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Culinary medicine and community partnership: Hands-on culinary skills training to empower medical students to provide patient-centered nutrition education
This 2019 article describes a project that aimed to improve the nutritional knowledge of medical students in the United States. Currently, 71% of medical schools in the U.S. do not provide the minimum benchmark of 25 hours of nutrition education set by the National Academy of Sciences. It is becoming increasingly important to educate these medical students on nutrition and preventive medicine since the economic burden and the morbidities associated with obesity and poor diet are both growing. The Keck School of Medicine of USC (KSOM) therefore partnered with LA Kitchen (a local teaching kitchen) and the Wellness Center at LA County Medical Center to develop a hands-on culinary and nutrition course. This course was designed to teach students practical skills and knowledge that they will be able to apply to their own lives as well as pass onto patients. After the first 3 years of the course, the class was well received by the students and their nutritional knowledge appeared to have improved. Moreover, the course seemed to enhance the students’ confidence in lifestyle counseling and their personal culinary skills. Thanks to these highly promising findings, the project now aims to incorporate nutritional education more broadly into the required preclinical curriculum at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. [NPID: culinary education, cooking, nutritional intervention, medical students, medicine, diet, nutrition]
Year: 2019
