8 NOVEMBER 2023IN MY OPINIONCulinary Medicine for a Healthier LifestyleBy Gloria Richard-Davis, M.D., Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Program Director for the Culinary Medicine Program, The University of Arkansas for Medical SciencesCulinary medicine is a relatively new evidence-based field that blends the art of food and cooking with the science of medicine. It focuses on using food to live healthier lives and fight chronic diseases like diabetes by making health-promoting foods more palatable, affordable, easy to prepare and accessible.The Culinary Medicine Program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) includes a robust curriculum purchased from The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University, which was founded in 2012 as the first teaching kitchen operated within a medical school. The curriculum includes more than 32 components focusing on the basics of culinary medicine and numerous diseases that better nutrition could prevent or manage. The program is designed to provide 24 hours of nutrition education in an eight-week course-- with the didactic portion delivered online to two cohorts each semester.We start with lessons on safety and sanitation, weight management and portion control before progressing to instruction on fats, food allergies and intolerance, proteins and amino acids, vegetarian diets and eating disorders, sodium, potassium and hypertension, simple versus complex carbohydrates and the significance to diabetes control and prevention, and the geriatric diet for a fast growing segment of our population.Last October, we opened the UAMS teaching kitchen, which serves as a classroom for students and residents and is also available for limited use for employee and community courses.It includes 10 cooking stations, each with an induction burner; a large prep area; lots of storage; ovens in the back; Gloria Richard-Davis
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