November 18, 2025
5 min read
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Key takeaways:
- The Culinary Medicine Program and updated Culinary Medicine Curriculum offer practical tips for healthy eating.
- The resources were created by a chef-physician with hands-on experience in nutritional science.
DALLAS — The American College of Lifestyle Medicine recently unveiled two open-source resources to educate health care professionals and patients about healthy eating and cooking techniques.
These resources — the Culinary Medicine Program and updated second edition of the Culinary Medicine Curriculum — are designed to be practical and accessible “to help people discover that healthy eating doesn’t have to be complicated, expensive or out of reach,” Michelle Hauser, MD, MS, MPA, FACP, FACLM, DipABLM, president-elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), said in a press release.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s Culinary Medicine Program and updated Culinary Medicine Curriculum offer practical tips for healthy eating. Image: Adobe Stock
Hauser, a nationally recognized leader in culinary medicine, led the creation of the Culinary Medicine Program. It includes 115 videos on cooking skills, kitchen knowledge and healthy recipes. The videos can be used independently by clinicians and patients or in conjunction with the updated curriculum — also created by Hauser — which features nutrition education and counseling skills that are tailored to medical schools, residency training and community teaching kitchens.
Healio spoke with Hauser, who is also clinical associate professor and obesity medicine director at Stanford University School of Medicine, at the ACLM’s annual conference to learn more about the culinary program and curriculum.
Healio: Can you talk about how the culinary program helps move “food is medicine” beyond a buzz-term?
Hauser: This is accessible and doable. It’s something that you can really bring home and heal yourself, heal your family and enjoy. I was a chef before I was a doctor. I’ve never been able to lose the “it has to taste good” feeling, which I think has served me well because people aren’t really interested in eating food that doesn’t taste good. If you can make it healthy and taste good, then that’s the key.
Healio: Where did you get your inspiration for the recipes?
Hauser: I was thinking about it from an education perspective. I had come into medicine already as a chef, so I had done formal culinary training. I knew all the basic skills one would need to learn to be a really effective and good home cook. By the time I wrote this curriculum, I had already been teaching nutrition to health care professionals, medical students and other health professional trainees. So, I also knew what was really important for patient care.
In each of the sessions of the curriculum, there’s a nutrition and counseling — making it real, making it accessible — theme, and then also a cooking theme. So, by the time you work your way through all of them, you really have a good grasp of it.
I tried to break it up into bite-sized pieces so it wasn’t like drinking from a fire hose. Then I designed the recipes to fit in that. They’re a sampling of things that I could teach, going through world flavors, cooking techniques and nutrition counseling — eating healthy food that’s enjoyable.
Healio: What are some of your favorite recipes or cooking techniques in the program?
Hauser: This is like asking who is your favorite kid, right?
I definitely think that people should step beyond the recipes in the curriculum. They’re really meant to highlight certain skills I want people to learn as a jumping off point. I hope that after they go through a full course, they aren’t looking at recipes too much afterward. They might use them for inspiration, or they might glance a few times while they’re cooking, but they don’t feel like they are a slave to them, as many people who are new to cooking often do. It’s pretty easy to understand what you can deviate from and how to still get a good product. As you learn more about cooking, you become more comfortable.
But in terms of my favorite… a really high-yield thing that I use a lot in my own life when I’m super busy — I don’t think I’ve spoken to anyone lately who’s not super busy, so that’s a universal theme — is in session five of the Culinary Medicine Curriculum on building healthy bowls. This is where you can repurpose a lot of the ingredients found elsewhere in the curriculum. You can use it to make a meal from scratch, or you can use leftovers from other dishes and turn it into a beautiful, colorful, flavorful, balanced meal. You’re not having to do everything from scratch all the time. And you can prepare it ahead of time, too, so you have something to grab and go.
I made a lot of use of things that you could freeze and defrost, like whole grains, beans and roasted foods. I also like that it highlights the fact that you can take basic ingredients and make them in a different way to create something else. So, if you have five ingredients and you put, say, a lemon tahini dressing on it, you get a Mediterranean Eastern flair. But if you use soy, sesame and ginger, it tastes more Asian. So, you can mix up the sauce without needing hundreds of different ingredients. That said, I have little kids, so I understand not wanting different foods to touch. What I like is that you can serve this deconstructed. There is usually a base of greens or whole grain, and then a protein-rich ingredient, then colorful vegetables and toppings with some kind of sauce. It doesn’t have to be mixed together. You can serve it salad-bar style and people can pick what they want.
Healio: The HHS Secretary recently called on medical schools to adopt nutrition requirements. Can you discuss how the updated curriculum could help address the gap in nutrition education?
Hauser: This is really important and definitely a great window of opportunity to get more nutrition education in medical schools, where it’s absolutely needed.
One thing that often gets lost in this conversation is that we do have experts in nutritional counseling already, but a lot of the policies don’t actually allow people to access them. I’d love to see in conjunction with expanding education in medical school that we also expand coverage for dietitian visits for people before they get sick. People who are at risk for getting sick often don’t have coverage — they have to be sick first. We really want to break that cycle.
Right before the ACLM conference last year, we published in JAMA Network Open recommended competencies that medical students should learn about nutrition. The Culinary Medicine Curriculum was designed to cover the gaps that aren’t covered in traditional nutrition education and meets most of the competencies in the JAMA paper. Is it fully plug-and-play where it will cover everything? No, but it really was meant to augment learning about micronutrients and deficiencies and things that are typically covered. What’s always been missing is how you talk to people about food in a way that meets them where they are, is engaging, and gives them doable approaches to making healthy dietary changes and educates them about why that’s important.
Healio: What else do you want clinicians to know about the Culinary Medicine Program and Culinary Medicine Curriculum?
Hauser: I really try to reduce barriers to entry. You don’t have to wait until you have a fancy teaching kitchen and be certified in multiple specialties, including culinary arts, to be able to teach culinary medicine. These resources give practical tips where you can start today on improving nutrition and culinary education. There are over 100 videos that show all the techniques. I want to encourage people to get in there and take a look at the materials. I have to believe that you’re going to find something you’re going to be able to use right away, and hopefully even make something tasty for dinner.
Sources/Disclosures
Source:
Healio Interviews
References:
Disclosures:
Hauser reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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