Q&A: How culinary medicine can be incorporated into clinical settings

Photo Cred: Anna Shvets/Pexels

By Avery St. Onge

The field of culinary medicine is growing, according to Melinda Ring, MD, director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University, and clinical associate professor in the Departments of Medicine and Medical Social Sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

At Osher-NU, she founded a culinary medicine course for health professionals, “Cooking Up Health.” She said she believes that food not only heals and prevents illnesses, but that it can also taste delicious while doing so. She will be presenting, “Culinary Medicine – Cooking Up Health: Anytime, Anyplace,” at this year’s Integrative Healthcare Symposium on February 17-19 at the Hilton Midtown in New York City.

We spoke with Ring about how she began working in the field, the current landscape of culinary medicine, and what it may look like in the future.

Integrative Practitioner: To start, could you tell me a little bit about your background and how you became interested in culinary medicine?

Melinda Ring: I grew up not knowing how to cook. I grew up in the era of T.V. dinners and cupcakes and processed food being king, where really we thought [white] bread was wonderful. When I was graduating from college and in the summer before medical school, I begged my way into a job being a sous chef at the fancy French Italian restaurant in Ann Arbor where I was going to school. I spent the summer learning on the job how to cook. That was my culinary background where I realized, okay, food tastes better when we make it with good ingredients.

On the health side of things, I went to a traditional biomedical school, University of Chicago. Nutrition was very minimally touched on in my training, even less so by the time I got to residency. I did my integrative medicine fellowship and that’s where I realized how important nutrition is to our health. This is built on the background that I had an eating disorder for years when I was in high school through medical school and so, for me, there was very much a good-bad to food. As I learned more through integrative medicine and the science behind why nutrition is so important to our health, it really came to me: we need to be nourishing our body with food, nourishing our brain, eating the food that loves us back, learning to love the food that loves us back—all those kinds of things.

I would teach patients about nutrition, give them some hand-outs, and tell them what to do, but that doesn’t always lead to meaningful change. Then, I learned about the field of culinary medicine and that changed everything.

Integrative Practitioner: How do you define culinary medicine?

Melinda Ring: I like the definition, “the art of cooking combined with the science of medicine and nutrition.” It really is bringing those together. It goes beyond just cooking and it goes beyond just the idea that we should eat healthy food, and it puts them into action. That’s what differentiates it and makes it more powerful. When you give someone the skills to prepare the food that will make them heal instead of just telling them what they should do and making them feel overwhelmed, that’s very powerful.

Integrative Practitioner: What does culinary medicine look like in a clinical setting?

Melinda Ring: Culinary medicine, clinically with patients, can really vary. It can be as extensive as hospitals and private health practitioner offices building kitchen spaces and doing demonstrations or even hands-on classes for patients. That’s the ideal. Again, when people see it in action, when they get to create something themselves, then they’re going to make it again, and see that healthy food can taste delicious. It can also be as simple as a discussion with a patient. While consulting them, instead of just saying, ‘you should be eating x diet,’ suggesting recipes, or YouTube videos, or websites where they can learn how to prepare the food. You don’t have to be a chef or professional cook yourself to recommend cooking to your patients.

Now, one of the things we are seeing coming out of the pandemic is that you can teach cooking virtually. There are virtual classes where health providers are meeting with patients or doing it as a group visit. Culinary medicine can get covered by insurance as a group visit as long as there’s an educational competent and it meets the requirements..

Integrative Practitioner: For culinary medicine to be more incorporated into clinical settings, do you think health professionals need more nutrition education?

Melinda Ring: Absolutely. We know that the current state of education in nutrition itself is abysmal. On the plus side, if we talk specifically about physicians, there was just a congressional act passed about a requirement for more nutrition education in medical training. Right now, in medical school everything else comes first and nutrition is kind of an add-on. I do think other integrative professions are oftentimes much more in-tune with nutrition. In traditional Chinese medicine and ayurvedic training, the role of diet and constitution is really part of the whole training. It’s not just, here, ‘do acupuncture.’ It’s, ‘here do acupuncture, plus think about what is the right diet.’ I think in the integrative world [nutrition] is already inherent to natural approaches to healing but in biomedicine, it has a long way to go.

Integrative Practitioner: Why do you think nutrition isn’t a priority in traditional medicine training?

Melinda Ring: There are guidelines and standards for what medical school needs to include and right now the requirement for nutrition is scant and, therefore, it isn’t given a priority. So, that is certainly one aspect. There is also, particularly in some specialties, a lack of appreciation for the therapeutic and preventive value of nutrition in disease and health. If somebody has been taught to use pharmaceuticals and surgery as their first line treatments, they never gain that appreciation for nutrition. It’s almost become a self-perpetuating problem in that the teachers training today weren’t taught about nutrition, so they can’t teach the people coming behind them about nutrition.

Integrative Practitioner: What do you think the future of culinary medicine looks like?

Some of these movements that we are seeing with the congressional act and insurance now providing coverage, I think these are positive signs that culinary medicine is going to continue to grow in its presence throughout medicine. Our communities, our patients, our clients, they’re already on board. They already think nutrition matters and they’re looking for guidance. It is really a prime opportunity for those in the integrative field who already have a step up in the nutrition language and knowledge to expand the way that they’re teaching and helping their patients by adding culinary medicine into what they’re already doing.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed.