Last April, when Yale Medical School, in partnership with the Yale New Haven Health System, opened the doors to the new Digestive Health Center in North Haven, it included the Irving and Alice Brown Teaching Kitchen. This kitchen has become the home for one of the medical school’s newest courses: Defining “Healthy”: Culinary Medicine for Chronic Disease Prevention.
The course, co-taught by Nate Wood, MD, and Max Goldstein, the lead dietitian chef, integrates instruction in nutrition, cooking, and evidence-based science. Wood and Goldstein work with students to identify the health-promoting components of evidence-based diets and gain an understanding of how diet impacts disease. And students do all the cooking.
Wood said that the motivation for the course stemmed from the knowledge gaps he saw between dietetics, medicine, and cooking. Dieticians know how to plan for a healthy diet but not necessarily how to cook. Chefs have the skills to make a meal but typically don’t receive training in nutrition. And physicians, who combat diseases brought on by a poor diet, often serve as a first point of contact for people interested in making better choices.
“Food is a problem, but it can also be a solution, especially if we can bridge the gap among physicians, dietitians, chefs, and patients. Culinary medicine is not only vital to patient care, but it can also provide necessary nutrition education for students, medical trainees, and health care professionals,” Wood said.
Yale is not the only school to provide instruction in culinary medicine. The first training kitchen, the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University’s School of Medicine, opened in 2012 and the number of programs offering such courses continues to grow. The Health Meets Food culinary medicine curriculum has now been integrated into 33 medical schools, as well as some residency and nursing programs.