Culinary medicine and culinary nutrition education for individuals with the capacity to influence health related behaviour change: A scoping review

Abstract

Background Culinary medicine (CM) or culinary nutrition (CN) education provided to professionals with the capacity to influence behaviour change is an emerging strategy to promote diet quality and reduce the burden of diet related chronic disease in adults. The purpose of this scoping review was to synthesise current research describing CM/CN education provided to or by health, education and culinary professionals, or students of these disciplines. Methods Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta‐Analysis extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA‐ScR) was used. Eleven electronic databases were searched in March 2019. Included studies were: (i) nutrition, health or lifestyle programs with a CM/CN component; (ii) study participants or programs facilitated by people working or training in health, community and/or adult education, or culinary roles where facilitator training was described; (iii) reported in the English language; and (iv) published from 2003. Results In total, 33 studies were included. Nineteen studies delivered programs to general population groups and were facilitated by health professionals and/or health university students. Fourteen studies delivered CM/CN training to health professionals or students. Studies reported changes in participants' culinary skill and nutrition knowledge (n = 18), changes in dietary intake (n = 13), attitudes and behaviour change in healthy eating and cooking (n = 4), and competency in nutrition counselling and knowledge (n = 7). Conclusions Further research examining the effectiveness of CM/CN programs, and that describes optimal content, format and timing of the programs, is needed. Research evaluating the impact of training in CM/CN to education and culinary professionals on healthy cooking behaviours of their patients/clients is warranted.

Exploring culinary medicine as a promising method of nutritional education in medical school: a scoping review

“…Reasons for excluding articles reviewed as full-text included wrong study design ( n = 13) [ 4 , 12 – 23 ], wrong population ( n = 5) [ 24 – 28 ], a failure to report any outcome measures ( n = 3) [ 9 , 29 , 30 ], wrong intervention ( n = 3) [ 26 , 31 , 32 ], and five studies were found to be duplicates of an included paper or had used the same data ( n = 5) [ 33 – 37 ]. Amongst the 24 included studies, there were six qualitative studies [ 38 – 43 ], four cross-sectional studies [ 34 , 44 – 46 ]; seven case studies [ 47 – 53 ], and seven mixed-methods study [ 35 , 54 – 59 ].…”

“…This study is one of the first reviews, along with Patel & Kassam 2021 and Asher et al 2022, to advance understanding of current opportunities and obstacles for culinary medicine within the context of medical, or other health care professional education, by examining the impact of culinary medicine in medical programs using a systematic approach [ 4 , 18 ]. In recent years, a clear interest in the use of culinary medicine as an education tool has been demonstrated in the literature.…”

“…Culinary medicine is an emerging field of education related to meal planning, preparation and cooking skills in combination with counseling practices to promote health behaviour change in patients/clients [ 4 ]. Interest in culinary medicine has rapidly increased among many medical schools across the United States and other countries as a potentially low-cost, high impact strategy to equip students with practical nutrition skills that can be employed for nutrition care in clinical settings [ 5 ].…”

“…A recent scoping review by Asher et al, 2021 explored literature that provides culinary and nutrition training to and by health, education, and culinary professionals. This study demonstrated that the feasibility and outcomes of culinary medicine programs warrant further investigation as there is still insufficient evidence of the impact these programs on practitioners to promote health behaviour changes in patients [ 4 ] and the viability of culinary medicine [ 9 ]. This scoping review aims to synthesise the existing literature on culinary medicine offered to medical students within their four years of medical school education.…”

Best Practices for Culinary Medicine Programming

“…Identifying the overall goals, objectives, and vision of a CM/CN program is an important step to help guide your approach. For example, if your purpose is to carry out a health intervention using a teaching kitchen, choosing what you hope to change and how the program can support this can be helpful in promoting behavior change (Rigby et al 2020;Asher et al 2021). This was applied in a virtual CM program (five 90-minute sessions) among patients with type 2 diabetes that specified program inputs (like materials and training), change objectives (like culinary skills), and desired outcomes (including healthy eating and food practices, better access to food, and improvements in disease risk factors) (Sharma et al 2021).…”