The Role of Culinary Medicine in Nutrition and Health Coaching

On Thursday, March 14th, FMCA welcomed Olivia Thomas, Chief Innovative Officer of Rewire Health, and Laura Klein, owner of Well Seasoned Coaching, for a food-centric webinar complete with a cooking demonstration. Olivia and Laura share their expertise in culinary medicine and how you can apply it to your health coaching practice.

Food is medicine, but it only works if you are actually eating it. When medical providers prescribe diets and food plans or tell patients to “make healthier diet choices,” they don’t go into the details of what ingredients to purchase or how to prepare healthier food. This is where culinary medicine and health coaches bridge the gap.

Culinary medicine takes nutrition recommendations and translates them into “real food and repeatable behaviors.” This includes teaching clients how to cook, shop, adjust their meals to fit their new recommendations, and much more. Health coaches can work with culinary medicine by supporting their clients as they make these dietary changes. This webinar offers great resources, such as apps, websites, and databases health coaches can share with clients.

For health coaches who want to work within this niche, Olivia and Laura discuss ways coaches can incorporate culinary medicine into their practice. This includes partnering with culinary professionals, discussing cooking techniques with clients, or setting up a teaching kitchen. They also highlight training programs where coaches can sharpen their culinary skills and become trained in the emerging field of culinary coaching

Finally, Laura Klein finishes the webinar with a live cooking demonstration. She offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to cook a healthy and versatile meal, One-Pan Ratatouille with Chickpeas. We have shared the recipe below, and even more recipes are available on our blog. Let us know how your version of this meal turns out.

Watch the Replay

Nourishing Change: The Role of Culinary Medicine in Nutrition and Health Coaching

Recipe: One-Pan Ratatouille with Chickpeas

Cooking Instructions

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and pre-heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Toss eggplant, squash, bell peppers, tomatoes, shallots, oil, garlic, chickpeas, thyme and 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon pepper on a rimmed baking sheet and spread into an even layer.
3. Roast until vegetables are slightly softened and charred in spots, about 30 minutes, stirring halfway through roasting.
4. Remove sheet pan from oven.
5. Stir olives, lemon zest, and half of the basil into vegetables and transfer to a platter.
6. Sprinkle with remaining basil and serve.

For more ways to serve this dish or to download this recipe, click here.

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Welcome, everybody. I am Sandra Scheinbaum. If you don’t know me, I am the founder and CEO of FMCA. And I’m so glad that you’re here. I want to welcome all of you to this very, very exciting webinar. We are talking about nourishing change and specifically the role of culinary medicine in nutrition and in health coaching. So, let me tell you a little bit about our fabulous speakers today.

First, let me introduce you to Olivia Thomas. Olivia is a registered dietitian, and she is also the co-founder of Rewire Health. And Laura, Laura Klein, she is a chef and a culinary coach. She is the owner of Well-Seasoned Coaching. She’s on the faculty of the chef coaching program at Harvard University, and she is also the chef at NuCook. So, I’m going to turn it over to Olivia and Laura. Take it away. And if you have questions, please you could see at the bottom of your screen the Q&A. You can submit your questions. We will save time at the end.

Olivia: Perfect. Thank you so much, Sandra, for having us. We’re really excited to talk about culinary medicine. And for the next hour, we hope to do a brief, kind of, didactic component about 20 minutes or so of slides. Then we’ll meet Laura in the kitchen for a cooking demonstration for about 10 minutes, and then we’ll spend the rest of our time chatting and answering your questions. So, thank you all so much and feel free to put your questions in that Q&A section as we go, and we’ll answer them at the end.

So, to begin, what is culinary medicine? Before I answer that question, I first think I need to define what Food is Medicine is. So, Food is Medicine describes food-based interventions that help prevent, manage, and treat chronic diseases. This is not new. People have been using food for medicine for centuries. However, integrating food into our health system is a newer concept and so this triangle here on the right describes Food is Medicine interventions. So, we’ll dive into there first, and then we’ll talk about culinary medicine.

So, this is the NIH definition of Food is Medicine services and activities. It includes medically tailored meals so prescribing people meals with their medical needs, nutritious food referrals and vouchers so helping people pay for healthful foods, medically tailored and healthy food packages and groceries, prescription for nutritious groceries and produce, so if you’ve heard of VeggieRx or Produce Prescriptions. And then lastly, culinary medicine and teaching kitchen programs. And so this is where we’re going to dive in and focus on for the next 45 minutes or so.

So, culinary medicine is the practice of translating nutrition recommendations into real food and repeatable behaviors. And in the literature, you might see two terms. You might see culinary medicine, which refers to culinary in the context of medicine, or culinary nutrition, which is a bit of a broader definition that includes context outside of medicine.

And I like to think about it like riding a bike. So, we learn to ride a bike by going outside, putting our helmet on, and practicing, and falling off your bike, and trying it again, and it didn’t work, and you have to try it again. The same goes for nutrition. So, talking to a coach or a dietitian in a office about ways you can improve your health and your nutrition is one thing, but actually going and doing it and practicing it and tasting it is something else. And that’s what culinary medicine is. It is the idea of translating that science to real food behaviors and things you can do at home daily in the context of your kitchen.

So, for example, the dietary guidelines recommend eating 3 to 5 servings of whole grains each day. Great. What the heck is a whole grain? What is a serving of whole grains? What does it taste like? How do I make it? How do I help my kids eat it? What is this thing? That’s what culinary medicine does. It translates that science into something you can do and taste and try. Even if you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter. It’s helping you discover things you do like or ways you do like to prepare foods.

