Impact of a Brief Culinary Medicine Elective on Medical Students' Nutrition Knowledge, Self-efficacy, and Attitudes

Nutrition's Role in Quality Healthcare in the United States: Opportunities and Education for Pharmacists to Take a Bite of the Apple and Strengthen Their Skills

With global chronic disease rates on the rise, diet and nutrition remain pivotal yet under-appreciated aspects of healthcare, including in pharmacy practice. This perspective paper delves into how current United States health policies support nutrition's role in healthcare and its integration into pharmacy practice. The paper also reviews the landscape of nutrition education and training for pharmacists, pharmacy roles in multidisciplinary teams and interprofessional nutrition care, and the opportunities for post-graduate nutrition-focused certification, training, and continuing education. It advocates for a paradigm shift towards greater emphasis on nutrition within pharmacy practice, to improve skills and benefit quality patient nutrition care.

Culinary Medicine Experiences for Medical Students and Residents in the U.S. and Canada: A Scoping Review

PHENOMENON

Despite the importance of diet in the prevention and management of many common chronic diseases, nutrition training in medicine is largely inadequate in medical school and residency. The emerging field of culinary medicine offers an experiential nutrition learning approach with the potential to address the need for improved nutrition training of physicians. Exploring this innovative nutrition training strategy, this scoping review describes the nature of culinary medicine experiences for medical students and resident physicians, their impact on the medical trainees, and barriers and facilitators to their implementation.

APPROACH

This scoping review used the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist as guides. Eligible publications described the nature, impact, facilitators, and/or barriers of nutrition and food preparation learning experiences for medical students and/or residents. Additional inclusion criteria were location (U.S. or Canada), allopathic or osteopathic, English, human subjects, and publication year (2002 or later). The search strategy included 4 electronic databases. Two reviewers independently screened titles/abstracts and a third reviewer resolved discrepancies. The full-text review consisted of 2 independent reviews with discrepancies resolved by a third reviewer or by consensus if needed, and the research team extracted data from the included articles based on the nature, impact, barriers, and facilitators of culinary medicine experiences for medical trainees.

FINDINGS

The publication search resulted in 100 publications describing 116 experiences from 70 institutions. Thirty-seven publications described pilot experiences. Elective/extracurricular and medical student experiences were more common than required and resident experiences, respectively. Experiences varied in logistics, instruction, and curricula. Common themes of tailored culinary medicine experiences included community engagement/service-based learning, interprofessional education, attention to social determinants of health, trainee well-being, and cultural considerations. Program evaluations commonly reported the outcome of experiences on participant attitudes, knowledge, skills, confidence, and behaviors. Frequent barriers to implementation included time, faculty, cost/funding, kitchen space, and institutional support while common facilitators of experiences included funding/donations, collaboratives and partnerships, teaching kitchen access, faculty and institutional support, and trainee advocacy.

INSIGHTS

Culinary medicine is an innovative approach to address the need and increased demand for improved nutrition training in medicine. The findings from this review can guide medical education stakeholders interested in developing or modifying culinary medicine experiences. Despite barriers to implementation, culinary medicine experiences can be offered in a variety of ways during undergraduate and graduate medical education and can be creatively designed to fulfill some accreditation standards.

Comparison of Effectiveness regarding a Culinary Medicine Elective for Medical Students in Germany Delivered Virtually versus In-Person

(1) Background: The Culinary Medicine elective at the German medical schools of the universities of Göttingen, Giessen, and Brandenburg is a teaching kitchen-based elective aimed at training medical students on how to improve patient counselling on nutrition and lifestyle medicine topics. This curriculum was either delivered virtually (2021) or in-person (2022/2023). Changes in teaching effectiveness were evaluated. (2) Methods: The elective included seven modules in the teaching kitchen for 3 h each. It consisted of a short introduction and a hands-on interactive cooking part illustrating important dietary principles in different disease groups. The elective was conducted virtually in 2021 in a fully interactive setup using videoconference tools. Students in this cohort attended from their private kitchens whereas students in the in-person cohort (2022/2023) attended the same classes in the teaching kitchen. Standardized comparative self-assessment questionnaires on counselling competencies, nutrition knowledge, eating habits, and mental well-being (WHO-5) before and after the elective were used to determine teaching effectiveness. Paired and unpaired t-tests were performed to evaluate results. (3) Results: A total of 70 students (mean semester 6.3) were included in the virtual cohort, and 80 students (mean semester 6.3) were in the in-person cohort. In both, counselling competencies on 25 nutrition and lifestyle medicine topics increased significantly. Significant changes also occurred in most nutrition knowledge categories. Subjective well-being as well as personal attitudes towards nutrition counselling in medical practice improved significantly during the elective. Healthy eating habits improved in both groups as students ate significantly less unfavourable foods. There were no significant differences between the two groups apart from minor differences in nutrition knowledge. (4) Conclusions: The elective in Culinary Medicine improved students counselling competencies, nutrition knowledge, attitudes, well-being, and eating habits with no relevant difference between virtual and in-person teaching.

Uncovering culinary medicine research themes: Current status and future direction

Background: Culinary medicine (CM), an emerging discipline, is a novel approach that focuses on the art of food and cooking to prevent or improve health outcomes among chronic patients suffering from lifestyle diseases. The concept originated in the USA, gaining interest from scholars in medicine, nutrition, nursing, and the gastronomic discipline. Notably, in the last five years, there has been exponential growth in CM literature. In this regard, this study sought to examine the growth, performance and distinct research themes of CM literature over time. Methods: To achieve the study's objectives, this study employs descriptive, performance and bibliometric analysis. The descriptive analysis was applied to examine the growth of the CM literature since its emergence. The performance analysis was used to identify the most influential journals, articles, and authors in the CM domain. The bibliographic coupling analysis was adopted to discover the various research themes of the CM knowledge base. Results: This study identifies three stages of literature development: Early stage, modest growth stage, and emerging stage. Further, the results indicate that most of the studies on CM had been conducted in developed countries. Our findings reveal a clear interest in integrating the CM curriculum into medical/nutrition education programs in recent years. Additionally, the study discovers four distinct main research themes: knowledge assessment, impact measurement, acceptance and efficacy, and implementation of CM. Conclusions: These findings are helpful for scholars in medicine, nutrition, nursing, and gastronomy as they provide an overview of CM's development and research focus. Future studies could focus on expanding the geographical distribution of research on CM and further exploring the identified research themes to gain a deeper understanding of the potential of this approach for improving health outcomes among chronic disease patients.