When doctors gave me two weeks to live, nutrition science and culinary art saved my life—and inspired a career teaching future food coaches.

Cooking food is my centering practice, my life’s calling. I am instantly at home in any kitchen. I cooked my first dish, pea soup, at age 4. By 8, I was preparing meals by myself, and when I was 15, I became an apprentice to a German pastry chef. 

I worked as first cook at the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada, and then a sous chef in Montreal. Then I began working on my doctorate in nutrition biochemistry at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, where I learned to add the science to the art of food. My opinions were encouraged, and I got to spar intellectually with the greatest nutrition minds, which built my confidence.

As I was finishing my doctorate in 1993, I was shocked when doctors found a cancerous tumor in my abdomen and gave me two weeks to live. This caused me to dive even deeper into nutrition. I had the tools to look at articles and analyze diets biochemically, but at the end of the day only I knew what direction to take. It was a turning point in my life. With all the conflicting information, I looked within for answers, and took one step at a time toward health.

I got better and stronger, and I was able to return to school and finish my Ph.D. 10 years later. Diet was a huge component of my healing. After two recurrences of the cancer, I’m now doing great. I’m still learning how to live, play, eat, and exercise in my body, but aren’t we all? 

The experience made me want to help others with food and nutrition when they face a diagnosis, which led me to build the Integrative Therapies Program for kids with cancer at New York Presbyterian Babies and Children’s Hospital. I then worked at Yale’s Prevention Center, where I helped create an algorithm called Nuval to score foods from one to 100. 

From there, I helped create the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center Weight and Wellness Center and became the first director of best practices at the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative. I brought together 40 experts and a dozen chefs, and we created a cooking curriculum designed to apply nutrition recommendations, resulting in the Culinary Medicine Textbook series.

I have been thrilled by how Food as Medicine has taken off like a rocket ship in the past couple of years. What’s often missing, however, is the skill-building—how to take clinical information and turn it into a delicious dish. 

For example, when the doctor or dietitian says to eat more vegetables or whole grains, how do you shop and cook to make them taste delicious, with just a handful of simple culinary techniques that honor a person’s wallet, palate, and cultural heritage? If we only provide produce prescriptions, groceries, or medically tailored meals, and don’t teach people to prepare food themselves, it leaves them reliant on the medical system.

Based on that skill-building, I built the Food Coach Academy, which I launched last year to teach health coaches, community members, chefs, and others how to help patients translate dietary recommendations into enjoyable eating. In a series of simple, science-based modules, students learn to teach others how to cook—which is completely different from learning how to cook oneself.

Students come with a burning desire to help people, and they have this almost spiritual “aha” moment from the very beginning, because they can start using their new knowledge right away. They especially love learning to assess someone’s palate—supertaster, thermal taster, fat and sugar likers. Supertasters, for example, will taste bitter foods more acutely—which is essential to know, because bitter foods are mostly vegetables. Students then learn culinary techniques to reduce that bitterness and enhance other flavors to create craveable broccoli, for example. 

I have a vision of food coaches in every community teaching their neighbors how to cook for their health while honoring their cultures, and demanding healthy food for schools and senior centers. At the end of the day, I will know I have lived my life’s purpose when patients put themselves at the center of their healing. Because in my experience that is how sustainable healing happens—one bite at a time.