According to Culinary Medicine UK our food choices have overtaken smoking as the leading preventable risk factor for diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Despite medical students training for several years some students have reported they only receive as little as two hours of nutritional training.
The Culinary Medicine programme is ‘unique’ and will help to train health professionals, doctors, nurses, dentists and culinary students. The project is run by non-profit organisation Culinary medicine UK at Westminster Kingsway College.
These groups will learn together about the basics of nutritional science and how to create healthy meals that can be adapted to different cultures.
The training module is split into four parts:
- Watching online presentations
- Reading clinical papers online
- A cooking class led by a dietitian chef or doctor
- Discussions about clinical cases and the recipes they created in class.
The new scheme aims to improve junior doctors’ confidence to deal with their patient’s nutritional issues. Around 40 similar schemes have appeared in America over the last decade but this scheme is new to the UK.
Dr Rupy explained: “The UK has been exceptionally slow to adopt this idea. So I decided to use some of the materials from the USA, bring it to the UK and introduce it into a programme with the help of Gary Hunter from the college and Professor Foskett.
"The programme brings different disciplines together, such as professional chefs, dieticians, and registered nutritionists, and when you get this incredible mixture of specialists, incredible things can happen. I really hope to see Culinary Medicine becoming the standard across all medical schools.”
At the launch event Prue Leith informed guests that she believed the Culinary Medicine programme was a “really good idea” because it would enable doctors to inform their patients about nutritional health. If doctors have a better understanding of nutritional health they will be able to offer guidance to their patients who are experiencing obesity, gut problems or high blood pressure.
The Culinary Medicine programme was first launched in the UK at Bristol University where their medical students had a four-week module as part of their undergraduate training in July 2018.