Osnabrück/ Göttingen 07.10.2020
Innovation for medical studies:
The Institute for Nutrition and Psychology at the Georg-August University of Göttingen has successfully launched a new elective subject "Culinary Medicine" for medical studiesat theUniversity Medical School Göttingen in cooperation with CookUOS e.V. under strict adherence to a hygiene concept for the winter semester 2020/21.
Culinary Medicine is an innovative combination of medicine, nutritional science and dietetics with practical culinary arts. Nutritional medical findings are thus translated into the living environments of patients. This takes into account the rapidly increasing demand for nutritional medical advice in practice.
To this end, medical students learn the basics of clinical nutrition in practical cooking courses on the one hand, and at the same time learn how to motivate their patients to lead healthier lives based on natural foods, practical cooking skills and attractive recipes.
Doctors are seen by patients as the most trusted source of health information. Studies from the USA show that they advise their patients much more often and better on nutritional medicine topics if they have previously completed a special cooking course in Culinary Medicine. In the USA, more than 50 universities already offer an elective in Culinary Medicine as part of medical studies. The University Medical Center Göttingen is the first university in Germany to offer Culinary Medicine as an elective subject with 28 course hours (LVS).
The planned start of the summer semester 2020 had to be postponed by one semester due to the Corona pandemic and the associated ban on classroom teaching.
The development, piloting and evaluation as well as the multimedia documentation of the Culinary Medicine elective are funded by the Rut- und Klaus-Bahlsen-Stiftung with a grant of €100,000 over the project period of two years.
In addition to the classroom teaching, digital teaching and learning formats are prepared and provided on the basis of the individual modules of the Culinary Medicine curriculum.
The Culinary Medicine curriculum is based on the consensus paper Leitfaden Ernährungstherapie in Klinik und Praxis (LEKuP), which was presented at the end of 2019 and points the way forward for nutrition medicine and dietetics.
The development of the Culinary Medicine curriculum is led by PD Dr. med. Thomas Ellrott (Institute for Nutrition and Psychology at the Georg-August University Göttingen, University Medicine) and Uwe Neumann (CookUOS e.V., Osnabrück).
The conception team also includes Dr Silke Lichtenstein, Jana Dreyer, Jana Steindl (all Dr Rainer Wild Foundation, Heidelberg), Birgit Ellrott(Cook-and-taste-it, Göttingen), Laura Antonia Drösch and Louisa Schonebeck (both University Medical Centre Göttingen). The conception phase was supported by the Dr. Rainer Wild Foundation.
Since 2015, CookUOS e.V. has been continuing the cooking course offerings first developed in the winter semester of 2010 at the Institute for Health Research and Education (IGB) of the University of Osnabrück for prospective teachers in the health professions and subsequently for students of all disciplines. Cooking courses as part of the CookUOS portfolio are ideally suited to transport health, sustainability, natural science and social aspects. The existing theory-practice deficit is thus counteracted. https://www.cookuos-ev.de/publikationen-zu-cookuos/