For people fighting illness, the right nutrition can make a world of difference. A new course in the University of Kansas School of Medicine demonstrates how food can be medicinal — especially for those with allergies. Taken a step further, it’s about teaching medical students the role of nutrition in wellness and how to communicate solutions to patients who struggle with access to healthy food.
“It’s about practicing medicine in a different way,” said Marissa Love, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine. “Students aren’t sure what to expect coming in, and there are various levels of food expertise in the class.” She added that while some students may have never eaten a lentil, others in the course may even follow a plant-based diet. The course exposes every student to specific cases where patients can benefit from changes in their diets. The goal is to help future doctors motivate their patients to eat healthier and to assist their patients in overcoming barriers. Students also learn about food deserts and food swamps.
The course was designed by the American College of Culinary Medicine, which provides courseware to more than 60 academic medical centers in the United States.
Since December 2023, 30 students have enrolled in the week-long elective course in the School of Medicine, offered to first- and second-year students. In partnership with other departments, Love teaches the students, who discover ways culinary medicine can affect how they treat patients.
“Each day the students get a new case file,” Love said. “We talk about issues the patient faces, including things like allergies, food insecurity and living in food swamps — places where mainly processed and fast foods are available.”
The students then head into a kitchen in the KU Clinical Research Center in Fairway, Kansas, which is overseen by the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition in KU School of Health Professions. There, the medical students cook meals based on a specific case, then reflect as a group. “By discussing lived experiences in class, that makes it easier for these future doctors to relate to their patients,” Love said.
Grace Gyllenborg, a second-year medical student from Leawood, Kansas, took the course in February. She said it opened a whole new world for her at a time when she was trying to choose a specialty. “I want to be a primary care physician, but I’m also considering an emphasis in sports medicine,” she said. “I live in a world where supplements provide nutrition, but now I understand more explicitly how to get the right nutrients from the right foods.”
The University of Kansas Medical Center Botanic Gardens assisted by providing the numerous gardens around campus for students to plant and harvest foods. They harvested the fresh vegetables and herbs, wrote recipes and prepared their dishes — a method Love refers to as “seed to table.”
aside to grow vegetables and herbs for the culinary
medicine class. These planters dot campus, and they
also are available to other students, faculty and staff.
Students spend a lot of time in the garden with Sarah Norris, M.S., program manager for the community gardens in Landscape Services at KU Medical Center, who helps educate them about food from the ground up. “I try to impress on future doctors that gardening is a healthy and therapeutic activity,” she said, “so that when they find themselves in front of their patients, they can talk about it from a place of understanding.”
Some students show up with gardening experience, but some students have never set foot in one. “They are familiar with carrots, but don’t know what they look like in the garden, or that the tops are edible,” Norris said.
There’s also a summer intensive course that includes cooking modules, observing clinical counseling regarding food choices and volunteering in the community to learn about barriers to healthy eating that patients commonly face.
The culinary medicine course is a collaboration originally between Love and Margaret Smith, M.D., MPH, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, who is board-certified in culinary medicine, and Clare Brady, M.D., a clinical instructor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. A critical piece of the collaboration included Debra Sullivan, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Dietetics and Nutrition at the School of Health Professions.
“It is critical that medical students learn about nutrition,” Sullivan said. “A poor diet is linked to most of the leading causes of death in the United States. In their future careers, they will need to be able to discuss nutrition accurately and confidently with their patients as a way to prevent and treat most of the common chronic diseases. Providing them with the knowledge and skills for eating healthy improves their own knowledge and provides them with practical tools to use with their patients.”
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