The Teaching Kitchen Collaborative invites you to submit your manuscript for publication in a Special Issue of Nutrients, guest edited by TKC Executive Director, Dr. David Eisenberg.
Nutrients Special Issue “How can health and wellness promotion strategies which include nutrition education alongside hands-on cooking be organized, evaluated, and optimized for maximal impact?”
Special Issue Editor: Dr. David Miles Eisenberg
Deadline: August 25, 2023
Nutrients is a peer-reviewed, open access journal of human nutrition published semimonthly online by MDPI. Published abstracts in Nutrients are highly visible as they are indexed within Scopus, SCIE (Web of Science), PubMed, MEDLINE, PMC, Embase, PubAg, AGRIS, and other databases.
Submission Information
Special Issue Information - A letter from David Eisenberg
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Diet-related diseases account for the majority of deaths in the US and an increasing proportion of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, food and nutrition insecurity pose challenges to health authorities and governments globally. Existing strategies focusing primarily on disease diagnosis and treatment are insufficient.
In May 2022 the US House of Representatives passed the bipartisan Resolution 1118 calling for medical schools, graduate medical education programs, and other professional training programs to provide meaningful physician and health professional education on nutrition and diet, and demonstrate competencies in advising patients about enhanced food choices, or risk the discontinuation of $10.3 billion in federal funding for the training of future health professionals. In October 2022, the White House National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health set the bold strategy to end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
In October 2022, the Teaching Kitchen Research Conference showcased the rapid growth of multidisciplinary programs to respond to these calls. Individuals, families, and communities need to be able to afford, access, and learn to select and prepare delicious and nutritious foods and receive evidence-based, culturally sensitive guidance about diet and lifestyle. Proponents of Teaching Kitchens, Culinary Medicine, Culinary Nutrition, Lifestyle Medicine, Integrative Medicine, Food as Medicine, and Whole Person Health Programs have developed strategies which include nutrition education alongside hands-on cooking instruction, often in association with evidence-based instruction in lifestyle, e.g., movement, exercise, and sleep; mindfulness training; motivational interviewing, health coaching, and additional behaviour change strategies.
Teaching kitchens are increasingly being built as educational classrooms and translational research laboratories to deliver this evidence-based instruction across a range of populations and settings worldwide.
For this Special Issue, we invite manuscripts that formally describe, contrast, and evaluate the impact of health and wellness promotion strategies which include nutrition education alongside hands-on cooking on:
- health risk behaviours
- clinical outcomes
- biomarkers
- costs
- access to nutritious foods
- the training of future health professionals.
We welcome submissions that:
- provide evidence that these programs show behavioural, clinical and/or educational impact
- highlight and recommend strategies to improve programming
- suggest or demonstrate the financial impact, return on investment, and financial sustainability of these programs
- provide evidence of impact for at-risk populations
- summarize relevant data tracking tools to be used across comparable studies
- recommend future wellness care team “ensembles” and training programs
- describe relevant competencies and credentialing requirements for those providing such programs.
Dr. David Miles Eisenberg
Guest Editor
View List of Topics
Manuscripts could focus on, but not be limited to, the following concepts:
1) Provide a systematic review of controlled studies assessing the impact of hands-on culinary instruction and participant cooking as a component of an educational intervention intended to enhance behavioural and health outcomes.
2) Describe and define teaching kitchen/culinary medicine programs (and curricula) designed to positively impact behaviours, clinical outcomes, relevant biomarkers, and health care costs of selected populations.
3) Highlight models that enhance standard care with teaching kitchen/culinary medicine/food as medicine adjuncts. Importantly, such manuscripts should address ways in which multiple providers, disciplines, and teams responsible for aspects of nutrition care/intervention can work more effectively in a coordinated (interprofessional) fashion to deliver optimized patient care.
4) Describe teaching kitchen/culinary medicine programs designed to explicitly address the needs of vulnerable populations, including individuals and families facing nutrition insecurity and historically marginalized populations.
