Zest: The Health meets Food Newsletter
March 2025
Zest. It says a lot about what the folks who are involved with Culinary Medicine are about. People connected with the Culinary Medicine movement have just that: a zest for life, learning, and teaching. Zest evokes the excitement and passion that is happening at the intersection of where health meets food.
2025 Poster Session at Health meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference
For 2025 we are delighted to be able to gather for The Culinary Medicine Conference Poster Session. Posters can be submitted now, and will be reviewed by the Poster Committee, with final decisions made in April with notification by May 1.
You can find previous posters and abstracts at this link: https://culinarymedicine.org/research-2/
Join Sara Police for Yoga at Health meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference
The yoga sessions offered at this past year’s conference was popular and we will be offering this again at this year’s conference. You can participate in sessions both on Friday and Saturday morning at 6:15 AM. Bring your own yoga mat.
Sessions will be held in the Atrium Space at Entrepeneur’s Row across the street from the International House Hotel at 220 Chartres Street.
Sara Police, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. As a faculty member, Sara brings a science-backed yet soulful approach to yoga. Join her for energizing morning sessions designed to awaken the body, calm the mind, and set the tone for a day of learning at the intersection of food and medicine.
Early Bird Rate Ends in 5 Days for Health meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference!
The 2024 Culinary Medicine conference was amazingly successful and we are looking forward to a great conference in 2025. The Health meets Food team is delighted to announce that we will be returning to our roots – in New Orleans! There will be an online streaming option using a virtual conference platform.
The conference will be held at Delgado Community College: 615 City Park Avenue, New Orleans, LA.
FRIDAY: REBOOT OF FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE
Friday programming will focus on the Food Safety and explore the fundamental information around safety of food in the supply chain, diagnosing and treating foodborne illness, and contaminants in our food.
SATURDAY: CHALLENGES IN CULINARY MEDICINE
Saturday programming will explore the intersection of women’s health, food, and nutrition. Topics will include an exploration of the role of women in nutrition research as well as nutrition and PCOS and nutrition and menopause.
During this year’s culinary skills building sessions, we will explore the challenges our vulnerable patients face with cooking great healthy food using a variety of pre-selected ingredients. Teams will create and share recipes with other conference participants in the afternoon sessions.
SUNDAY: LOOKING TO THE HORIZON – FOOD FOR THOUGHT
What are the current issues and impact of nutrition in the food supply chain and how is this affecting our planet?
Register for the Conference Now!
Conference Host Hotel
Our host hotel will be the International House Hotel. The hotel room block is now filled, but we have a great alternative at a great rate.
You can book at a similar rate at The Old No. 77 hotel. This hotel is about 1 1/2 blocks away and will be easy to access the shuttles to the conference venue, Delgado Community College. Use this link to book:
Culinary Medicine Conference 2025 @ The Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery
Guests can also call and reference the “Culinary Medicine Conference 2025” rate with our reservations team at 504-302-0017
The link provided defaults to an arrival on June 5th and departure on June 9th. Guests can navigate to the link and adjust the stay dates for arrival as early as June 1st and as late as June 10th and book a stay for as many nights as they’d like.
Featured Speaker
Richard S. Legro, MD, FACOG
Penn State University
Dr. Richard Legro’s primary interests as a clinical and translational researcher have been in the field of reproductive endocrinology and human infertility. He has a long-standing interest in all aspects of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), the most common endocrinopathy in women. His studies have focused on the diagnosis, treatment and genetic/environmental causes of PCOS, as well as on improving infertility diagnosis and treatment. He has worked with multiple clinical trial/research groups to develop novel and important investigator-initiated, multi-center trials to answer clinical questions about the role of lifestyle modification, medical agents and surgery to improve human reproductive function and treat infertility.
Through these studies, Dr. Legro has pioneered the tracking of outcomes in mothers from preconception through pregnancy to the postpartum period, and infants from birth onward. He has been the principal investigator on many National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded grants, including a lead investigator of the Reproductive Medicine Network for 20 years, and has been continuously funded by the NIH for 25 years.
Register for the Conference Now!
