Culinary medicine and the fundamentals of holistic nutrition
BY PAULINE JOY M. GUTIERREZ
AS any homemaker will tell you, cooking has long been acknowledged as a foundational approach to healing, and is now even woven into naturopathic medical education as consumers become more open to improving their health through the food they consume.
A Filipino plant-based brand produced by Unilab’s natural products company Synnovate Pharma Corp., Sekaya (www.sekaya.com.ph) seeks to add to this conversation through its Prescribing Nature Series, an online panel discussion on culinary medicine and the importance of natural, nutrient-dense ingredients to holistic nutrition.
“Culinary medicine blends different medical subspecialties in a way to cook healthy and simply without saying that any one diet is the best diet. What it has is an omnivorous outlook,” explained Dr. John La Puma, internal medicine specialist and co-founder of Chefmd.
According to La Puma, the discipline started as new enthusiasm and interest emerged around the relationship of food, eating and cooking to personal health and wellness over the past few years.
“Just like the ‘food-as-medicine’ movement decades ago, nature-based medicine is beginning to emerge as a scientifically proven school of thought and a critical medical intervention that has both immediate and long-term health benefits,” he said.
He further pointed to several academic findings which prove that robust diets function as preventive medicine.
In particular, the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in healthy fats, whole grains, and vegetables, is linked to a reduced risk of heart disease, neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes, certain cancers, and obesity. Plant-based diets have also been found to reverse coronary artery disease while low-carbohydrate lifestyles help to eliminate type 2 diabetes in some people. In his paper “What Is Culinary Medicine and What Does It Do,” La Puma even writes that some eating patterns have been found to be as effective than prescription medication for some conditions: “An anti-inflammatory eating pattern helps rheumatoid arthritis, a ketogenic diet for epilepsy, a Mediterranean eating pattern for cardiovascular disease and advanced colon cancer.”
Furthermore, several foods have been found to be as effective as well: “Legumes for cholesterol lowering; soy nuts for systolic and diastolic hypertension; tree nuts for metabolic syndrome; baked and broiled fish for heart failure; honey and milk for acute cough.”
“Culinary medicine is a way to start actually looking at your food,” said La Puma.
Dr. Oyie Balburias, FPCP, IFMCP, and functional medicine pioneer in the Philippines, agrees, stressing the part holistic nutrition—eating whole foods that do not have added sugars, starches, flavorings, or
other manufactured ingredients—play in the overall health of an individual.
He said, “Being healthy means putting the right fuel in your body. Whole foods act as medicine that protect and heal, and give your immune system a break from toxins and the additives found in processed food.”
An Ayurvedic diet, for example, is based around the principle of maintaining and/or bringing the body back to its natural state if it becomes unbalanced. Eating holistic or Ayurvedic foods, including ones that are free of sugars and flour, can help keep your elements in balance. Apart from lowering triglycerides, whole foods can also save the cost of managing chronic lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes and obesity. “Every meal you eat influences the way you feel in one way or another, so the more nutritious food you choose, the closer you are to getting to optimum health,” Balburias added.
Sekaya recognizes that adding more natural remedies can help one’s well-being improve in the long run, recently introducing Sekaya Raw Actives, a curated line of nutrient-dense superfoods.
“Sekaya is very proud to bring another line of best-in-class plant-based products to Filipino consumers. The brand works hard to provide high-quality solutions brought on by converging the exacting measures of science and the healing benefits of nature,” said Abi Nepomuceno, director of Synnovate Pharma.