When the Prescription Is a Recipe

Posted by jesuslewis on August 11th, 2017

After years of telling patients to skip junk food and prepare homemade meals, a growing number of doctors and medical groups are now going a step further and teaching them how to cook. Some are building teaching kitchens or creating food pantries right next to their practices. Others are prescribing culinary education programs in hopes of improving their patients’ nutrition and overall health. Some medical schools have even introduced culinary curriculums to train more doctors to talk to patients about food.

Dr. Nimali Fernando, a pediatrician in Spotsylvania, Va., noticed that many of her patients’ concerns could be traced to poor diet — even problems that may not seem connected, like bed-wetting. She started a food blog, and soon began offering cooking classes out of a church basement kitchen. In 2014 she opened Yum Pediatrics, a nutrition-based pediatrics practice that included a 600-square-foot teaching kitchen. She also created the Dr. Yum Project, a nonprofit with a preschool nutrition curriculum now taught in several Virginia schools.

“I needed to do more than just give patients a pamphlet. I had to have a kitchen in my office,” Dr. Fernando said. “I try to give a lot of prescriptions that are just recipes to see if we can fix an issue with food.”

Dr. Fernando said she has learned that poor food choices can be the root of many seemingly unrelated issues.

“Sometimes parents say their kids have symptoms of anxiety and are wetting the bed and they feel their child needs to see a counselor or needs medication,” Dr. Fernando said. But when she asks about diet, it may be that the child is not eating enough fiber, which leads to constipation. And constipation, in turn, can aggravate the bladder, causing bed-wetting. “That’s when you can connect the dots and see how food is often intertwined in their symptoms.”

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RECENT COMMENTS

Abcdef 16 hours ago
I know Nimali Fernando (Dr. Yum) personally, and I can say she is even more wonderful than this article conveys. If you live in or near...
Greg D. 16 hours ago
Given the central role that food plays in our health and overall well-being, the opportunity to bring the world of chefs, physicians, and...
Lisa Radinovsky 18 hours ago
I'm really glad to hear that more physicians are paying attention to their patients' nutrition and helping them improve their diets but...
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A perk of having a kitchen right next to her office, Dr. Fernando said, is that she can take patients right in and demonstrate something she wants them to try, such as how to grind flaxseed. That costs the patients nothing. But patients pay out-of-pocket for cooking classes, which vary in cost depending on the length. For example, a five-day “food adventure” camp for 7- to 12-year-olds costs 5. A popular class on how to make nutritious baby food costs .50.

Claudia Castro of Stafford, Va., and her daughter Michelle, 14, began taking lessons in Dr. Fernando’s kitchen after a blood test showed that Michelle was prediabetic.

One of the first recipes Michelle and her mother learned to make in Dr. Fernando’s kitchen was for bean burgers.

“Dr. Fernando took the time to tell us and then show us how to make the food she wants Michelle to eat to be healthy,” Mrs. Castro said. “We also now drink almond milk, we have vegetables and salads, very little red meat. Even when we eat out, we eat healthier.”

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