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May13

Final Week: First Med Student Clinical Elective in Culinary Medicine

Posted in: Common Conditions, Food FAQ's, Wellness and Health

Last week I finished teaching and supervising the first medical student clinical elective in culinary medicine…and credit was given! Awesome!

Each day had assigned reading (peer-reviewed papers, book chapters from my ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine) and viewing (culinary medicine FAQ from viewers and readers, Tulane University basic nutritional science review from their new Center for Culinary Medicine, and more).

As a parting present, I gave a become-an-olive-oil-expert taster, to the right: tiny quantities of differently infused oils (garlic, basil, fig) in tiny quantities: it’s also available online. Identifying flavors is something we’ll do more of next time, especially with herbs and spices. We did identify fava bean maturity, and note the way nutritional content, flavor and texture change as the bean matures (mature fava beans can be planted too).

The week was divided into one basic topic area per day:

1. Hospital and Clinic (seeing patients, meeting other med students);

2. Home, Garden and Kitchen (harvesting, cooking techniques and dish creation, presentation, clean up, with food safety and recipe reading and development);

3. Organizations and Community (participation in Foodbank teaching, food advocacy initatives, and food literacy classes);

4. Research and Writing (curriculum critique, study of questions which arose during the week, work on assigned projects);

5. Menu Analysis and Eating Out (read-between-the-lines assessment, how to order and taste, deconstructing flavors and texture, portion size, control and rate of eating);

6. Shopping (farmer’s market tour, farmer interviews, buying, seasonality, comparison with grocery store fare and products) and Conclusion (final turn in of projects and papers).

7. Rest.

We also integrated personal exercise into this, and that’s something we’ll do more of next time too: so important for students to know what they are asking patients to do. Although Santa Barbara is a paradise for walking, running, climbing and more, many of my own patients prefer to get their exercise inside, so they can count their numbers, which I fully support. Many of you know that I love the Smooth Fitness CE-3.6 Elliptical Trainer; the Sole E35 I previously recommended is sold out.

I don’t have the final numbers yet, but the elective appears to have provided about 60 contact hours in two weeks with 17 faculty members from 6 different disciplines: Internal Medicine, Professional Cooking, Nutrition, Public Health, Community Leadership, Organizational Development. You can read about Week 1 here.

The photo to the right is one idea of how culinary medicine relates to 3 of its contributing disciplines.

Although I believe that it is logically a part of medicine and medical practice, it may be that the people to undertake its refinement and day to day application are actually chefs and cooking instructors, more than physicians or nutritionists or dietitians.

Chefs meet people where they eat, and as more and more of our budget goes towards eating out, it is clear that cooks and chefs outside the home will continue to have an outsized effect on how people eat and choose food.

This, of course, is despite my own, Michael Pollan’s new excellent Cooked book, and Mark Hyman’s exhortations that the key to health is learning to cook. I think it is still the key: but it takes time and skills that the culinary medicine elective teaches.

But who should be its students, leaders and champions? And what should it do? Stay tuned.
May5

Week 1: Med Student Culinary Medicine Clinical Elective (First!)

Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging, Common Conditions, Environmental Health, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

This week I have been teaching the first week of the first clinical elective in culinary medicine in a U.S. Medical School (in Santa Barbara: I love it when students create special circumstances outside of their curriculum). Michael Roizen and I taught the first clinical cooking and nutrition 2 week course onsite at SUNY-Upstate, in winter, and we might have called it culinary medicine, but didn’t. What a blast!

Other than Des Moines University School of Osteopathic Medicine, I think only Tulane offers an elective in culinary medicine (to first and second year students: they have a super well-endowed teaching kitchen and a supportive dean…so glad they’re doing it.) My alma mater Baylor College of Medicine offers a CHEF elective (a series of cooking classes) to basic science students, as has the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt. There’s even been a culinary competition at Stanford among med students.

Culinary medicine means blending the art of cooking and the culinary arts with the science and practice of medicine, and aims to offer delicious menus, recipes, habits and research findings which prevent and treat disease.

So we’ve spent this week reviewing its basic culinary applications (cooking, shopping, eating, menu design, recipe planning, gardening and eating) with basic medical science (nutrition, physiology, chemistry…and plant and animal nutrition, physiology and chemistry, and their interactions).

