What's cooking? New med school elective serves up important lessons for doctors

There’s something cooking at the University of Alberta’s school of medicine. For the last three months, the school has been running an elective culinary medicine course that has students simmering sauces and baking muffins in a vast, professional kitchen.“There are two goals for this elective: to promote personal wellness among medical students—because if we’re not eating well, we can’t function properly and that affects patient care—and also being able to take that personal knowledge and experience into clinical settings and being comfortable speaking about nutrition and diet management,” said Lauren Wong, a third-year medical student at the University of Alberta and co-lead of Food is Medicine, a six-module course running from October 2023 to April 2024 and open to first- and second-year medical students.The course opened for registration last September with a 24-person limit. Interest was so strong, with more applicants than available spots, that participant selection had to be done through a lottery draw, said Wong.The idea for the elective came to her towards the end of her first year in med school, when she had become more interested in cooking but noted the lack of nutrition training in undergraduate medical education.Other organizations, such as the University of Toronto, have offered culinary medicine workshops in past years but these have largely been one-off events with perhaps one or two cooking sessions included. There is a culinary medicine lab at the Northern Ontario School of of Medicine, which launched the program in 2018.“I had initially gone to my school’s undergrad office and was trying to propose integrating more nutrition content into our curriculum but just because of how packed medical school curriculum already is, it is quite hard to get anything in there without taking something else out,” explained Wong. “And so I came up with this idea instead of starting out with an elective as a way to get the idea out there and to try and garner more faculty and student support for it so that, in the long run, we hope to have something further incorporated into the curriculum for all students.”Read: Is there a doctor in the kitchen? Why this FP is taking nine months off to study at Le Cordon BleuOverseen by preceptor Dr. Chris Koo— a graduate of Paris' Le Cordon Bleu and former contender on the CBC’s The Great Canadian Baking Show—the Food is Medicine course combines lectures by dieticians, nutritionists and physicians with actual time spent cooking. The Edmonton Public Library, which recently built a state-of-the-art kitchen, agreed to host these cooking sessions in its new space.“We’re using that kitchen space so that people can get hands-on experience and develop skills like knife skills and using different kitchen equipment,” said Wong. “We also have people working in groups in the the kitchen so that they get that social component of cooking, where you get to meet people within your own class and from other classes. And you get to learn from other people because we have participants with different cooking skills and levels of experience.”A dietician is present during all these cooking sessions, said Wong.“They highlight things like the macronutrients and micronutrients in the recipes that we’re cooking as well as fun facts or nutritional facts about the different ingredients we’re using and how we might be able to use some of these facts in nutritional counselling with our own patients,” said Wong. “There’s definitely a focus on the clinical applications of what we’re learning.”Another important benefit from working in the kitchen with a dietician? Learning when it's appropriate to refer a patient to a diet and food nutritition specialist, said Wong.Most of the recipes chosen for the course are plant-based and tested either by the lecturer who proposed the recipe or by the university’s nutrition faculty. The goal, said Wong, is to promote a sustainable way of eating while also promoting health through better food choices.“In terms of a public health lens, we get taught that exercise and diet are important parts of health management but we don’t get expansion on how we should be counselling the patient about nutrition, or that there are some specific things about diet that could impact heart disease, for example,” said Wong. “So really, this (course) is just really about equipping students with more tools that they can use in clinical practice.”Read: Food for thought: Uncovering the complexities of drug–nutrition interactions

What's cooking? New med school elective serves up important lessons for doctors

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