Research
TKC’s Research efforts and initiatives are led by the Culinary Nutrition Group at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Featured Publication
This perspective paper summarizes the basic principles of teaching kitchens, their conceptual origins, preliminary evidence of effectiveness, recent growth, and potential for impact as educational classrooms and translational research laboratories. This paper serves as an excellent introduction for readers new to the concept of teaching kitchens, offering valuable insights into their benefits and applications.
Nutrients Special Issue
A Special Issue of the journal Nutrients titled “How can health and wellness promotion strategies which include nutrition education alongside hands-on cooking be organized, evaluated, and optimized for maximal impact?” and guest-edited by TKC Founder and Senior Advisor Dr. David Eisenberg, invited research papers related to teaching kitchens and the concept of food as medicine.
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. This Special Issue belongs to the section “Nutrition Methodology & Assessment” and has published a significant number of manuscripts, many of which are from TKC Organization Members.
2026 TKC Research Paper of the Year Award
Congratulations to Natalie Heredia, et. al., from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX (TKC Organization Member), recipient of the 2026 TKC Research Paper of the Year Award! The winning paper, “Testing of a Culinary Medicine Intervention for Racially/Ethnically Diverse Adults with Type 2 Diabetes,” assessed the efficacy of virtual culinary medicine programming for 104 adult patients with type 2 diabetes from a Texas primary care system. HbA1c levels showed statistically significant reductions from pretest to posttest and at 6-month follow up. Participants reported high satisfaction and improvements in MyPlate knowledge, cooking self-efficacy, servings of fruits and vegetables, frequency of healthy food intake, shopping, cooking and eating behaviors, diabetes self-management, and sustained new habits learned from this five-session program.
