Published in Nutrients on 26 November 2020, Razavi et al reviewed opportunities for culinary medicine to improve outcomes of individual- and population-level sodium-reduction outcomes. “Culinary medicine is an emerging discipline in clinical and public-health education that provides healthcare professionals and community members with food-based knowledge and skills”. Five key areas were reviewed: (1) increasing adherence to a plant-forward dietary pattern, (2) food literacy, (3) the enhancement of complementary flavors, (4) disease-specific teaching-kitchen modules, and (5) the delivery of culturally specific nutrition education. Among other findings, the review found that culinary medicine has potential for progressing sodium-reduction in at-risk minority population groups and diverse populations by delivering culturally-sensitive adapted education with diverse languages relevant to differing cultural cooking practices, as implemented recently by ‘Health meets Food’ whom adapted their courseware for Hispanic populations and delivered it in Spanish. The authors concluded that hands-on teaching-kitchen education may provide a multidimensional approach to achieving a reduction of daily sodium intake to healthcare professionals and communities.
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