Nancy Kistler Scholarship
The American Academy of Culinary Medicine is pleased to announce the establishment of the Nancy Kistler Scholarship.
When the ACCM launched the Certified Culinary Medicine Professional Course, Chef Kistler was the first participant to enroll. This scholarship honors the life and legacy of Chef Nancy Kistler, commemorating Chef Kistler’s passion for great food and her understanding of the complex relationship of food and health. As an educator with an intellectual curiosity and desire to learn, she valued evidence-based information and demanded excellence from herself and her students. This scholarship will be awarded to a like-minded female chef educator.
Aims: The primary aim of this scholarship is to offer financial support to a current female culinary educator of future culinarians in obtaining the Certified Culinary Medicine Professional designation.
Learn More and Apply Now! Donate to the Scholarship Fund
ACCM Advisory Board Member Spotlight
Amy Jasperse, RPH, CDCES, CCMS
Pharmacist, Certified Diabetes Care & Education Specialist, Certified Culinary Medicine Specialist at Robert C. Byrd Clinic
Lewisburg, West Virginia
Amy Jasperse is a pharmacist, certified diabetes care and education specialist, and certified culinary medicine specialist serving southern West Virginia. Her current role is in clinical practice at the Robert C. Byrd Clinic in Lewisburg. The clinic is headquartered on the campus of the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (WVSOM).
The West Virginia native is a graduate of the Ferris State University College of Pharmacy. She has over 30 years of pharmacy experience as a pharmacist and educator. She served as adjunct faculty for the Colleges of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky, the University of Cincinnati and for the University of Charleston. In 2009, Amy became a certified diabetes educator and developed an accredited diabetes education program for a local independent pharmacy group and another for the Robert C. Byrd Clinic in 2020.
Amy worked voluntarily starting in 2015 to co-found a culinary medicine elective on the campus of the WVSOM. In December 2019, she began her role at Robert C. Byrd Clinic. She also works as the consultant pharmacist for the clinic doing monthly clinic medication inspections, developing policies and procedures, providing drug education to staff and patients, and she coordinated covid vaccinations, vaccinating thousands during the pandemic.
Disease prevention, reversal and medication de-prescribing through plant-based nutrition is a particular interest for Amy. She has been a certified culinary medicine specialist since 2020 and enjoys conducting grocery tours for patients and runs the FARMacyWV prescription produce program for the clinic.
Amy completed the ACCM Food Lover’s Questionnaire
What is your favorite ingredient?
Beans!
What is your least favorite ingredient?
Eggplant
What turns you on creatively?
Color. I love color. Color in nature, art and in food. A rainbow of color on my plate makes me happy… and healthy.
What turns you off?
Negativity and conflict.
What is your favorite recipe or meal?
My mom’s homemade cornbread, brown beans, fried potatoes, homemade applesauce, cucumbers and onions in vinegar and garden fresh sliced yellow tomato.
What culinary flavor or aroma do you love?
The smell of fresh baked bread.
What culinary flavor or aroma do you hate?
Hate is a strong word. I’m not sure there is any aroma I truly hate. Not a fan of boiled egg smell though.
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
I have always said that if I wasn’t in healthcare, I would do landscaping and lawncare. Yard work is my Zen time.
What profession would you not like to do?
Phlebotomist
Julia Child invites you to a pot luck dinner with James Beard and Aguste Escoffier. What dish would you take?
Homemade spanakopita, not healthy but absolutely delicious.
Featured Recipe: Curried Spaghetti Squash with Shrimp
Last month we featured a Curried Spaghetti Squash Salad with Shrimp and this month we offer a warming version of the dish, Curried Spaghetti Squash with Shrimp.
One of our favorite chefs owns an out of the way Indian restaurant in Las Vegas, called Mantra Masala. He says the key to a great sauce is to start with an onion gravy, simmering the onions for a long time in spices and then pureeing until smooth. That forms the foundation for this terrific curry sauce. It pairs well with the spaghetti squash and shrimp.
