TMC PULSE

July 2018

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13 T M C » P U L S E | J U LY 2 0 1 8 Providing solutions Although the causes of obesity are clear, simply telling Americans to drop the extra pounds hasn't worked. "We know why people are obese. We know the reasons behind it. We know what they need to change, but what's lacking is how to tell people to do it," McWhorter said. "We can tell people, 'You need to lower your BMI, you need to reduce your heart disease risk, etc.,' but we don't tell them how to actually do it. That's that missing link. … It's one of the reasons we're seeing a trend that's gradually increasing." The Nourish Program at UTHealth combines culinary medicine with nutrition education. Culinary medicine is a hands-on, evidence-based approach that merges nutrition and culinary science to teach people in the community how to cook for optimal health. "It's a food-first education model," said Laura Moore, director of the Nourish Program. "We start with food, whether it's from the garden or from the grocery store, and then we take it into the kitchen and make healthy food taste good." Preparing food that is healthy and delicious is an important strategy to ensure people cultivate and continue good nutrition habits. "If we can teach people how to make healthy food taste good, that solves a lot of the problem," McWhorter said. "If food tastes good, people will eat it. If it tastes bad, they might eat for a small amount of time, as long as their will allows them to. But we all know that the will to do something is very small. It doesn't last. When food tastes good, you're going to eat it and you enjoy it." The doctor is in … the kitchen In addition to helping community members learn how to cook, the Nourish Program also allows medical professionals—including physi- cians, medical students, residents and nurses—to swap their scrubs for aprons. The program isn't intended to produce master chefs, but to teach basic cooking skills with nutrition information that can be shared by health care providers treat- ing overweight and obese patients. "We believe that if we start at the top with our physicians and work all the way down, we're spreading the same word across the board to every- one and we're all on the same page," Moore said. Despite obesity's link to a slew of preventable chronic diseases, fewer than one-fifth of American medical schools make a nutrition course manda- tory for students, according to David Eisenberg, M.D., director of culinary nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. (continued)

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