Healthstyle
Culinary Teaching Kitchen: Home of the UC Irvine Plant Eater
Healthy lifestyle choices have an immense impact on our overall health, but how we nourish our bodies with food, in particular, plays a vital role in our physical and mental well-being. Unfortunately, many patients – as well as healthcare providers – often overlook the importance of these lifestyle choices and lack the knowledge that are key to maintaining a sustentive and healthy life.
“Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.”
-Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Kos, often considered one of the most influential and reflective minds in the history of medicine, once famously uttered these words more than 2,000 years ago. Here at the UC Irvine Men’s Health Hub teaching kitchen, we fully embrace Hippocrates’ brilliant concept; food can help change the course of many of the most significant diseases of the modern era. What is perhaps more critical to our core mission is that food should be considered to be synonymous with health and rather than being considered solely to be a form of medicine. Our team sees quality food and nutrition as the core component of a healthy lifestyle that can help preserve health and vitality while staving off most of the most common diseases that afflict the United States population today, including cardiovascular disease and many forms cancer. Thus, in actuality, food is more than medicine; it is health and vitality.
The conventional paradigm in medicine has been to solely treat patients’ disease – a reactive and passive process of waiting for people to become ill. Alternatively, we strive to partner with and empower our community (yes, “partner” and not “patient” as you do not have to be sick) to make lifestyle choices which will help us all feel healthy and strong. At the Men’s Health Hub, we are using our state-of-the-art Culinary Teaching Kitchen to blend culinary arts with evidence-based nutrition, behavioral science practices, and patient-centric health education.
No Such Thing as Having Too Many Chefs in a Kitchen…
The more the merrier, and our entire community is welcome! The Culinary Teaching Kitchen will invite some of Orange County’s best nutritionists, food scientists, and local farmers to work closely with our community members, patients, medical students, scientists, and physicians. We are all in this together!
Working as a team, our participants and staff will engage in meaningful discussions about healthy eating and highlight the nutritional value of consuming certain ingredients and food groups, all while cooking some delicious meals and having a great time doing it. We see our kitchen as a generational familial and communal gathering place for fun and health. Additionally, by embracing amazing culinary perspectives from around the world, we hope to make the kitchen a bastion of diversity and inclusivity.
Having Our Roots in the Community
We look forward to hosting a wide spectrum of community outreach programs that invite local middle and high school students to our kitchen for custom sessions that can help address some of the most prevalent conditions afflicting young individuals – obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol). These events are the opportune time for our UC Irvine nutritionists, physicians, medical students, and community leaders to engage in meaningful dialogue about nutrition with young audiences all the while cooking side by side with one another. Students and faculty, alike, will end the day by enjoying the food they prepared with one another, all the while leaving a seat at the table in case our resident Plant Eater decides to join in on the fun!
Culinary Teaching Kitchen: At A Glance
The Culinary Teaching Kitchen has been built as an inclusive, fun and accommodating space that doubles as both a kitchen and as an area designed for collaborative discussions and human connection. The kitchen also serves as a state-of-the-art recording facility where we can create digital content to share with interested parties far and wide!
UCI Health invested substantially in our community by investing in the construction of the Men’s Health Hub and beautiful Culinary Teaching Kitchen that feels warm and welcoming to our community
partners, patients, and visitors. Our kitchen is fully loaded with several huge refrigerators, four ovens, and multiple food-prep and cooking stations which are designed specifically for our patients and soon to be chefs in training. Every station is fully adjustable and also serves as a comfortable dining area so that individuals can enjoy their culinary creations while their meal is still hot!
Cooking Lessons & Events
Our “Culinary Cookout” sessions are organized purposefully to reflect a new topic every month. Each month will have an emphasis on either a new food group or cater to foods that are beneficial for combating certain conditions. A preliminary list of sessions is listed below. Please note: sessions are subject to change and official dates will be announced soon.
- An Introduction to Healthy Cooking
- Combating Weight Gain and Obesity
- Knowing your Grains & Gluten
- Mediterranean DASH Diet
- Kidney Health: Nutrition and Low Sodium Diets
- Low Fat, High Protein – Benefits and Pitfalls
- No Meat? No Problem! – Sustentive Foods for Vegetarians and Vegans
- Nutrition-filled foods for your young ones
- Mindful Eating and Portion Control
- Myths, Fads, and Controversial Diets – Do they work?
- Eating like our grandparents: Traditional healthy cooking from around the world.
Culinary Medicine Education: Looking at Food as Medicine and Health
There is no better way to help shape a healthy community than by creating the world’s best “influencers.” The Men’s Health Hub and UCI Health work closely with the UCI School of Medicine to train future doctors who will be “health influencers” by sharing healthy eating and lifestyle practices with their community partners and patients.
Medical literature has shown that giving healthcare providers a greater breadth of knowledge and training in practical nutrition, including healthy cooking skills, improves their comfort, effectiveness, and desire to support their patients’ healthy lifestyles. Working together with the UC Irvine Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, the Culinary Teaching Kitchen will offer monthly classes and discussion sessions to our UC Irvine School of Medicine medical students and physicians that will see them participating in hands-on cooking tutorials to bring alive conceptual knowledge about nutrition and healthy eating. They will also become well-versed in basic culinary techniques (i.e., proper food preparation, cutting, seasoning, etc.), developing educated grocery shopping practices, and learning delicious yet fast, inexpensive, and easy-to-make recipes.
Diversity of Thought & Cuisine
At the Culinary Teaching Kitchen, we honor and celebrate cultural differences in recipes and various cuisines from all over the world. Food is an ancient art practiced differently by a multitude of cultures
and communities. Diverse traditional diets from around the world, as different as they are, all result in good health and vitality. As such, our aim is to learn from the past and look to revive the quality eating habits and cuisines of our grandparents and generations that came before. We have tailored our curriculum and the foods that we cook to represent a little bit of all of us such that we ensure our patients, students, and staff enjoy themselves, feel more connected and comfortable with one another, and practice collective cultural humility during their culinary experiences in the kitchen.