5) Describe teaching kitchen/culinary medicine programs designed to explicitly address the needs of populations with specific disease states, e.g., nutrition support for patients with obesity, diabetes, pre-diabetes, enhanced cardiovascular risk, cancer diagnoses, etc. and include information about optimal timeframes (aka “dosing”) of such interventions.
6) Propose validated outcomes tracking tools to assess changes in diet, exercise, mindfulness, quality of life, anthropometrics, relevant biomarkers, and other relevant outcomes measures whereby future studies aimed at enhancing health behaviours and clinical outcomes can be more uniformly assessed across studies and populations.
7) Offer a range of business cases and reimbursement strategies in support of teaching kitchens and/or culinary medicine/Food as Medicine programs. Ideally, these will include (a) the potential for Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine/Food as Medicine programs to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) to the private sector, including third party payers (and, especially self-insured corporations); (b) Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine/Food as Medicine/Whole Person Health programs adapted for Shared Medical Appointment settings; (c) trans-professional referrals to Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine professionals in circumstances where these can be successfully billed for using existing reimbursement guidelines.
8) Describe the potential role of Teaching Kitchens/Culinary Medicine/Whole Person Health programs in the context of Precision Nutrition research, especially considering (a) the NIH’s Strategic Plan for Nutrition Research 2020-2030; (b) the recent (2022) White House Conference on Food and Hunger; and (c) value-based health care. Importantly, such manuscripts should address ways in which multiple federal agencies responsible for both food and healthcare delivery can work more effectively in a coordinated fashion.
9) Describe the value of having Teaching Kitchens operated in collaboration or partnership with local agriculture, including farmers, those responsible for school and community gardens, those developing urban gardens and urban agriculture (aka vertical farm) projects, etc.
10) Explore the relevance of Teaching Kitchens and Culinary Medicine to (a) conventional medicine, including the training of various future health professionals; (b) lifestyle medicine; (c) integrative medicine; (d) health coaches; (e) proponents of “Whole Person Health”; and (f) other professional stakeholder groups TBD.
11) Include studies demonstrating the impact of Teaching Kitchens/Culinary Medicine on the training of future health professionals.
12) Suggest ways in which teaching kitchens can be used to promote interprofessional training.
13) Specifically explore the relevance of Teaching Kitchens/Culinary Medicine in the context of the recently passed House of Representatives Resolution (HR 1118) which calls for enhanced nutrition education (and the demonstration of competencies regarding advice about nutrition and food choices) on the part of medical trainees and practicing physicians.
14) The roles of the Chef, RD, MD, Health Coach, Mindfulness instructor, exercise trainer, and other practitioners in Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine/Lifestyle Medicine/Whole Person Health wellness teams of the future.
15) Summarize/present behaviour change theories and strategies to be applied to teaching kitchens, culinary medicine, Food as Medicine and Whole Person Health programs in order optimize behaviour change in an effort to improve health outcomes.
16) Summarize best practices relating to Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine instruction, including approaches used “in-person” as compared with approaches used “virtually” (e.g., online, interactive video-conferencing methods) and the intervention durations thought to be optimal.
17) Suggest core competencies and credentialing criteria to be applied to teaching kitchen instructors, teaching kitchen educational ensembles (of instructors), as well as Teaching Kitchen (physical) facilities, as these competencies and certification criteria will likely be of interest to third party payers as research in this area expands.
18) Suggest ways in which (a) mindfulness training; (b) movement and exercise instruction; (c) education about sleep and rest; (d) strategies to optimize successful behaviour change, e.g., motivational interviewing and health coaching; and (e) strategies to educate trainees about the relationships between food choices and environmental sustainability and planetary health can be summarized into educational modules and successfully incorporated into Teaching Kitchen/Culinary Medicine related curricula.
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Nutrients is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI’s English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