So, culinary medicine can help lots of different people. It can help staff and trainees. So, if you work for an organization, it can be something you do with other, kind of, staff members or employees. It can be for adults, it can be for children, and it can be for general community members. When we talk about culinary medicine, it’s not about teaching someone else your cooking skills but it’s about working with a person to find something that works for them. And so we like to use a co-design technique where we’re working with people and finding ways that they like to cook, to use their favorite flavors and foods, and it’s this, kind of, group activity where you find these solutions through lived experience rather than one person, kind of, teaching everyone how to cook one specific way.

So, that was my background. It was brief, but I want to make sure we can get everything in. I’m now going to jump into six steps you can do as coaches or people interested in this field to implement culinary medicine into the work that you do.

So, first, don’t start new right out the gate. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at what already exists and see where you can help. And the best way to do that is using these different tools that help actually track social need resources in your community. And so I like to use the one, FindHelp.org, where you put in your zip code and there’s a registry of all of these services. And I like to look at the ones with food and see what already exists related to Food is Medicine and culinary medicine in my community. If something doesn’t exist or there’s not something specific to your need, that’s your cue for you to invent it, for you to bring it to your organization, your community, or your practice.

This is another good way to find what else is out there. This is the Food is Medicine map that was co-created with a few different organizations, but it’s posted on the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative website. You can go in and see all of the teaching kitchens and culinary medicine programs across the world, which I think is pretty cool. This is a global initiative.

All right. So, hopefully, you’ve looked into what’s around you. You’ve decided what needs to happen and what you need to build, and your second step is to build your team. So, you want to include culinary medicine into your practice. Who do you need to do it with? And so I starred dietitians because I’m a dietitian, and dietitians are well-suited to lead culinary medicine. They have the nutrition training. Many have some culinary training but not everyone, and they are great people in a network to help partner with to facilitate a culinary medicine program.

However, there are tons of people you can work with, and we can have this great wheel that talks about all of the different practitioners you can partner with to build a program. And I want Laura to talk a little bit about the role of coaches in culinary medicine.

Laura: Yeah, so thank you, Olivia. So, as coaches, we know that it’s all about behavior change, right? So, people can have the skills. They can have the tools, the techniques, but if they don’t have that behavior change component, they’re not going to make lasting change. So, this is where it’s so important to have those coaching skills to be able to implement the culinary medicine initiatives.

So, you can start by just having conversations with your clients about what did they like to eat, what did they like to cook, like, just open up that conversation and that is a great way to start. You can provide culinary resources. You can provide recipes, videos, YouTube channels, your favorite chef on TV doing cooking shows, whatever it is that you feel would be helpful to help them get into that cooking habit.

As Olivia said, you can collaborate with dietitians, with chefs, with culinary professionals. I collaborate with a number of different physicians from OBs to general practitioners, oncologists, and I do healthy cooking classes for them, and it’s a great way to work together. You can add culinary skills to your toolkit by taking a course or registering at your local culinary school or you can train to become a culinary coach. And that’s something I’m going to talk a little bit more about later.

Olivia: All right. So, one, you’ve looked at what already exists. Two, you’ve decided who you want in your team to bring culinary medicine to your practice. Three, you need a teaching kitchen, and I like to say this, and I’ve this before in other presentations, if you’ve seen one teaching kitchen, you’ve seen one teaching kitchen. They’re not alike. Some of them look like virtual spaces. Some of them look like your home kitchen. Some of them are pop-ups, some of them are built-in. It’s really whatever you want to build.

But like Laura suggested, you don’t need something robust. It could be something within your own home in a virtual setting. It could be just sharing videos and content during a session. It doesn’t need to be something that’s physical. It can be conceptual or virtual or whatever you need it to be.

So, if you are going to do something in person and you want to host people and teach nutrition through culinary medicine, there are some basic things that are great to have on hand. First is some sanitation, so making sure whatever you’re doing, you’re working in a food-safe place. You have sanitizer. You have gloves. You have ways to clean a surface. Then of course you just need a few basic cooking equipment. Oftentimes just a bowl and measuring spoons and cups is enough, but if you’re feeling spicy, you could get things like a blender, or a hotplate, or a kettle. And you can really help ignite that culinary experience within your group visit or within a one-on-one session.

The virtual teaching kitchen space is really exciting, so adding virtual cooking to your nutrition education is a great way to start. This is my personal setup. You’ll see Laura’s setup in a little bit. Here I have just a cutting board. I have a document camera, so it’s a camera that kind of bends over, over my hands. I use my phone for my, like, frontal view, and then I use my laptop for me to see the participants. And then I use a hotplate or an induction burner as my heat source. And just this one setup, I can offer classes for all different types of people.

All right, we have our teaching kitchen. We have our team. We know it exists. Now we’re going to curate our content. So, we want to teach something to people around culinary medicine. So, the first thing we want to do is define who. Who are we serving? What are the things they like? What don’t they like? Where are we living? What are the living situations? What do we want to create?

Then we want to determine our aims and outcomes. So, what are our goals to our culinary medicine intervention? And that could be health outcome goals like maybe learning skills to better manage your blood sugar and your diabetes or maybe it’s more culinary-based like basic knife skills for healthy eating. It can be, kind of, a whole spectrum of outcomes.

Once you know what you want to teach, then you need to learn or create what you’re going to teach, which is your lesson plan. You’re going to put your resources together and then find a way to evaluate. So, this is, kind of, the standard cycle for creating curricula for culinary medicine.

