Montana State University in Bozeman has had a culinary medicine program since 2017, and with the help of partners at Benefis, they were approached by Touro School of Osteopathic Medicine (TouroCOM) in Great Falls with an interest in trialing a culinary medicine course.
After two years of planning, TouroCOM, MSU, Benefis, and Thomas Cuisine created a three week pilot program, led by Montana State University’s Dietetic Internship Program Co-director Anna Diffenderfer.
Diffenderfer says, “We talk about how healthy eating can impact the whole person. When you're talking to a patient, it's more than just saying, ‘eat less, move more’,or ‘eat in a healthier way and move your body more’, health is much bigger than that."
During the pilot program, second year medical students at TouroCOM utilized the teaching kitchen at Benefis Sletten Cancer Institute to learn about healthy eating patterns, gut health, and adverse food reactions.
They were aided by culinary experts from Thomas Cuisine and MSU dietetic interns to expand their knowledge on how diet is linked to nutrition related diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
Helan Paulose, a student at TouroCOM who took the course, says, “As an osteopathic student, and based on our principles, we focus on the whole person. And this, nutrition, is a great aspect of looking at the whole person."
In their third and final class, the students learned to make an array of recipes using ingredients with no food allergens, including cauliflower crust pizza, and even an egg free chocolate cake.
Another student, Karen Egu, explains, “We learned a lot about how we'd be able to treat patients that have different dietary restrictions, or have dietary modifications for different health problems that they're going through, and not just being able to recommend that with words. Not just being like, ‘just substitute less salt’, but actually being able to give them recipes, and actually displaying that we have experience in all that."
Diffenderfer says there is a rising interest to learn more about food as medicine within the medical field, saying, “I think that we're going to see more and more culinary medicine programs popping up, and there's definitely interest in the state to offer this program more far reaching. Hopefully we can expand capacity and be able to include more students, more health care professionals, and really sort of come together as a community in Montana to learn with each other about the benefits of healthy nutrition."
With the success of the pilot program, TouroCOM plans to add the culinary medicine course to their curriculum, teaching their future medical professionals nutrition as a key factor in health and wellness.
