The Culinary Medicine Program at UT Southwestern

The Culinary Medicine Program at UT Southwestern

Program Overview

UT Southwestern Medical Center delivers a dynamic, research-driven Culinary Medicine program through its Department of Internal Medicine. Led by Dr. Jaclyn Albin and Registered Dietitian Milette Siler, the program integrates culinary education into medical training, community outreach, and innovative care models. With a hybrid teaching model that includes hands-on classes, shared medical appointments (SMAs), and e-consults, the program exemplifies how culinary medicine can be embedded in both academic and clinical settings.

The program engages diverse learners across multiple tracks:

  • Medical Students: A fall elective open to first-year students, offering four modules. Enrollment is capped at 24 and consistently fills through a first-come, first-served sign-up.
  • Family Medicine Residents: A 3-year, longitudinal series (12 sessions total) with content customized annually based on resident interest (e.g., food insecurity, IBD, sports nutrition).
  • Fellows: Targeted hybrid sessions for Pediatric GI, Pediatric Endocrine, and Adult GI fellows, often anchored in case-based lectures with corresponding culinary instruction.
  • Research Participants: Culinary medicine is integrated into research trials, including recent work with living kidney donors.

Programming also includes e-consults for referring physicians and SMAs hosted in community kitchens at churches. These SMAs typically run as six-class series with adaptations for site-specific constraints. Culinary medicine is also embedded in UTSW’s broader food-as-medicine strategy, with expanding partnerships across specialties, departments, and community organizations.

Faculty Leadership

  • Jaclyn Albin, MD, CCMS, DipALBM – Director, Culinary Medicine and Center for Human Nutrition; Internal Medicine & Pediatrics
  • Milette Siler, MBA-HC, RDN, LD, CCMS – Culinary Medicine Program Lead and Instructor

Spotlight & Media

Research & Publications

Medical Education & Professional Training

  • Virtual teaching kitchen classes and cardiovascular disease prevention counselling among medical trainees
    https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-023-04321-w
  • Nutrition from the kitchen: culinary medicine impacts students’ counseling confidence
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21501327211042469
  • Empowering learners to provide dietary counselling
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-023-01362-5
  • Improving nutrition education for medical trainees through Culinary Medicine
    https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/117/3/477/6962202

Community & Food Access Research

  • Redesigning recruitment and engagement strategies for virtual Culinary Medicine and medical nutrition interventions in a randomized trial of patients with uncontrolled Type 2 diabetes
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9605361/
  • A pilot randomized controlled trial comparing nutritious meal kits and no-prep meals to improve food security and diet quality among food pantry clients
    https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-023-16090-z
  • Providing medically tailored groceries and food resource coaching through the charitable food system to patients of a safety-net clinic in Dallas, Texas: a randomized controlled trial protocol
    https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-023-07215-w

Culinary eConsults

  • Culinary Medicine eConsults pair nutrition and medicine: a feasibility pilot
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21501327231163276
  • From clinic to kitchen to electronic health record: the background and process of building a Culinary Medicine eConsult service
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21501327231179394

 

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