The road to practice medicine is long indeed. And it is long overdue for an overhaul.

I am the fourth generation of my family to practice medicine. The field has changed tremendously since my great-great grandfather first hung up a shingle in rural Georgia. In some respects, for the better - we have amazing technology and medications to help people live longer. However, the problems that once plagued mankind - famine and infectious disease - have been supplanted by the modern scourges of metabolic disease - heart disease, cancer, obesity, and more. Despite our attempts to conquer these problems with modern solutions, they have only persisted and in fact worsened.

In medical school we learned the proper medication or intervention for a problem, but we were never taught to take a step back and think how the problem arose in the first place. My patients are all shocked to hear that we get very little nutrition training in the grueling four years of medical school. Even in Endocrinology fellowship - the study of metabolism - nutrition was still something relegated to the dietitians. Yet when I went into practice, patients would ask me questions I was ill-equipped to answer. “Doc, how much protein should I eat?” “How many carbs are in a slice of bread?” “I heard keto is good, should I do that?”

I had my first epiphany in February 2020, when I attended the Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives course through the Harvard School of Public Health. It was the most fun I’d ever had at a medical conference. There were experts from world-class institutions going through the evidence for what humans should be eating and why. And while our typical conferences are peppered with booths from the likes of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lily, this conference boasted such sponsors as The Bean Council (who knew there was such a thing!).

I came back from the conference excited to combine what I had learned with my love for cooking and start making patients better using food as medicine. Well, you all know what happened after that. March 2020 hit, and all of that was put on the backburner. The pandemic did teach us that for patients who are metabolically unwell, there is little reserve to be able to fight as fierce an adversary as COVID-19. That is all the more reason that I have continued to try and learn as much as I can about how to help patients improve their health and well being one meal at a time.