300-Person Waitlist for Lifestyle Medicine 2024 Workshops!

We returned to action at the 2024 American College of Lifestyle Medicine conference in Orlando, Florida, after first convening here in 2022 to design and execute engaging workshops for healthcare professionals. Leading a team of interprofessional experts from across the country, I delivered an interactive workshop on the application of culinary medicine. I was thrilled to learn that the pre-conference workshops focused on culinary medicine were so popular that the waitlists collectively included more than 300 people—indicating the enormous demand to learn more about this growing field! 

Titled “Leveraging Culinary Medicine to Promote Health Equity,” this culinary medicine workshop was hosted in the teaching kitchen at the adjacent hospitality school. Culinary medicine presents an engaging, evidence-based means to help advance health equity by reaching and empowering historically marginalized and underserved communities to improve their health through food and cooking as foundational aspects of their cultures. This workshop aimed to inspire and empower diverse healthcare providers to collaborate to improve healthcare delivery, patients’ health outcomes, and providers’ well-being through culinary medicine. Attendees practiced hands-on cooking and learned skills that will help them adapt recipes based on medical, cultural, and socioeconomic considerations. 

After Dr. Theresa Stone, Heidi Davis, and I delivered a brief presentation about how culinary medicine aligns with national healthcare priorities and trends and the growing policy and payment opportunities to address patients’ food-related needs, teams competed to create a dish and intervention to meet the needs and patients of a defined patient population in collaboration with a trusted community partner. My team provided a full pantry of diverse ingredients and general guidelines, letting groups use their creativity to concoct a delicious, nutrient-dense, and culturally appropriate dish. Photos of the six dishes are shown below, and the winning group is shown above. We are grateful to Penzeys Spices for donating enough spices for us to send everyone home with samples and to offer gift packages to the winners.  

Survey responses indicated that participants developed great ideas for applications when they returned home. Favorite aspects of the class included the connections made with others in the class, experiential learning, collaboration, and—of course—the food. We appreciated the 100% positive feedback, though we are always looking for ideas to better meet the audiences' needs.

My team left excited to design and deliver more lectures and workshops focused on culinary medicine in the subsequent months, including at the Teaching Kitchen Collaborative Symposium 2024, Obesity Medicine Association 2025, American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians 2025, and the American College of Sports Medicine 2025. Contact me if you would like to meet in person at any of these future conferences or to discuss how I can help you bring training, resources, or other forms of culinary medicine education to your patients or clinical team. I am thrilled to return to the 2026 ACLM conference to offer an even larger and more comprehensive culinary medicine workshop—and that it was the first to sell out many months in advance!