There are a lot of wonderful resources that already exist, that you can learn from and use. And this is one I really like. This is the recipe writing guide, and this is basically a textbook on how to write recipes for culinary medicine, including considerations, medically tailored recipe guidelines, and overall, kind of, nutrition concepts that you can facilitate through your recipe creation.

Rewire Health is another great tool where you can refer patients or your clients to a resource that provides culinary medicine real-time through a mobile application. It is offered in multiple languages and has multi-media training, so there’s written and video text. And Rewire Health also offers consulting and other services that help you become a better practitioner of culinary medicine. And to you, Laura.

Laura: Yeah, and then here’s another resource. This is live, virtual on-demand cooking classes that contain live cooking. So, we have two different recipes that we do. We have an education component with a physician and dietitian. We teach people about the health benefits of what they’re cooking. And then we send out shopping lists, and prep sheets, and recipes so your clients and your patients and yourselves can be prepared to cook with us.

I’m one of the chefs here, and over the last three and a half years, we’ve had 8,000 people go through the program and they report significant changes in their health, in their cooking behaviors, and most importantly in their confidence to cook in the kitchen. So, this is something you can attend. They’re free. We have a new class starting next week. You can send your clients, or you can have a customized program for your organization. So, the contact information is there.

Olivia: So, our Step 5 out of our 6 steps—we’re getting close to the end here—is joint professional groups or consider further training. So, hopefully you’ve been motivated that culinary medicine is an important part of nutrition education, and it’s something that you can do through partnerships and, kind of, strategic planning, but it’s not a major obstacle. However, if you wanted more resources and more training, there are lots of wonderful groups out there. The Teaching Kitchen Collaborative is a group of teaching kitchens, a global collaborative that sets best practices.

And by joining the TKC, you can have access to all sorts of different curricula, and recipes, and a network of people doing similar work. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine also has a Food is Medicine members interest group which I’m part of, so I can see you there. And we meet every six weeks and talk about different strategies within Food is Medicine and culinary medicine. The Culinary Nutrition Collaborative is another great resource for training. They offer webinars and workshops. I think they do a few a year where they train on different nutrition topics that are translated into culinary medicine. And Health Meets Food is another training program. It’s a little bit more of a commitment, but it’s a wonderful way to really become expert. And I’ll let Laura talk about the program at Harvard School.

Laura: Yeah, so the Clinician CHEF Coaching Program is… When I said that was the last thing, I said about, if you want to really become a culinary coach, this is one way to do that. And this program was developed in 2014 by Dr. Rani Polak at the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine. And really the idea behind that was to show that we knew back then that home cooking was really important to improve people’s health and nutrition. Just by virtue of cooking at home, you will eat healthier. It doesn’t even matter what you’re cooking, but Dr. Polak took that research a step further, and he discovered that by combining those behavior techniques that go through coaching, the behavior change techniques with the culinary coaching skills, you can affect lasting behavior change.

So, the key principles of the CHEF Coaching Program, the number one is that we are looking at using behavior change techniques to overcome those barriers to home cooking. So, in the coaching world, we wear the hat of the coach where our job is to help the client really find those answers within where they are to facilitate, to encourage, to motivate, and to be a mirror for the client to find those answers from within. With chef coaching, we are not only wearing the coach hat, but we’re also wearing the expert hat because the client or the patient may be missing those skills: the recipes, the techniques, the skills that they need an order to reach those home cooking goals. So, we wear both the coach hat and the trainer hat.

We also use telemedicine techniques. Obviously, we’ve all been using them the last couple of years, but we’ve been doing this for 10 years now and we’ve really found that there’s so many benefits to using this technique, that we can really reach a really broad swat that it’s really accessible and it really improves people’s confidence and competency because they’re working in their own kitchens. So, like I’m going to show you today, I’m in my kitchen. You’re in yours, and it’s really going to help you to put those skills into practice.

So, I want to just show you here where we intersect so we have the culinary training. So, we teach people about cooking, healthier ingredients, using healthier cooking skills, time-saving, and organizational skills. We use our health coaching skills, motivational interviewing, appreciative inquiry, all of those skills that we learn in health coaching. And then the intersection of those two is really around the organization, time management, and planning. That’s the culinary medicine piece. And all these skills and tools combined lead to sustainable healthy cooking habits.

So, if you go through the training program, you don’t need to become a culinary coach. You certainly can, but you can just integrate and adopt some of those culinary coaching principles into your practice. So, what that looks like in terms of implementation is… Next, slide, please. Well, first of all, everyone who goes through the program reports that they improved their own home cooking. So, self-care is a great benefit but just adding those home cooking discussions to your current, either interviews or sessions with your clients or your patients into your meetings, you can make them part of your culinary medicine program, or you can develop your own culinary medicine program.

So, I’ve seen people just do one one-on-one with their clients. They’ve done sessions with clients and their family, because it’s so important to wherever you’re working, your environment is going to be really important to help support you in that. And then the whole community. You can do a program that is maybe one-off. You could do a series or you could do a whole six-month program. So, really it’s a wide spectrum and whatever works for you and your client is the program that you should implement. And we have all the information in terms of accreditation and continuing education and all of the schedules of upcoming trainings on our website. And I’m also happy to answer any. Questions you can email me.

