Perhaps the next time you see your doctor, he might finish the visit with a reminder to take a medication and a conversation about cooking salmon.
In a “teach the teachers” experiment, health care professionals have been learning to cook, as well as learning nutritional science, at a conference that has been presented eight times in the last few years by Harvard University and the Culinary Institute of America. The idea behind “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives — Caring for Our Patients and Ourselves” is that doctors and other health care professionals who know how to cook healthfully might be more likely to get patients to do the same.
“The conceptual mode for this program was influenced by the observation that for health care professionals, practicing a healthful behavior oneself (for example: exercise, wearing a seat belt) is a powerful predictor of counseling patients about these same behaviors,” researchers wrote in a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine.
The participants — 219 people before the conference and 192 three months after — took an anonymous survey in 2010. The researchers noted a limitation of their work is that the results were limited to a three-month follow-up, and it’s impossible to know whether the reported changes in behavior were sustained.