We also looked at the impact of hunger in the community, and efforts to combat hunger, obesity, and their derivative illnesses, especially in underpriviliged and medically indigent populations. We’re using my ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine as a primary text, and supplementing with many peer-reviewed articles, websites and recommended apps. I’d like to offer the latter on prescription slips for clinicians, if there is interest.

Here for example is Day 1: it started with Alice Waters giving a talk on the importance of integration of culinary skill at all levels (I moderated the dialogue afterwards, at UCSB’s Campbell Hall: also a blast); and then, as you can see from my day 1 handwritten curriculum, we moved to scientific paper and book analyses, seeing patients, and visiting the hospital gift shop, where we found food for sale.

We then met up with the hospital’s culinary director (with whom I arranged a rotation, to see what really goes on in a conscious hospital’s kitchen), and mentioned the treats, left: rice krispies, brownies, more.

They’re working on getting healthier food all around, he said, but people like them…he only had so much say-so. (Really? I thought)(The hospital has come a long way in a short time)(It used to offer cheeseburgers after coronary bypass)(Next month, maybe).

We then cooked for a full day, working on knife skills, the relationship between the garden, orchard, apiary and the kitchen, and creating an entire menu of beverage, appetizer and entree, largely from onsite organic produce. Below is the Rincon Hass Guacamole with Pink Lemonade Zest and Wild Radish Flowers (below, right).

There were no lacerations, I’m happy to report, and we’re entering week 2: stay tuned!

Balancing flavor in a dish; roasting, steaming and grilling; appropriate communication techniques with patients aiming to solve common problems such as obesity and hypertension; and an extensive farmer’s market tour with teaching about nutritional content are upcoming.

Now it’s off to speak to the Next Generation Summit on “The Biology of Weight and Why Women are the Key”: looking forward to these bright entrepreneurs and their ideas.

This short talk is a tad longer than my The Biology of Weight: What Men Need to Lose the Gut at SXSW which I gave in March.

I focus both of these talks down into a simple get strong and healthy plan for men in “Refuel”, coming at the end of the year: sneak peek: http://RefuelMen.com
Oct24

Interview: People’s Pharmacy on NPR and My Research Sources (Accessible!)

Posted in: Food FAQ's, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health
I had the privilege of again speaking with Joe and Terry Graedon of People’s Pharmacy for their legendary podcast and national NPR show. It will be broadcast on December 8, but stay online. We covered a lot:

*how and why I think culinary medicine offers real value to people

*what (and how) women can say to men about their health

*healthy eating for healthy holidays (and weight loss thereafter)

*lowering cholesterol with your diet, and

*the top 4 Food and Nutrition Stories of 2012: what you need to remember

I did a lot of research and preparation for it, and I’ll be unpacking it for weeks. Here are a few quickies.

What women can say to men about their health and diet especially is sometimes touchy. Men want to get healthy, be strong and lean, and take care of themselves.

They just do it differently than do women. Actually, some men just do more steps (with the Precor Treadmill– my favorite). Or the Livestrong Elliptical (ditto). And keep track using the Timex Global Trainer Speed and Distance GPS Watch. Which is also awesome.

Women can help men who are reluctant to see the doctor or lose weight: they just need the right language. I’ll cover more of this on http://manlyeating.com, and in my new book, with a revolutionary new approach to men’s health, next year.

Some cholesterol, statin and supplement answers are in my published ChefMD book (about culinary medicine) and my 5-DVD set . My sources are ones you can use too:

1. Latest in Clinical Nutrition, 2012: Volumes 1-10 (12 DVD Set)

2. Food and Nutrients in Disease Management

3. Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients, Second Edition (nb: will be released 12.12)

And on the web
1. www.naturaldatabase.com (regularly updated by pharmacologists and other scientists).
2. www.pubmed.gov (all peer-reviewed stories, with good filters)
3. www.lpi.oregonstate.edu (tremendous science, especially about cancer and immunity, part of my Dr Oz Show appearance).
P.S. Thrillingly, the Dr Oz Show put the ChefMD book in the running for the New York Times best-seller list—again! We’ll see shortly: until then, the Honeyed Chinese Chicken recipe he and I prepared is free, if you’d like to receive my Paging Dr. La Puma newsletter, “Healthy Bites“.
Aug11

Basic Food as Medicine

Posted in: Food FAQ's, High Cholesterol, Media, Wellness and Health

I had the privilege of speaking with Joe and Terry Graedon, founders of The People’s Pharmacy, on their syndicated NPR show (free podcast here) broadcast today)!, about how we’re trying to make your health and health care awesome with the right food.

