Perhaps the next time you see your doctor, he might finish the visit with a reminder to take a medication and a conversation about cooking salmon.
In a “teach the teachers” experiment, health-care professionals have been learning to cook, as well as learning nutritional science, at a conference that has been presented eight times in the last few years by Harvard University and the Culinary Institute of America.
The idea behind “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives — Caring for Our Patients and Ourselves” is that doctors and other health-care professionals who know how to cook healthfully might be more likely to get patients to do the same.
“The conceptual mode for this program was influenced by the observation that for health-care professionals, practising a healthful behaviour oneself (for example: exercise, wearing a seatbelt) is a powerful predictor of counseling patients about these same behaviors,” researchers wrote in a letter in an issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine this week.
The participants — 219 people before the conference and 192 three months after — took an anonymous survey in 2010.
The researchers noted a limitation of their work is that the results were limited to a three-month follow-up, and it’s impossible to know whether the reported changes in behaviour were sustained.
But the participants reported changes: Before the conference, they cooked 58 per cent of their meals, and 64 per cent afterward; they ate more whole grains, nuts and vegetables; and while 46 per cent said before the conference that they could successfully advise an overweight patient on nutrition and lifestyle, 81 per cent said they could do so afterward.
“We need enhanced educational efforts aimed at translating decades of nutrition science into practical strategies, whereby healthy, affordable, easily prepared and delicious foods become the predominant elements of a person’s dietary lifestyle,” the researchers, led by Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School, wrote.
Eisenberg is also a member of the scientific advisory committee and consultant to the culinary institute.