Olivia: So, for our last step, it’s explore funding opportunities. So, adding culinary medicine to your coaching practice or to your practice in general may require some additional resources, depending on the type of teaching kitchen you want to offer. And so there’s a few ways you can think about trying to fund the expansion of your work through culinary medicine, you can internally fund projects so adding a part of your operations costs, using things you already have like your laptop and your cell phone. If you do work for an organization, maybe including it in those operating costs. So, my other position, I work at Boston Medical Center, and we have a teaching kitchen at a hospital and we use our food from our food pantry and our food service cafeteria. And so that’s how we’re able to acquire food to support our program.

Philanthropy. So, oftentimes most of his work is done through grants or donors and so tapping into different grant resources or local donors is a great way to start a program. On community benefits and employee health, these are things that larger organizations often have or pockets of money organizations often have for wellness programs for their staff or their community. Using some of those dollars towards a culinary medicine program is another great option. And then, as Laura alluded to, you can bill depending on your credentials and the type of clinician or practitioner that you are for services.

So, dietitians can use standard MNT, medical nutrition therapy, billing codes. I know there are some opportunities for chefs, for coaches. And there are ways to integrate this into a billing model. And so there’s good resources out there that we can, kind of, send after to help ignite some of those medical billing or insurance offerings that can help subsidize some of the costs that come along with adding this new practice.

So, with that said, we do have more information on our blog post, so you can use your phone to scan this QR code and all of this information is listed out with links to different resources. But now with that said, we’re going to go over to Laura in her kitchen for a cooking demo.

Laura: Great. Hi, welcome, everybody. Welcome to my kitchen. I’m so excited to have you here today. So, what I want to do today, we’re going to make this. It’s delicious sheet pan ratatouille with chickpea recipe. Now traditionally ratatouilles are made like in a Dutch oven. It’s kind of like a stew, but we’re going to do it all on one sheet tray. And instead of serving it a lot of times, it’s served like with chicken or fish. We’re going to make it vegetarian with our chickpeas.

So, it’s a delicious easy way to make a delicious, delicious dish. Easy way to make a delicious meal. And before I get started, I always like to share a few tips with my clients. So, you’re my clients today. So, the first thing I always tell people is to read your recipes through at least twice. So, have it printed out, have it on your computer, whatever works for you. But the number one reason that we hear people don’t cook more at home is because they don’t have time. So, this is where those time-saving skills really are important.

So, you want to read your recipes through twice so that, first of all, you get an idea of the flow. We want to be really organized. We’ve dedicated this time to make a meal, so let’s make the most of it. You want to see if there’s any instructions you needed to do ahead of time. So, for today’s recipe, you need to preheat your oven to 450, so make sure you’ve done that. So, I’ve already got mine preheated.

You want to make sure that you have all the ingredients that you need on hand. The last thing you want to do is have to run out. This has happened to me before like, “Oh, my gosh, I forgot something.” And then you’re not really maximizing your time.

The most important tip I can give you is to have everything prepped and ready to go, what we call in culinary terms, a mise en place. You can see all my ingredients here are prepped. I’m going to prep a few with you today, but this is the number one tip I can give you. Pro tip. When I’m working with NuCook, this is a NuCook recipe, but we always send out the recipe ahead of time with instructions. You can do this with your clients that they know to be prepared and that they can make the most of it.

So, your mise en place, which is the culinary term for having everything prepped and ready, is not just your ingredients but also your equipment. So, for today’s recipe, you’re going to need a sheet pan. So, that’s a heavy-duty baking sheet. You can see this one’s got a lot of love. It’s been used many times not as a baking sheet, like a cookie sheet, because those can warp. We’re going to be roasting at high temperature. I always say make sure that you have a cutting board that is a surface that’s big enough to actually work on, not one of these little punny cutting boards. I like to always have a side towel because I want to keep my station nice and neat. I have a compost bowl. You don’t have to compost but just so you don’t have to run back and forth to the trash. Again, you’re going to maximize your time.

And then your number one piece of equipment is your chef’s knife. And the chef’s knife, if you just invest in one piece of equipment, this is what I recommend. It’s fully bonded from the end to the tip, so it’s one piece of equipment, the handle is not separated. And when you hold the chef’s knife, you want to hold it with your thumb and forefinger at the base, so at the very end of the blade, and then you’re going to wrap the rest of your fingers around the handle. So, it’s really an extension of your hand, okay? You don’t want to have your fingers out like this. You don’t want to grip it up here. And I’m going to show you a few basic knife skills, but basically we’re going to use this hand, the hand that has our knife as a cutting hand, and the other hand is called your claw hand. This is the one that’s going to guide the knife. And we’re going to tuck our fingers in and use our knuckles as a guide, so we don’t have any fingertips out and could be possibly cut. So, this is our tip for today.

Okay. So, let’s get cooking. So, we’re going to make the sheet pan ratatouille that I mentioned, and I’m going to start with eggplant. This is the hero of our dish. So, you see this eggplant, it rolls around, right? So, we always want to have a nice, flat surface whenever we’re cutting. So, what I’m going to do first is I’m just going to cut off the ends of my eggplant. And I also should mention I have this flexible cutting board surface that I’m using, and I love it for a number of reasons. This way I don’t get garlic and onion on my cutting board. I can also just, kind of, throw it in the sink when I’m not using it, and I’ll show you some other great reasons why it’s very helpful.

