class in medical school where you'll eat what you dissect!

Culinary Medicine is the utilization of a unique combination of nutrition and culinary knowledge to assist patients in achieving and maintaining optimal health. This course is intended to expand students’ comfort in counseling patients in successful behavior change around nutrition and cooking. Through this course participants will learn basic culinary skills, steps to create nutritious meals, relationships between food, health, and disease, and cultural competencies around nutrition.

CUH CURRICULUM

OVERVIEW

Nourishing to Mind and Body

Each culinary medicine lesson focuses on one aspect of a healthy diet and its application to disease prevention. Class time is faculty guided and discussion based.

Community service-learning sessions provide an opportunity to apply learned knowledge by teaching elementary school children about nutrition and health connections.

CULINARY MEDICINE

Flipped Classroom

Students receive pre-work in the form of brief videos and articles to review the role of nutrition in certain disease processes and small group case based discussion on evidence based nutritive literature.

Topics addressed include mindful eating, the Standard American Diet, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition guide, understanding state of the science of macronutrients, the gut microbiome and impact of diet, food sensitivities, and inflammation as a precursor to chronic disease.

Scientific literature underpinning each of these topics are presented in the form of journal articles, videos and websites and discussed in class with the students both in-person and virtually.

CULINARY MEDICINE

Hands On Learning

Since the pandemic it has become evident that medical education will permanently adopt online and hybrid learning opportunities. The pandemic created a unique challenge for the culinary medicine curriculum, which included a hands-on cooking component. In response, Osher's culinary medicine program Cooking Up Health pivoted, formulating new content and virtual delivery to medical students and residents.

Each culinary medicine class begins with a shared experience, comprised of learning kitchen techniques and preparing foods relevant to each session’s discussion in the kitchen. The class closes with students practicing nutrition coaching using semi-scripted patient cases and preparing for community teaching.

SERVICE LEARNING

Recipe for Success

Throughout the teaching kitchen course, students participate in a service learning component teaching upper elementary school students from at risk communities about basic healthy nutrition concepts and how what we eat relates to health, and guiding the kids in easy hands-on food preparation.

The community sessions run about 1 hour and are based on the Common Threads Small Bites lessons.

Besides the benefits of service learning, health professional students are able to apply and solidify the newly acquired knowledge by teaching in local classrooms.