A Culinary Medicine Elective Course Incorporating Lifestyle Medicine for Medical Students.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe our culinary medicine elective course with a lifestyle modification focus and to evaluate the students' perceived knowledge and attitudes in lifestyle medicine. Pre- and post-surveys including quantitative assessment, Likert-type questions, and one open-ended response question to assess students' perceived knowledge of nutrition and lifestyle medicine were distributed to osteopathic medical students who participated in the culinary medicine elective course. The Mann-Whitney U test and dependent t test were used where appropriate based on normality. Compared to the pre-course survey, students who responded "strongly agree" in questions related to nutrition counseling in the post-course survey were 26.5 to 31.3% higher (p < 0.05). Based on the post-course survey (n = 34), 33 students responded either "strongly agree" (n = 25, 73.5%) or "agree" (n = 8, 23.5%) to the question of "increased my knowledge of nutrition." Culinary medicine courses with a lifestyle medicine focus may be effective in increasing medical students' confidence and perceived knowledge of nutrition and lifestyle medicine.