All right, so now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to cut off a section of this eggplant, so that it now lies flat, and I don’t have to worry about it rolling around. Next, I’m going to cut it into planks. So, I’m going to cut about three planks. I’m going to use what’s called a bridge cut. I’m going to come across the eggplant because it’s a little hard to hold it steady when it’s, kind of, very slippery. And now I have these different planks, and I’m going to come across, and I’m going to cut them into strips. And I’m going to cut them about an inch wide. So, however… You want to think about when you’re cooking, how are you going to be eating this dish? So, maybe with a spoon or a fork. You don’t want to have really huge pieces of eggplant. So, I’m just going to cut them into about an inch cute, and I’m going to do that with the rest of the eggplant.

And eggplant is a great… I love this vegetable because it really absorbs the flavor of what you’re cooking it with. It has this beautiful purple color. It’s high in antioxidants, as I’m sure Olivia could tell you from a dietary standpoint, because it’s nice and purple and dark in color. But sometimes people don’t like eggplant. It might be an acquired taste. I always like to have people try something new that they haven’t tried before. But if you don’t like eggplant, you could easily substitute zucchini, summer squash. Those would be really nice substitutes for the eggplant.

I’m just going to get one, but this eggplant is huge. But I like to have people, kind of, get out of their comfort zone a little bit and maybe try something new. Okay, so now I have all my eggplant diced, and I’m going to grab that baking sheet. I’m not even going to bother with a bowl, and I’m just going to take the eggplant, and I’m going to just pick it up and dump it right onto my baking sheet.

Next up, we have a red pepper, so I’ll show you one other tip here for how to cut a pepper. So, I’m going to cut off the end, the top, and the bottom, what we call popping and tailing our pepper. And then I’m just going to follow one of these seams here on the pepper. I’m going to open it up, and I’m going to lay my pepper out. And I’m just going to take my knife and I’m going to graze it right along the seam. And I’m going to take that seed packet right out. See how helpful it is also to have this compost bowl here because then I don’t have to keep running back and forth to the sink or to the trash. And now I have my pepper nice and open.

And what I’m going to do, I’ll just cut it in half. So, it makes it a little bit easier to work with. I’m going to get rid of some of this pith. And then I’m going to make those slices again just like I did with the eggplant and cut it into strips, again, about an inch or half an inch wide. And then you want to have the shiny side of the pepper down. It’s what makes it easier to cut. And I always like to… When you can, put as many slices together so that, again, you’re going to save time by cutting things together instead of doing each one separately. But whatever you feel comfortable.

Now, this recipe is a great template recipe, which means that you can switch out any of the ingredients. You can switch out the seasoning. You can switch out the herbs, the spices. So, if you don’t like this flavor profile, which is kind of like a Mediterranean profile, you could switch it out. If you don’t like peppers, you can either don’t bother using them at all, or you could use a different vegetable that we do enjoy.

And I love all the colors. So, if you wanted to do half of a red pepper, half a green pepper or yellow pepper, we eat with our eyes not just with our stomachs. So, making it really colorful is just so enticing for so many reasons.

All right, so I’m going to grab a sheet pan, and I’m going to add the pepper in. And now I have my other ingredients that I’m going to add into my sheet pan. So, I have some shallots here. So, shallots are just like a milder onion. If you don’t like shallots, you could use a red onion. You could use a regular onion. You could just eliminate them altogether. These are adding a nice little bite to it, I would say. And then we’re going to add in… I have a container of these cherry tomatoes, and these are just going to burst as we roast them. And they’re going to be really delicious and, kind of, like a blistered tomato. Then, we’re going to add in some garlic. So, I have some sliced garlic about three cloves of sliced garlic. I sliced it really thinly. So, that’s going to get nice and browned and delicious.

And then I’m going to add in my chickpeas. So, I have one can of 15-ounce chickpeas, canned chickpeas, that I drained and rinsed, because a lot of times they add extra salt that you don’t really need in here. We’re going to season our food ourselves. But I also wanted to mention that this is the liquid that I drained from the chickpeas that’s called aquafaba, and you can use it in a lot of other culinary applications. So, you can use it in place of eggs and egg whites, and I can talk more about that later but that’s a great thing. You might want to save that chickpea liquid the next time you’re using a can of chickpeas. And there’s no shame in using canned ingredients as long as you look at the ingredients, make sure there’s nothing else added in there, if it’s going to save you time.

And now we’re going to add a little seasoning. So, I have two teaspoons of fresh thyme, and I’m going to add about a teaspoon of some kosher salt and about a teaspoon of some ground black pepper. And then we’re going to add two tablespoons of olive oil. And I like to measure the olive oil when I am coating the vegetables. A lot of times the recipe will say coat with oil and people add a half a cup of oil. It’s not necessary to have all that oil. And so you want to be mindful of portion control that you don’t overdo it.

And then I’m going to get in there with my hands and I’m just going to coat everybody, make sure that they get nice… Whoops, and they jump off of the plate… They’re jumping right out of the pan here. Got a lot of veggies here, but you know what? This is going to cook down and it’s going to get nice and roasty, and they’re going to start to turn a little brown and you’re going to smell the delicious aroma of all these vegetables and the garlic and the shallots.

And I am going to put this in the oven, and we’re going to roast it for about a half an hour. And I always like to tell people what we’re looking for. So, they’re going to get a little browning, and these are going to release their moisture and they’re going to, kind of, relax. And I’m going to show you what the finished product looks like. So, I’m going to put these in. Now, when you put them in your preheated oven, always put it on the highest rack. That’s where it’s the hottest, and we want these to get nice and roasty. So, I’m going to put these in the oven.

