The head of the medical school teaching kitchen at Tulane University was in Shreveport Wednesday to speak at a luncheon hosted by the Martin Luther King Health Center.
Internist Timothy Harlan launched the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane three years ago. His curriculum has since been adopted by 18 medical schools and health care centers nationwide, including one nursing school in Arkansas.
What started as a Tulane School of Medicine elective is now standard course work. Medical students learn fundamentals of food preparation and how to talk about it with patients.
“We take all that information they’re learning in the first two years -- pre-clinical information, biochemistry, physiology, metabolism, cofactors and all of the nutritional concepts -- and we translate that into the conversation that you’re going to have in the examination room with your patient about food,” Harlan said.
Estimates put diabetes care at $240 billion a year. Harlan says if diabetic Americans adopted a diet based on Mediterranean principles the cost of related medications could be slashed, saving billions. A healthy diet may not cure an illness, Harlan says, but it can help medications work more effectively.
“I am a dyed-in-the-wool, allopathic, Western statins-writing physician,” Harlan said, who also is Tulane’s assistant dean of clinical services. “I believe in the power of what we’ve been doing in medicine for the past 50 years. When you combine those medications and interventions with a really healthy diet, the effect is synergistic.”
Harlan says he’s in talks with many more medical schools, and the focus of the Goldring Center is shifting to disseminating its culinary medicine curriculum nationwide.
Tulane’s 4,500-square-foot teaching kitchen is a state-of-the-art facility and can accommodate 20 students for hands-on classes. The center also offers free community cooking classes that focus on healthy nutrition to prevent obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
