Geeta Maker-Clark

‘Food as Medicine’ Must Be a Pillar of our Medical Care, Says Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark

August 12, 2019 |

Thought-Leader Series, Farms, Food & Health Conference

Geeta Maker-Clark, MD, will be a featured speaker at the Farms, Food & Health Conference with Culinary Medicine Training September 26–29, in Traverse City, Michigan. She is Coordinator of Integrative Medicine Education at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and director of Culinary Medicine, a curriculum that teaches future doctors about clinical nutrition while also cooking in a teaching kitchen with a chef. She is the founder and chair of the annual Food as Medicine symposium at North Shore University Health System, which draws over 200 physicians and patients to hear the latest in up-to-date, evidence-based nutritional medicine. Her integrative clinical practice focuses on the therapeutic and preventative use of food as medicine, and also utilizes herbs, botanicals, and mind-body therapies alongside allopathic medicine. She frequently speaks around the country on nutrition and optimal health at conferences as diverse as Integrative Medicine for the Underserved to the James Beard Food Summit, as well as at farmers markets, festivals, community organizations, schools, and on radio and TV.

Why should we be teaching culinary medicine in medical schools?
Well, traditionally, medicine in its earliest roots and its earliest iterations as a healing practice was entirely based around food. Whether you look at Greek, Roman, Chinese medicine or Ayurveda from India, they were almost entirely food-based systems with additional use of botanicals and plants; as well as emotional medicines that were used in community, like ceremony, ritual, singing, and dancing. As Western allopathic medicine emerged, these aspects of health were really minimized. And as the pharmaceutical industry began to influence health care we saw a shift toward pharmaceutical medicine to the point where now when people think of medicine they think of pills. Things have radically shifted from the roots of healing to what we call Western medicine now.

Nutrition education really became a victim of that transition. Medical education, even though there are existing rules about offering 25 hours of nutrition education, rarely complies with this, and it is often offered in ways that are not practical for application. Learning about nutrition in a biochemistry class is very different from the nutrition I teach in a culinary medicine teaching kitchen curriculum like the one we teach at the University of Chicago. We are working with a chef in a teaching kitchen and making food and then eating it together and discussing the health implications of this recipe. I think it is vital that doctors learn how to talk about food and to teach people about ways to use food that are practical, affordable, and delicious. I don’t think that means doctors all need to be chefs, but in training future doctors there needs to be some exposure to food as part of clinical nutrition. That is what a culinary medicine program provides.

What do current doctors need to know, since they didn’t get this in medical school?
I look through the lens of integrative medicine. I believe there are so many things that are integral to the health and well-being of a human and to a community. A big part of it is food and what we grow in communities and what we put into our bodies. And it also revolves around who we eat our food with and how we eat our food. Are we mindfully eating our food? Are we sitting down and making space for eating and being delib