I’m going to set my timer for half an hour and then through the magic of our call today, here is my finished product. So, you can see here how the eggplant got nice and browned. The tomatoes got nice and blistery, and they’re all wrinkly and relaxed. And this is what we’re looking for. So, you want to make sure that you tell people what they’re looking for so that they don’t think, “Oh, my gosh, I burnt that because that’s the way we want it to look.”

So, here’s how I’m going to finish this dish off. We’re just going to add in a zest of one lemon. So, this tool is called a microplane grater or a rasp grater. And what you want to do is you just want to run it along the outside of a lemon and don’t saw it. You’re just going to take a nice swipe. And what we want to do is we want to get those essential oils that are in the skin of the lemon, but we don’t want to get the white part, which is called the pith. So, we’re just making a nice, gentle swiping motion. And this is going to really heighten some of that flavor. It’s great to add some citrus to your dish. And then I also have half a cup of Kalamata olives that I cut in half. So, you can use these or not, it’s totally up to you.

And then I’m just going to take my spatula and just stir everything together. And look at all this beautiful food that this made. I should mention here, I did have some squash in this dish, so I had some zucchini and some summer squash. That’s how you see the yellow and the green. And now I’m going to plate this, and this is going to make a delicious lunch. I’m very excited about this. You can put this over some brown rice if you want. You don’t need to. So, there is one way that you can enjoy this dish. I’m just going to put some nice, fresh basil on top. So, there’s one way you can enjoy this dish.

And then I also wanted to show you some other ways because it makes all this food. So, I also took some of this dish, and I added in some whole wheat pasta. I’m going to also add a little bit of feta cheese on top, and I’ll put some of my basil on top of there as a nice garnish and this would make a delicious dinner. And then I also took some of the ratatouille, and I put it in a food processor with some tahini and some lemon juice, and it makes this really delicious dip. And then I make some whole wheat pita chips. I just took some pita bread, I cut it into triangles, I sprayed it with a little olive oil and some kosher salt, and I baked it at 350 for 8 minutes. And I get these nice crisp chips.

So, look at all this food, and plus, I still have all this food left over. So, this is like a great way, these sheet pan meals, to make a meal that’s really quick and easy and that you can then repurpose. You have leftovers, you have a totally different dish, and then you have a way of repurposing it into something else. So, I hope that you all get a copy of the recipe and that you can enjoy it. I know I’m going to enjoy it.

Olivia: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Laura. And I’ve been keeping an eye on the questions, and there’s a few for you and the equipment you have. So, first, what is the overhead camera you’re using or the tripod you’re using? Do you know what type it is?

Laura: So, I just have… Let’s see if I can go like this and lower it down so you can see it. Okay, can you see this? So, this is just like this arm that I use my camera as the phone and the arm is just attached to my bookshelf over here on my shelf. So, I can just raise it and lower it. And this is it. It’s very, very low-tech. And then I’m using my computer across for me, so that’s just how I’m seeing you on my computer. And that’s how you’re seeing the front view of me and the overhead view is from my phone.

Olivia: And what brand of cutting board are you using? That’s another question we’ve gotten.

Laura: Oh, do you mean the flexible cutting boards or the wooden one? I have these in all different colors, and these I actually I got on Amazon. So, I have one for proteins and then I have one for veggies and I have one for fruits, so that I use them so that they don’t get cross-contaminated. They come in different colors, and they’re available on Amazon. The wooden cutting board I’ve probably had for 20 years, I have no idea where I got it from.

Olivia: And then someone asked about the chickpea liquid, if you can talk to us more about the aquafaba.

Laura: Yeah, so this is… It has protein in it. I don’t know exactly from a chemical standpoint what it’s called, but you can use it in place of egg whites so you can whip it up. So, depending on how much you whip it, you can get really stiff peaks. You put a little tartar… What am I trying to say? Cream of tartar.

Olivia: Oh, yeah. This cream of tartar.

Laura: Yeah, and it’ll whip up really stiffly. You can just whip it gently, and you’ll get soft peaks and then you could use it like in a meringue or you could just whip it really gently and you can use it sometimes in place of egg whites depending on what the recipe is. So, it has all different uses, and it’s just amazing. You would never believe it until you see it that this can turn into what looks like whipped cream.

Olivia: We had a question about billing and scope, so I can take that one. So, currently culinary medicine is an adjunct pedagogy to an existing service. So, there’s not a billing code for culinary medicine, but based on your normal counseling group visit shared medical appointment, you can add it in. Some billing requires some documentation and there’s definitely strategies to do that. So, having a group visit where you check in with your physician and you document individual care while also offering your group, that’s kind of a shared medical appointment model. For dietitians, there are group MNT billing codes you can use. It depends on kind of what opportunities you have, but using this, kind of, to enhance your education, there’s not a specific code for culinary medicine.

All right, I’m looking through the questions. Laura, does the CHEF Coaching Program teach you how to put together meal plans for clients, or is it still a step down from an RD?

Laura: Yeah, well, we don’t know. We’re not qualified to do prescribed meal plans. We can work with a dietitian. And if somebody has a meal plan for a dietitian, we can teach them how to implement that, but we can’t prescribe.

Olivia: Yeah, so that’s a great opportunity for a partnership. So, if you want to work with a dietitian to co-develop curricular meal plans, I think that’s a great opportunity for interprofessional collaboration and a great way to enhance the field through, kind of, strategic partnerships.