Their questions made me think about why it’s so important to help people wherever they are starting.

For example, I love farmer’s markets. I give market tours, I know many farmers personally, I created a PBS DVD library on how to eat healthy (available for a donation to PBS, which I support) and I love to cook locally grown foods.

But most people buy food shipped into supermarkets, and are worried and time-pressed about cooking.

So it’s become more important to me to show how to buy and cook any broccoli, even bad broccoli (as Mark Bittman writes) than to search out the most pristine, tight head. Or to explore the wonders of the youngest broccosprouts (highest in sulforphane, and patented by Johns Hopkins).

Getting people to cook more–and people are catching up and catching on–is the key to helping them lose weight. Especially men.

Thousands of people (according to my Dear ChefMD e-mail!) want to change their cholesterol, blood pressure, back pain, constipation, irritable bowel, heart disease and diabetes. And those who have have great stories.

So if you were going to stock a kitchen medicine chest, like the one I describe in the ChefMD book, and you wanted just 10 foods instead of the 50 I name, what would they be and why? Here are mine:

Broccoli: detoxify carcinogens, reduce estrogen levels

Chilies: faster metabolism, better control of diabetes

Dark Chocolate: lower blood pressure, improve insulin sensitivity

Cinnamon: lower LDL cholesterol, improve insulin sensitivity

Fish: fewer heart attacks, fewer strokes

Garlic: less stomach, colon and rectal cancer; lower blood pressure

Nuts: lower cholesterol, improve satiety

Walnuts: protect brain cells, protect interior arterial linings against junk food

Wine (sensibly): raise HDL (healthy) cholesterol, reduce risk of heart attack, peptic ulcer disease

Yogurt: lower risk of antibiotic related diarrhea; reduce irritable bowel syndrome symptoms
Mar18

3 Foods That Boost Your Sex Drive

Posted in: Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

No, it’s not hype. It’s science.

I gave a talk on “Manly Dieting” to the National Wellness Association at #IHRSA in LA on Culinary Medicine and Manly Dieting this week, and was overwhelmed with the response: 10% of the audience spoke with me afterwards, to ask if they could be in my beta test for men (and bring 9 other men), which we plan to run online later this year. I loved it, and plan to include them. Meanwhile:

1. Walnuts (not drive but performance).

Especially after a fatty (read salami and cheese) meal: walnuts keep your arteries from constricting in response and responding abnormally to exercise and exertion. Walnuts are also high in the amino acid arginine, which you need to make nitric oxide, to keep arteries flexible, and improve your blood flow.

Dosage: 8 walnuts, with your meal, 4 hours before sex. Take with Viagra/Cialis/Levitra, or instead.

b. Beans, legumes and seeds, especially kidney beans, peanuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

These foods are richest in arginine, an amino acid which precedes nitric oxide in the body. And nitric oxide allow vessels to dilate.

An excellent study showed that a supplement high in arginine improved female desire, satisfaction and frequency of sex, regardless of menopausal status. Note: watermelon, which generates arginine indirectly, probably only makes you pee more.

c. Mediterranean foods, if you have a big belly and metabolic syndrome. The diet works to help you burn belly (visceral) fat…which blocks insulin so you store more fat, squeeze your kidney and poison your liver. If you’re a guy, you should know that belly fat turns the testosterone your testes make into estrogen. And drops your ability to make muscle, get lean and strong, and other drops.

The Mediterranean diet as a whole helps women with metabolic syndrome have better sex: better overall desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, pain.

It also helps men overcome erectile dysfunction (ED), also known as impotence. One-third of obese men with ED cure their disease after 2 years of a Mediterranean-style diet and exercise.

Dosage: It’s a meal! Three times daily.