What is Culinary Med Ed?
Culinary Med Ed is your go-to CEU source to 
get the cooking knowledge and skills you need to teach your patients with chronic conditions how to make the foods on their therapeutic diet taste great and fit their lifestyle!
Because patients’ food choices and preferences are deeply personal, when their diets are radically changed due to illness, it compromises their satisfaction with food. We believe in the power of culinary medicine and its ability to help patients work through this challenge in a way that meets their individual needs and helps them discover they can love foods proven to fight disease.
We started this service to provide dietitians and other health professionals with the tools they need to empower their patients to break through individual challenges when learning about new food selection, meal planning, and food prep practices. Through self-paced continuing education courses and downloadable patient materials, Culinary Med Ed will teach you the cooking information you need to know and help you to get educational resources into the hands of your patients in a convenient way.
Courses Coming Soon!
Access Training on Your Computer, Tablet or Smart Phone
Culinary Med Ed’s courses will arm health professionals with evidence-based nutrition information combined with real-world cooking solutions to target a variety of common dietary compliance barriers including health condition, lifestyle, cultural beliefs, budget, cooking skills, and taste preference.
Our highly visual courses are designed to boost kitchen confidence and cooking skills by delivering helpful information about food prep tools, cooking equipment, ingredient selection, grocery shopping, meal planning, and cooking techniques.
Courses will feature:
- Self-paced modules that can be completed anytime and on any device
- Disease-specific nutrition guidelines paired with food and cooking advice
- Step-by-step tutorials on ingredient preparation and cooking techniques
- Recipes and meal plans
- Interactive quizzes
- Patient education materials
- Instant results and certificate upon completion
How It Works
Get Your Continuing Education Units in 3 Easy Steps!
Select Your Course
Choose a course and set up an account with a username and password. You’ll be able to access your course anytime, from any device.
Take Your Course
Complete the course at your convenience. Be sure to answer the test questions following each section.
Get Instant Results
After you’ve completed the course with a passing grade of 80% or greater, you’ll receive a certificate of completion immediately.
“Enhance Your Cooking Skills to Advance Your Dietetic Practice”
- Andrea Kirkland, MS, RD
Andrea’s Story
When I first started counseling patients with newly diagnosed chronic diseases, I would generally give them a black and white handout or booklet with certain foods divided into different categories like “Eat”, “Avoid”, and “Sometimes”. I questioned if there was a way to educate patients about food in a more exciting, more beneficial way. So, I’d embellish my talk with as much information as possible and leave the session thinking that I had successfully provided them with everything they needed to know to easily follow their new diet once they returned home.
But, it didn’t take long for me to significantly change my view on my counseling strategy once I began to understand how overwhelmed those patients and their caretakers must have felt. Around that same time my father had been battling renal failure and was continuing to struggle to adjust to his diet and new way of life. I watched my mother quickly learn the do’s and don’ts of the diet, but the bigger struggle was how to make those foods taste appetizing so my father would actually want to eat. Together we shopped for cookbooks and read through as many patient education materials we could access, but had very little luck finding helpful resources.
Since then, I’ve witnessed other loved ones and other families go through these same struggles and over the last several years I’ve dedicated my career to creating recipes and meal plans, writing articles, and developing cookbooks that serve others battling these same dietary challenges. Now, I want to empower health practitioners to become more equipped to talk about food and cooking with their patients so that together we’ll see greater dietary compliance among those with chronic diseases and ultimately improve their health outcomes.