We had a question about… A person in our practice finds that people like to buy food or have cooks and they don’t cook themselves. Can culinary medicine help in this situation? I’ll start and then, Laura, I’ll pass it to you. Absolutely because you have to train your chefs on medical needs. And so learning about culinary medicine and how it applies to meals can help upskill a chef or you, the coach, to apply the principles of diet that’s needed for a medicinal reason or for a food preference or whatever it is to the meals are getting prepared. So, maybe encouraging that chef to go through a culinary medicine program so they can provide medically tailored meals and foods. I don’t know, Laura, if you have anything to add to that.

Laura: I will also say I’ve done private chefing for people, and I’ve been able to educate them about what they’re eating and, kind of, influence their food choices because everybody wants to eat healthier but they’re just not educated. They just don’t know, and they feel like getting a private chef is a time saver, certainly, and it’s a convenience, but they didn’t realize the benefit of also improving their health. So, it’s a real win-win for everybody.

Olivia: Laura, someone’s asking about your culinary training. Where were you trained?

Laura: Yeah. Well, I started at, it was called, the Natural Gourmet Institute, which is now part of ICE in New York, and I got a certificate in culinary nutrition. And then I went to the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. I went through their professional chef program. And also I now teach there, and I started a plant-based program there, a recreational program for the public.

Olivia: I do want to add to that. So, I personally don’t have formal training. I’ve worked in kitchens. I was, kind of, like a line chef. I was a barista, but I’ve never had formal training. And I think sometimes instructors without formal training can sometimes even connect better to home chefs and so… I mean, Lauren’s done a wonderful job but I think not having training shouldn’t be a barrier because you’ve had experiences in your own life and found what works for you. And the goal of culinary medicine isn’t to train the next executive chef, it’s to train home chefs to prepare foods they love. And you as a practitioner can do that without formal training, though, of course, always advancing skills can be a wonderful opportunity for individuals, but it shouldn’t be the barrier to prevent you from starting a practice.

Laura: Absolutely. I went to culinary school because I was a coach and I was working with people on lifestyle change programs. And the one area I felt that that was lacking was in the culinary skills. So, I decided I wanted to improve my own skills so that I could help other people. But I’ve never worked in a restaurant, and I’m not… I’d never make it on one of those cooking shows.

Olivia: Someone’s asking about tangible criteria for clients to report improvement. I’ll start and then I’ll send it to you, Laura. For me, it’s oftentimes confidence and self-efficacy. I don’t mind what it looks like as long as you think it tastes good and you’re enjoying it. And so for me, the confidence and willing to try new things and efficacy and your ability to prepare foods that your family will love for me is the best outcome.

And then, of course, there’s clinical trials and there’s impact on health outcomes. But if we focus primarily on the enjoyment, the practice, the efficacy over time, we can assume that health will improve. And so I’ll pass it to you, Laura, to help answer that question.

Laura: I can tell you from our NuCook perspective, we do a poll at the beginning of the end of each class and each session. Well, we do a survey… We have a five-week session, so we do before and after. And then for each class, we do a poll, just a simple poll that you can do on Zoom. You know, what did you think of the class? Was the pacing okay? How did you enjoy the meal? So, this is all information that then can inform your next classes so that you can make those improvements.

But the biggest change I find and I think I mentioned it before is people’s confidence. That’s really been a huge gamechanger for people just like cooking from my kitchen to their kitchen. It just really helps not being like a professional culinary situation but just being in their own kitchen and using their own equipment. It really makes it much more doable I think for most people. Removes those barriers.

Olivia: Perfect. I’m going to send one to you, Laura, and then I’m going to jump to some I think I can help answer. How do you stay in your lane as a health or chef coach when helping clients to cook?

Laura: Well, by your lane, if you mean like nutritional information, I’m very conscious as a coach because I’ve been trained as a coach for over 15 years to stay in my lane and to refer when it’s out of my area of expertise. So, I’m very cautious and aware of when I need to refer someone to a dietitian or to some other health care professional. And that’s gone through… I’ve been drilled in my training both as a coach and as a culinary coach. So, I guess I would just say, if you’re ever in doubt, to refer out. That’s what I say.

Olivia: There’s a question about, let’s see, particular cooking techniques or methods that enhance therapeutic benefits of culinary medicine. Maybe, Laura, do you want to start with that one?

Laura: Well, I think it’s having… Like I talked about before is the time saving and organizational skills. So, teaching people things like their mise en place like sheet pan meals, like if you’re cooking multiple recipes, prep ingredients that are similar at the same time. Those are the things, the tools that we really encourage people to start to learn initially so that they can make the process so much simpler and smoother and more doable.

Olivia: Definitely, and I think things like roasting with two tablespoons of oil versus frying something or learning to measure as you go, I often teach salting at the end as a way to reduce your sodium intake. And so that’s the whole point. It’s strategies to help keep quality and flavor and texture while focusing on different nutritional needs, depending on the person you’re working with, if it is to reduce salt or calories or whatever the focus is. So, that’s the whole point. It’s the technique to do it without reducing the quality and the enjoyment of your food and meals.

And that leads us really nicely into the next question, which is what does culinary medicine curriculum look like? Are you learning about carbs, fat, protein? Are you learning recipes, chef skills? What does it entail? Exactly. It’s applied. And so maybe starting off with a conversation about whole grains and then working together to create this pasta dish and talking about the benefits of a whole grain pasta or a legume pasta and how that whole grain helps by adding more fiber and other nutrients. And then talking about adding vegetables and the colors of vegetables and the phytochemicals.

And so, yes, the recommendation is to eat more whole grains where culinary medicine is taking that recommendation and helping a person apply it to a meal. And what does it now taste like as a whole grain? How do you make it still taste good when you’re used to white flour pasta? And that’s kind of the focus. And so rather than just educating about macro and micro nutrients, it’s applied to the lesson. And so that’s through my experience. Laura, do you have anything to add to that?

