Culinary Medicine Brings New Facet to Medical School Education
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School offers classes for medical students to teach future physicians cooking and nutrition basics
'If you know how to cook, you will be able to talk to your patients. Research shows that patients listen to their doctors. We can bring a nutritionist in, but I think if their doctor talks to them, the impact is quite positive for the patient.'– Emine Ercikan Abali, an RWJMS associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology
When trying to entice students to participate in an event, nothing beats an offer of free food. So as a group of first-year medical students at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) were exiting an exam last fall, Peter Avvento and Vanpat Pensuwan steered them to a table with free brownies.
“‘Oh this is good, what did you do? Is there a little bit lower sugar?’” said Avvento, recalling the reaction. “We said, ‘Nope, this brownie that you’re eating is made from black beans.’ “
Avvento, of Manalapan, and Pensuwan, of Nutley, both second-year RWJMS students, whipped up the black bean brownies to whet the appetites of their fellow medical students for a Culinary Medicine program that they are helping to import to Rutgers from the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans.
Launched as an elective for 15 students, the goal of Culinary Medicine is to weave a better understanding of healthy eating into the everyday interactions physicians have with their patients.
Carol A. Terregino, RWJMS' senior associate dean for education, said a mutual colleague introduced her to Tim Harlan, aka “Dr. Gourmet,” an internist who cooked up the Culinary Nutrition movement at Tulane and was looking for national partners. Terregino brought Harlan and his sidekick, Chef Leah Sarris, to New Brunswick a year ago to get the Rutgers program off the ground. Pensuwan, who attended culinary school before switching to medicine, spent the summer completing a fellowship at the Tulane program to learn how it was run.
“This guy has started a movement that I think is really going to revolutionize not only the way we teach students to understand nutrition, but also teach them how to teach their patients,” Terregino said. Working in collaboration with the Department of Food Science, she is eager to move the program at Rutgers onto the front burner by finding a private funder, the path taken by Tulane with Whole Foods.
The Rutgers program is being managed by Emine Ercikan Abali, an RWJMS associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, who says a patient’s personal physician can play a critical role in good nutrition. “If you know how to cook, you will be able to talk to your patients,” Abali said. “Research shows that patients listen to their doctors. We can bring a nutritionist in, but I think if their doctor talks to them, the impact is quite positive for the patient.”
Culinary Medicine is based on the Mediterranean diet and is designed to be affordable in order to reach lower-income populations which have been particularly susceptible to obesity. For instance, students are taught how to prepare a nutritious salad for $2 per serving.
“It’s not a calorie restrictive diet per se, but simple changes that have been shown to help with your health,” Abali said. “You teach your patients that instead of buying a can of beans, buy fresh beans, make your own and freeze them. Then you can use them in many different things which is going to save a lot of money.”
Patients battling hypertension could be encouraged to look at the DASH Diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) which has been shown to decrease blood pressure by up to 11 percent, Avvento said. “The DASH diet is not only about decreasing sodium, it’s about increasing fresh fruits and vegetables and the amount of potassium that you eat,” he explained. “You eat mashed potatoes? Maybe you want to make roasted mashed sweet potatoes instead because that will raise your potassium a little bit.”
The Culinary Medicine class has been meeting in the kitchen at Davidson Hall on the Douglass Campus.
“We have four different groups and each group makes a different recipe,” Avvento said. “We go around and we taste and compare. In the two sessions that we’ve had, the biggest ‘wow’ moment was the mashed sweet potatoes. We had one group boil them, and we had another group roast them before they were mashed. The difference was night and day.”
Better understanding of nutrition is critical, Abali argues, for America to meet the challenge of obesity. “I did cancer research, but it’s surpassing almost the problems with cancer,” she said. “Cancer is going down, thankfully, for many of them, but obesity is like an octopus. It has so many ways it causes problems – cholesterol, gout, diabetes. It affects the whole metabolism of a patient.”
Avvento said he has detected no skepticism among his fellow students that Culinary Medicine, like diet crazes, is just a passing fad. “I think maybe five, 10 years ago you may have run into that,” he said. “But our current crop of students believes very strongly in this.”