Eating the right food isn't enough to keep you healthy, preparation of these food the right way is also necessary to help you get the most nutrients from your food while lowering down the risk of diseases.
Part of the medical students' curriculum is learning some culinary skills such as how to sauté, simmer and season healthy, homemade meals despite brainstorming about Cell Biology and Neuroscience.
As reported in Quartz, Tulane University School of Medicine's fresh and sophomore students in Louisiana have been figuring out how to prepare food in a way they can give patients some assistance with making practical dietary changes to enhance their wellbeing since 2012. Since the program launched, Tulane has established the country's first med school-affiliated teaching kitchen and considered a full-time chef as an instructor.
There are now sixteen accredited medical schools and two non-medical schools, the Children's Hospital San Antonio-Sky Lakes Residency Program and the Nursing School at Northwest Arkansas Community College. Just last month, Tim Harlan, who leads Tulane's Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine told the James Beard Foundation conference that about 10% of America's medical schools train students how to prepare food with Tulane's program. It also offers continuing medical education programs with a certification for culinary medicine, for doctors, their assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and registered dietitians.
"Physicians talk about nutrition and diet all the time, but they don't talk about it in a way that communicates change to their patients," says Dr. Timothy Harlan, Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine executive director. "Our goal is to teach medical students and residents how to cook and translate the information that they learn in the first two years of medical school - the pre-clinical basic sciences - with the conversations that they are going to have with their patients about food."
Harlan emphasized that their focus is not about nutrition but about food. In collaboration with the culinary school Johnson & Wales, the program seeks to help doctors give much better understanding and knowledge about health to their patients.
"We translate the preponderance of dietary evidence for the American kitchen," Doctor Harlan told Quartz.
The cost is to be given consideration as well as the nutritional value for diet-related diseases which are often linked to low income communities, including the New Orleans community that Tulane's kitchen likewise accommodates. Harlan also added that this also works out well for aspiring doctors who are self-supporting.
"The fact that doctors are now learning to cook is like a revolution," said Sam Kass, a former White House chef and senior nutrition policy advisor, at the James Beard conference.
The cooking lessons includes lectures, reading and as well as group critical thinking. Although the program starts extensively for first and second year students with an angle on the Mediterranean diet and basic knife handling skills included in the first "module", Harlan reveals they are developing about 30 more modules for third and fourth year students.Those will concentrate on particular like congestive heart failure, HIV and celiac disease.
Harlan anticipates a huge change the way doctors give remedy chronic illness and the coverage of insurance companies. At the conference, Kass outlined a future where doctors write recipes as prescriptions and insurance companies treat food as a reimbursable expense. Harlan predicts that care plans will incorporate menu planning, recipes and maybe even programming to get the ingredients delivered to patients. "Call me up in ten years and let's see if that's true."
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