She and 14 other students spent a recent evening making dinner as part of a two-month culinary medicine class to train doctors, dentists and dietitians that the university began offering last spring. Using case studies and cooking, the course aims to convince future medical professionals that good, affordable food targeting specific diseases can be as important as medication.
To prescribe food as treatment, doctors need to know more about it, said Corby Kummer, a journalist and the executive director of the food and society policy program at the Aspen Institute.
The idea isn’t to help doctors throw better dinner parties, but to understand how certain diseases like Type 2 diabetes, renal failure and even some cancers can be prevented or managed through targeted food intervention.
“The point is to have doctors tell a patient you need to see a nutritionist and have that nutritionist paid for,” said Mr. Kummer, who lectures at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science.