Spaghetti squash is so versatile. It is great in salads or in place of noodles in a dish like this one. This recipe calls for boiling the squash, but you can also roast it in the oven at 325°F for 40 minutes. Scrape the seeds out with a spoon and then pull the threads of spaghetti squash out using a fork. The squash keeps great in the refrigerator for a few days and is perfect for almost any sauce or in salads.
The ACCM website has thousands of recipes for you to try. Every recipe offers information on health benefits as well as potential allergies and are tagged to indicate whether they might be GERD friendly, gluten free, low sodium, safe for warfarin users, or those who are lactose intolerant. This combined with the ACCM Med Diet Score application gives you amazing tools to eat great food that just happens to be great for you.
Upcoming Virtual Culinary Medicine Classes
The Health meets Food team has been offering virtual online hands-on Culinary Medicine programming for almost 5 years. Participants use Zoom to gather, collaborate, cook together, and discuss case studies. Each module will follow the workflow of in-person programming and will take about 3 1/2 hours to complete.
For registration problems, questions, or for more event information, please contact Cecilia Hatfield at cecilia@culinarymedicine.org.
Module 16 – Anti Inflammatory Diet: Saturday April 5, 2025 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 3 – Fats: April 6, 2025 Sunday 3:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 17 – IBS IBD GERD: Friday July 18, 2025 4:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 13 – Celiac Disease: Saturday August 16, 2025 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 8 – The Pediatric Diet: Saturday October 18, 2025 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 3 – Fats: Sunday October 19, 2025 3:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 16 – Anti Inflammatory Diet: Friday November 7, 2025 4:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST via Zoom
Module 7 – Carbohydrates & Diabetes: Saturday November 8, 2025 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST via Zoom
ACCM Med Diet Score Application
What’s Your Score?
What if there were an app that could tell you what your Mediterranean Diet Score was?
You can do that now with the ACCM Med Diet Score, our flagship desktop and mobile app, designed to help improve the quality of the calories you consume.
The Health meets Food courseware teaches you how to eat great food, and the basis for our style of eating is the nine points of a Mediterranean-style Diet:
1. More vegetables,
2. More legumes,
3. More fruits and nuts,
4. More whole grains,
5. Better quality oils and fats,
6. Less land animal protein,
7. More seafood,
8. Less dairy and more reduced-fat and fermented dairy, and
9. Alcohol only in moderation.
Healthy Recipes
Med Diet Score includes over 2,000 healthy recipes, from Breakfasts to Desserts, created and tested by the Health meets Food team.
Meal Planner
Use Med Diet Score to create 2-week meal plans for one person, families, or groups – including shopping lists. Save time and money by planning ahead!
Food Diary
Track foods consumed using data from one of the most complete nutritional databases available anywhere.
Exercise Diary
Track exercise with calories calculated automatically. Connect common wearable exercise trackers such as Apple Watch and Fitbit.
But it’s much more than a food and exercise diary and calorie tracker!
It’s called Med Diet Score because it tracks your overall Mediterranean Diet Score according to the nine principles of a Mediterranean-style diet.
Health meets Food Culinary Medicine Research Library
The Clinical Practice Committee has continued to work on a Culinary Medicine Research Library and this month is the first of our curated articles. These are selected from a monthly search undertaken by students at the GWU Culinary Medicine Interest Group with leadership of the project recently taken over by Kaylee Fisher and Jeni Zhang from last year’s team 0f Hanna Harris, AJ Hora and Trinity Rico.
You can find the library at this link: https://culinarymedicine.org/research-2/culinary-medicine-research-library/
If you are interested in synchronizing the database to your desktop version of Zotero, complete the form on the library page.
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!
Want to learn about the impact of gut serotonin on irritable bowel syndrome, the MIND diet, advanced glycation end products, or understanding obesity bias? How about hours of culinary skills building sessions?
The American College of Culinary Medicine is pleased to announce updates to our YouTube channel, with these topics and many more.
Find the newly refreshed programming here: https://www.youtube.com/@ACCM-HmF
Be sure to click on the Subscribe button to be updated as new videos and programming are added to the channel.
Currently viewers have access to recordings from past years’ Health meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference, spanning from 2017 through 2022. (Sorry, CME is no longer available for these recordings.)