Laura: Yeah. Well, I always like to include the health benefits of what we’re eating, and why we’re doing it, and the techniques to make it easier. But the bottom line is that people have to enjoy what they’re eating, too. So, you want to meet them where they’re at. So, let’s say somebody just wants to reduce their meat consumption. I’m not going to tell them, “Don’t ever eat meat again.” Maybe we’re going to make something like a lettuce wrap that’s half beef and half tofu, so you can, kind of, cut the meat in half. Maybe we do a meatless Monday where we come up with one day a week where we’re not going to eat meat. It’s not necessarily all or nothing. It’s a gradual process, but you really need to consider your client, and what’s going to work for them and be sustainable in the long run.

Olivia: There’s a question of culinary nutrition versus culinary medicine. I’m sorry. I went over that slide really fast. I wanted to make sure we had time for the questions. So, culinary medicine is a term used in the context of medicine, so it’s often adjunct to clinical care or co-supported by a physician and a nutrition and culinary expert.

Culinary nutrition is the bigger term. I just actually published a paper on this that we can send defining the terms. We did a global survey of experts, and that’s kind of what emerged as the terms. In a global context, culinary nutrition is actually used more frequently. Only two doctors talk about culinary medicine. In the U.S., culinary medicine is the more prominent term and no one except for dietitians really use culinary nutrition. So, we wanted to call this webinar Culinary Medicine because it’s what people are more familiar with, but actually the proper term would probably be culinary nutrition because it’s a much more wider context than just specific medicine and clinical application. So, I’m happy to send that paper along, and you can read all about the nuances of language. But thanks for following up with that.

Someone’s asking about preferences and dietary restrictions. So, kids who won’t eat vegetables. Laura, do you have anything… I’ll read the question, you can answer it. So, how do you deal with dietary restrictions and preferences, thinking of kids that won’t eat vegetables, food allergies, etc.?

Laura: Yeah, well, first, obviously you want to find out what your client can and cannot eat or what their preferences are. And then you work together to come up with something that would be palatable for them. In the case of kids, it might be a little bit more challenging because they aren’t necessarily as open to trying new things. So, you can, kind of, introduce things without them necessarily knowing everything that’s in the dish. So, for example, with the tofu, it’s really easy because it is such a bland taste that it absorbs the flavor of what you’re cooking, so you can kind of mix it in with things, or, for example, with whole grain pasta, which I have here, sometimes it’s really hard to go from white pasta to whole grain. So, maybe you do a mixture of the two. You want to try to introduce these things to make it palatable. But especially with allergies you want to find substitutions that would still taste good but that are also agreeable to your client. And that’s usually working together with them, trying things and see what works.

Olivia: Yeah, I’ll add, kind of, two other thoughts involving people in the cooking process, involving kids in the cooking process. It’s really funny because we’ll lead classes, and we’ll have kids like cutting Brussels sprouts or bell peppers, and parents will be shocked that the kids will never try it at home. But because they cut it and they made the dip and they got to be part of it, all of a sudden they’re like raving about the vegetable that they wouldn’t eat at home. So, I think involving kids and family in the cooking process helps people feel ownership of the meal, and excitement and wanting to like it and try it.

Also, what we recommend often is a base recipe and letting individuals choose what they put onto it. So, for this pasta, maybe having the pasta as the base and having the vegetables there and the cheese and the chickpeas, kind of, separate and letting kids choose which goes into their pasta. They have to pick one, but they can choose what vegetable. You don’t have to control every choice that they make but making sure they’re choosing at least one vegetable that goes into their pasta. Or, we’ll do taco bowls or tacos and letting family members choose the toppings but always having them pick at least one vegetable to go in. If it’s the lettuce or the salsa, they don’t have to always have a side salad. It can be incorporated into the dish. So, thinking about meals as a base meal and then letting people make it their own especially for picky eaters. And then allergies, that’s a whole nother conversation with techniques around cooking for food allergies.

So, the next question… And I don’t know, Sandra, if this should be the last one or when you want us to wrap up, but I’ll answer this one and then you can let us know. So, does culinary chef usually conduct groups? Is there also an opportunity for coaching individuals?

Laura: Yeah, do you want me to?

Olivia: Yeah, go ahead.

Laura: Yeah, so I say yes to both. I’ve worked with individuals. I’ve worked with groups. I’ve worked virtually. I’ve worked in person. It’s really whatever works for you, but all of those methodologies work, and they can work. And it just really depends on who your clients are and how they best will receive the information. But I’ll just say that it can be really fun. I mean, it’s such a fun activity. People love to cook and they love… It creates community. It creates a really supportive environment doing it in a group, doing it one-on-one. You can really help the person in their own kitchen. You know, like I said, develop those tools and strategies. So, it fits so many different modes.

Olivia: Perfect.

Dr. Sandi: Well, this has been absolutely wonderful. I learned so much. So, I want to thank you, Laura, and I want to thank you, Olivia. And thank you to everybody who tuned in. This has just been very, very inspiring. And if you liked this webinar, please stay tuned because we will have more webinars coming up on various topics that would be of interest to health coaches, potential health coaches, and this really shows food is medicine but also food is community. Food is joyful. And I am going to make that recipe. That looks so good. So, thank you all.

Olivia: Thank you.

Laura: Bye, everybody.

Dr. Sandi: Bye, everybody.