CHOP-International: an open access nutrition education tool for physicians, resident doctors, and medical and public health students

Abstract

Dietary diseases drive some of this century’s most pressing and costly global public health challenges, ranging from malnutrition-related infectious diseases such as HIV infection to overfeeding and linked chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease. We seek to create clinically meaningful and cost-effective education tools to help treat such conditions in a manner that is both population specific and evidence based. Tulane University School of Medicine’s Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine (GCCM), a medical school-based teaching kitchen and research laboratory, utilized its novel collaboration of clinicians, registered dieticians, chefs, and culinary and medical students to create an open source international nutrition education resource comprised of region-specific recipes based upon the World Health Organization’s Nutrient Intake Goals. Using staple ingredients from three sample Millennium Development Goals regions, GCCM has developed sample recipes from three continents for proof-of-principle testing. The recipes include nutrition facts, interchangeable and optional ingredients, and salient nutrition education discussion points for students and medical professionals to use with a variety of patient conditions. Community-based participatory testing of the efficacy of this tool will allow for the refinement of the complete tool in the United States, followed by global expansion in coordination with physicians and students from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in Kenya, Indonesia, and Colombia.