The patient’s condition was poor: She had suffered from liver disease in the past and was now about 10 pounds under weight and had been experiencing loss of taste and dry mouth.
Nick Arlas, a first-year medical student at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, knew the exact prescription to appease his hypothetical patient’s symptoms. He went into the teaching kitchen at Johnson & Wales University in Denver with all the ingredients in hand.
“We made her spicy Brazilian fish stew because we wanted to create something that has liquid to address the dry mouth,” Arlas, 30, said. “It’s spicy and has a lot of flavor so that will help with her taste loss, and there’s a lot of healthy fats that will help her increase her weight. We’re also going to do a Vietnamese avocado shake for dessert for added nutrition.”
Arlas and more than 20 other medical students and dental students from the CU School of Dental Medicine have been learning to cook nutritious meals from students and faculty at Johnson & Wales this year as part of a collaborative education program started out of the CU School of Dental Medicine called the Frontier Center 4 Health.
The Frontier Center 4 Health program was established in 2005 through a donation from the Delta Dental of Colorado Foundation. The new culinary class, which launched in January, is the first of its kind in the country to integrate medical and dental students in culinary and dietary classes.
“We want them to learn together and from one another,” said Megan Wilson, senior program officer for the Delta Dental of Colorado Foundation. “This really helps facilitate improved communication for real-life scenarios where different specialties will work together.”
The central focus of the Frontier program is getting all kinds of health profession students understanding the connection between oral health and overall health.
“So it teaches medical students how to do oral exams and the importance of oral health as part of overall health, and vice versa; it helps the dental students make the connection between oral health and medical health,” Wilson said. “Our mouths are the entry for so much that happens in our bodies — there are over 125 different medical conditions that can be affected by or caused by conditions in your mouth.”
In 12 years, more than 3,500 medical, pharmacy, nursing and other health profession students, residents and practitioners have gone through the Frontier Center 4 Health, completing classes alongside each other.
“These future medical and dental practitioners will be taught now to talk to each other and think about these things now so that when they have their own patients it’s already second nature,” said Dr. Tamanna Tiwari, assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine. “In the past, that communication has not always been present in real world situations.”
The healthy cooking classes are the new way to get the students working together toward that common goal of overall health and medical coordination. The eight-week culinary crash course begins with CU students learning basics about diet and portion control. Then they move to the kitchen to cook a healthy meal together.
“We started the first class with knife basics,” said Marleen Swanson, department chair of culinary nutrition at Johnson & Wales. “It’s so much fun to watch them because you see that they have become very skilled.”
Swanson has been a registered dietitian for more than 30 years. During the CU cooking class, she taught students recipes and easy cooking tricks to teach to anyone — things like baking brownies with tofu or black bean puree or yogurt to cut the fat content in half without compromising flavor.
“Doctors need to know about heart disease and hypertension and diabetes,” Swanson said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a diabetic patient referral from a doctor who told them to cut back their sugar. That was all they could say. Well, indeed, sugar needs to be watched, but you truly need to look at a whole lifestyle plan. We want these students to be able to advise patients on those things.”
Just as second-year dental student Matt Torres’s broccoli puffs popped out of the oven, a medical student brought over a tray of black bean burger patties to cool off.
“Our patient is suffering from constipation, and so we prepared the broccoli and vegetable-loaded burgers to get them the fiber that they’re lacking,” Torres, 28, said.
“This class is great because they give really specific examples of how we can advise our patients to make small changes. We don’t want them to go from eating McDonald’s every day to cooking gourmet meals at home every day, but it’s the little changes, and understanding them, that make the difference in the long run.”