More videos will be added in the coming months, including those from conferences and our Culinary Medicine Roundtables.
As the year progresses, look for additional video offerings, including tips, culinary skills demonstrations, and Webinars focused on the ACCM mission of providing medical professionals, food service professionals, students, patients, and community members with hands-on culinary training and lifestyle lessons using an evidence-based approach that aligns with current medical literature.
The Certified Culinary Medicine Specialist (CCMS) Program
The Certified Culinary Medicine Specialist (CCMS) designation identifies clinicians who have a unique foundation for incorporating healthy eating into patients’ diets: comprehensive knowledge of nutrition and the culinary techniques to prepare food that is consistent with real-world budgets, time constraints, and nutritional ideals. Physicians, Physicians Assistants, Pharmacists, Registered Dietitians and Nurse Practitioners are eligible for certification.
The hybrid 60-credit curriculum includes a distinctive combination of online nutrition education courses, live conferences, and in-person attendance at hands-on teaching kitchen modules.By completing the program, clinicians will enhance their confidence and quality of care by learning how to:
- Integrate nutritional counseling to supplement pharmacological treatment
- Educate patients about weight loss and weight management
- Develop practical examination-room dialogues that inspire behavioral change
- Implement new strategies in even the busiest primary care offices
Apply for the CCMS Program Now!
Culinary Medicine Programming for Chefs and Foodservice Professionals
The Advisory Board and the Health meets Food team is excited to offer pioneering Culinary Medicine programming for chefs and foodservice professionals. The programming is a 20 module series and the courseware will be available for culinary schools as well as a certification program.
Chefs and foodservice professionals are perfectly positioned to play a central role in changing the way Americans eat. However, many chefs and foodservice professionals feel their nutrition education and ability to communicate practical, effective guidance to consumers as well as their skill to produce food that is healthy and delicious is lacking.
The Certified Culinary Medicine Professional (CCMP) program provides foodservice professional at any level with a unique combination of nutritional knowledge and improved healthy culinary skills so that they can effectively incorporate healthy options into menus to help consumers.
Through certification, foodservice professionals will enhance their knowledge, confidence, and skills by learning how to:
- Evaluate and apply the most rigorous current research to menu and recipe development.
- Enhance the quality of meals prepared.
- Improve the diet quality especially targeting diet-related chronic diseases
Featuring a hybrid 45-credit curriculum comprised of online education, live conference learning, and hands-on teaching kitchen modules, the CCMP program is designed for those passionate about integrating science-based nutrition research into their culinary skillset and will equip candidates with the nutritional knowledge and culinary skills to optimize health.
View the program’s hybrid curriculum and steps towards certification.
Congratulations to the professionals who have completed the Certified Culinary Medicine Professional Program.
This represents a significant achievement, with completion of both the courseware as well as sitting for and passing the certification examination.
| Shawnte Clawson Heidi DeCosmo Marisa Dimas Melanie Dunbar Kandice Everitt Helene Fletcher Jessica Holbrook |
Neha Jamani Dhawan Amanda Molina Katie Sindac Erin Valadez Cathy Whitt Samantha Willins Adam Wilson |
Culinary Medicine Roundtable – School Lunch Program
Watch the recording of the American College of Culinary Medicine Fall 2024 Culinary Medicine Roundtable.
Building on conversations started at the 2024 Health meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference, the ACCM convened experts in the field to offer further insight into the history, implementation, public health implications, and innovations in the school lunch program.
Free Food Security Continuing Medical Education Online
The Health meets Food team offers free continuing medical education programming focused on food security issues:
1. Food Security in Older Adults
2. SNAP and WIC
3. Food Banks and Medically Tailored Meals
This is a significant issue for many in our society and the courseware covers background as well as actionable information for healthcare professionals. All three of these modules are also available for use by partner sites using the Health meets Food courseware for healthcare professional students.
American College of Culinary Medicine Clothing and Swag
We are excited to announce the availability of Health meets Food clothing and swag. Great as a gift for yourself, family, friends and (even better) your Culinary Medicine colleagues.
Choose from baseball caps, t-shirts, polo shirts, embroidered aprons, mugs, and water bottles.
