By now, you know that when I hang up my stethoscope at the end of the day I often don an apron and create culinary delights for my family.  On the weekends you may find me gawking at the kitchen gadgets at Sur La Table.  Last year, I spent a week in St. Helena, California at the Culinary Institute of America learning how to cook (see my earlier blogs.)  I learned a great deal at this class and have been experimenting ever since with food as medicine.

Sound Health Physicians has evolved into a preventive practice that not only incorporates primary care internal medicine but nutrition and fitness to create a holistic health practice.  In my over 20-years of practicing in internal medicine I know that food is very important in everyone’s health.  So much of what we eat has effects on our health, making it important for us to treat food as medicine.  Diabetes can be made worse or started by an improper diet.  The same goes for hypertension.  Our dietitian, Frances Arnold, has added an important facet to Sound Health Physicians.  She has already taught a comprehensive weight loss program last winter and plans another session soon.

Last month I attended a one day, two session seminar on culinary medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans.  Culinary medicine is a new medical discipline that uses the concept of proper food and nutrition to cure or prevent diseases.  Tulane University has adopted culinary medicine into it’s medical school curriculum and will be opening the first of it’s kind teaching kitchen in conjunction with Whole Foods in New Orleans.  Part of The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine is to teach people how to cook using ingredients that will promote health and cure disease.  They are finding in their short experience that they have been able to get many of their patient-participants off of many of their blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetic medications.

I learned that one of the most important concepts in teaching nutrition to my patient-members is that it’s about food.  Discussing amounts of calories, percentages of carbohydrates and milligrams of salt is difficult to understand.  Learning to cook and learning to use the proper ingredients is more important than long-winded discussions about eating this or that.

This fall I will begin a series of cooking classes that will take a common recipe that most people already know how to cook and change it to be more healthy while maintaining the great flavors.  For example, at the Tulane conference we cooked 4 different versions of spaghetti from the old-fashioned meat, tomato sauce and white pasta to one version that was made with lentils.  Tasting the different versions really helped me understand that you can make something healthy without sacrificing taste.  In our long-range plans I would like to incorporate a teaching kitchen in our office so we can all work on new, healthy recipes together.  Who knows, perhaps we will be able to write a new cookbook with all of our new, gourmet creations to show you the ways you can utilize food as medicine!

Look forward to more on culinary medicine and how Sound Health Physicians will be incorporating good and healthy eating to it’s curricula.

For one example of how to make your cooking healthier, check out this post on cutting salt without cutting flavor in your tacos!