Eating well is about food and health, but equally also celebration and community. There is a world of flavor, and the passport is spices. I connected my lifelong love of food and cooking to my work as a physician in 2012, when I attended a medical conference that transformed the way I practice medicine, after a decade as a primary care physician. At that time, I was feeling burned out. I knew that I was helping my patients, but I didn’t feel that I was making an impact in the way I really wanted. Despite my support and advice, my patients struggled to lose weight, to control their cholesterol and blood pressure and blood sugar, and they were tired, anxious, and depressed. I wrote many prescriptions, for cholesterol medications, for blood pressure medications, for diabetes medications, and for antidepressants and sleep aids. My patients didn’t feel better, and I felt ineffectual.
Then, I went to what would be a life-changing CME conference, called Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives, co-sponsored by Harvard School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America. We reviewed the latest updates in nutrition science, and how this knowledge could help patients. We were also taught to cook incredibly delicious food that was also health-supportive, by the culinary school’s chef-instructors. That conference was my lightbulb moment. My practice changed immediately: Before, at the end of routine physical examinations, I would review my findings with the patient, discuss their weight, blood pressure and lab results, and make some vague suggestions for modifying their diet and exercise routine. Typically, it might have ended there. But after my epiphany, with my next patient, I pulled out my prescription pad—and wrote a recipe for kale chips. A week after the conference ended, I taught my first cooking class to patients, and I was hooked. I began teaching cooking classes on a regular basis, and felt as exhilarated as my students were. I shifted my practice to include culinary medicine, an evidence-based field that blends the art of food and cooking with the science of medicine. I did this to address some dismal statistics: About 75 percent of visits are due to lifestyle-related conditions. Half of premature deaths are attributable to our overfed, yet malnourished, society. Only 10 percent of Americans meet dietary guidelines.
Practicing culinary medicine is a low-cost, accessible, and culturally adaptable intervention. A few years after I began to teach cooking, I attended culinary school and earned a certificate in plant-based nutrition, after which I founded a formal cooking program for patients, called Thrive Kitchen, at Kaiser Permanente. I also teach medical students and residents—doctors in training—because only a quarter of medical schools offer a course in nutrition, despite the fact that diet is the top cause of death and disability. While my career path took a nontraditional turn, it reinvigorated my joy in my career, but equally important, allowed me to help patients in a way I had previously been unable to do. Whether patients take a hands-on cooking class with me or simply accept my offer of a recipe, they are surprised, grateful, and inspired. They tell me that I have changed their life. It might mean reversing diabetes, going off blood pressure medications, or avoiding weight-loss surgery. At the least, eating better makes people feel better. Helping people find their way on this path is my mission, and a joy.
The best way I have found to make transitioning to eating more healthfully a joy is to bring in flavors from around the world. My food influences have always been global and wide-ranging, and I love the adventures you can have in your own kitchen just by exploring different spices. I believe that the best way to get to know a culture is to sit down and break bread (or roti, or a bowl of rice or noodles) with the locals. What I cook and what I teach in my cooking classes are recipes inspired by the people I have met from around the world. I grew up with parents from Taiwan, lived in Singapore for a year in college, and married a man from Trinidad. No matter where I am cooking, I rely on spices to capture the flavors of a particular cuisine. And I am never without my own spicebox. Known as a masala dabba, the spicebox found in the kitchen of Indian homes is a large, flat-bottomed, round steel container in which nest several smaller steel bowls for the cook to fill with a personal VIP list of spices.
I like to think of a spicebox as the cook’s equivalent of a doctor’s bag—containing the essential tools to use in the art of cooking. Learning to use spices is the best way to add interest and vibrancy to simple home cooking. As our first medicine, spices also play a role in our health and wellness.
Going to culinary school and becoming a founder of a cooking program were both unexpected developments in what I thought would be a pretty standard medical career. My success and importantly, personal joy, in taking these detours gave me the confidence to pursue other ideas. Becoming an author was the next big development which opened my world and community to the wider food world, which has been both professionally and personally expansive and fulfilling. A few years after I started Thrive Kitchen, I wrote a cookbook, Spicebox Kitchen: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes, to bring the same flavors and culinary medicine principles that I teach in my cooking classes to home cooks near and far. This cookbook shares my love for flavors from around the world from my unique perspective and nutrition knowledge as a physician and professionally trained chef. Whereas most “healthy cookbooks” focus on nutrition over flavor, these recipes celebrate eating for pleasure. At my table, food is meant to be savored. I believe that our food choices should be personal; the best diet for one person may not be the best for another. I do recommend that everyone eat “mostly plants,” for many reasons, including taste, variety, the environment, ethical concerns, and yes, health. My goal as a physician is to improve patients’ health by inspiring them to cook more and eat more vegetables. My goal as a cooking instructor and recipe developer is to get people to love and crave vegetables by showing them the many ways to prepare them, deliciously.
And in the last several years, I have had the opportunity to explore other opportunities that my professional involvement in the food and publishing industries have opened up to me, from planning and speaking at conferences, serving on boards which address food and nutrition insecurity as well as culinary literacy, and helping start one of the newest culinary medicine electives, at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. I am also visiting faculty in a Culinary Nutrition Masters Program at a university in Dublin, Ireland. Closer to home, I recently started a new clinical program to offer individual consultations in lifestyle and culinary medicine.
I truly never could have dreamed up any of these opportunities when I began my career in medicine. If I were to give just two bits of advice, they would be to keep your mind open to new ideas, and to follow your passions. The details seem to work themselves out.
Excerpted and adapted from: SPICEBOX KITCHEN: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes by Linda Shiue, MD. Copyright © 2021. Available from Balance, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
In 2024, Dr. Linda Shiue was interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta for a Chasing Life segment titled The Joy of Food.
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