Culinary Medicine: A CMA Community
As the technical side of medicine continues to evolve at a pace nearing light speed, an older aspect of medicine is experiencing a renaissance – culinary medicine. With each passing year, school curriculums must realign with the explosion of knowledge. Sadly, one area that has continued to shrink with time is health, and especially nutrition education. Even as one matriculates along the way to becoming a physician, the medical side of food becomes divided into smaller parts of disease processes- DM, HTN, CVD, PKU, UC, and so on.
As the nation has become unhealthier, with poor lifestyle habits, medicine has started a resurgence back toward basics that were once taught in elementary school. A few decades ago, physicians pulled out their script pads and wrote a prescription for exercise to encourage deconditioned patients to embrace healthy practices. Now more than ever the link between what a patient eats and does has emerged as a strong determiner of a person’s overall health. And somehow in the small window of time with patients during which screenings must occur for health maintenance, immunizations, depression/anxiety, domestic violence, etc the physician needs to address diet and exercise.
The aspirations of the Culinary Medicine Community are to develop a cooperative group of physicians to cook together (virtually for now), cook with their patients, share recipes, patient info materials, research from culinary medicine, farm to table- garden building to harvesting, adding on exercises such as Walk With a Doc with our patients or each other, and other inspirations. Cooking with others is a time to connect with the earth through food, skills with our hands the yields consumable results, and grounding with nutrition for the soul and body. The hope is to have an event each month that includes demonstrations by chefs, cooks, and ourselves.
The CMA Culinary Medicine Community website will be launched soon and all Central Ohio physicians are welcome to join.
Join Dr. Lottes and Rosemary E. Riley, PhD, LD for the next virtual CMA Culinary Medicine event: "Evening of Culinary Medicine: Harvest in the Fall" October 27th at 7pm!
This session menu will be a Vegan Tomato Bisque and a Tomato Bisque with Cream.