Takeaways from Healthy Kitchens Healthy Lives Conference

Chuck Williams Culinary Arts Museum & Conference Center

This February, I had the privilege of attending the Healthy Kitchens Healthy Lives (HKHL) Conference in Napa, hosted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health—Department of Nutrition and the Culinary Institute of America. HKHL is a herculean effort of chefs, physicians, and research scientists to understand how our foods affect our health, interrogate nutrition fads, and supply healthcare providers with the tools to teach our patients how to eat in the most healthful, culture-aware, and delicious ways. The culinary and medical worlds are eager to help people grow healthier through food.

The conference spans 3 days and includes a variety of lectures, cooking demonstrations, cooking skills classes, and even some practice patient interactions. The presenters included chefs, dieticians, physicians, food ethnographers, and nutrition scientists, including Dr. Christopher Gardner, who led the study covered by the You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment documentary on Netflix. HKHL was a “who’s who” of the scientific nutrition and culinary communities, with attendees trotting the globe to visit, including one from New Zealand. Here, I will share the highlights of my experience.

The culinary and medical worlds are eager to help people grow healthier through food.

Knife Skills Class in the Hestan Kitchen

Chef Barbara Alexander explains how to properly cut a potato.

Healthy food is delicious.

The most obvious takeaway from HKHL is that healthy food can be delicious. There is a notion that healthy eating is boring, flavorless, and, quite frankly, a punishment. But it does not have to be that way. HKHL served breakfast and lunch daily with all the recipes meeting at least 6/7 nutrition goals: minding calories, fat, sugar, and fiber. For more details, see below.

Nutrition goals listed in the Healthy Kitchen Healthy Lives Master Recipe Document

The food was all delectable, with dishes I will crave and prepare for years to come. At the end of the conference, we were sent a recipe guide detailing each dish we were served, prepared, or saw in a demonstration. Proper seasoning, cooking techniques, and spices are the secrets to making healthful foods you will drool over. Healthy food should never be penance. Once you taste crave-able nutrient-rich foods, you may lose the taste for highly processed foods altogether. That’s the goal.

Boxed Lunch on Day 1

Peanut Crusted Salmon with Garlic Marinated Cannellini Beans, Green Beans, and Roasted Peppers with Sherry Vinaigrette

Chickpea Walnut Salad

Roasted Broccolini with Pepperoncini and Parmesan

Roasted Turnips and Winter Squash with Agave Glaze

Winter Greens and Vegetable Salad with Lemon Tahini Dressing

Plant forward is the way to go.

While some animal proteins were served, the focus was on plants, with >50% of the daily protein goal coming from plants. The narrative that plant protein is incomplete is outdated. The science doesn’t back the notion that vegetable proteins are inferior and have to be paired specifically in each meal to provide us with all our essential amino acids in one sitting. The average of amino acids over many meals is more important.

Meat, especially red meat and highly processed meats such as salami and deli meats, are carcinogens. Processed meats are category 1 carcinogens, which means they are so likely to cause cancer that they share a category with smoking and asbestos. Limiting exposure to cancer-producing substances and replacing our protein source with beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains is the best way to ensure longevity. The goal is not global veganism, however, shifting the diet from daily or 3 times daily meat consumption to several times a week or less is the most evidence-based way to ensure you live long and live well.

Student made lunch

Heritage diets are healthy and should be celebrated.

Dietary discussions are often Western-centered. Dietary handouts and instructions tend to vilify traditional foods, such as tortillas or noodles. This disregards the nutrients in Indigenous foods like masa and amaranth. Old Ways is an educational platform celebrating African, Asian, Latin American, and Mediterranean eating patterns. Old Ways provides culturally specific food pyramids, recipes, and tips for improving health while honoring tradition.

Simple techniques can lead to exceptional food independence.

During the cooking classes, novices produced phenomenal dishes with minimal guidance. The secret was simple recipes with easy-to-substitute ingredients focused on techniques. Once you learn to pan-sear a piece of fish, you can swap salmon for halibut or rockfish and switch out the Moroccan spice rub for whatever spice rub you have on hand or prefer.

Participants queuing to try all the dishes.

Carbohydrates are not the enemy, and fiber is your best friend.

We are ecosystems housing trillions of microbes, which require a variety of fibers to live. Our microbiome contains 60,000 to 100,000 genes to degrade fiber compared to the 17 genes we humans have to degrade fiber. A common dietary strategy for weight loss is a low-carbohydrate diet, but if you have ever tried that, you can attest to how miserable being low-carb is for most people. This can be explained in part by our microbiome. Low-carb is likely also too low in fiber to satisfy our gut ecosystem. The key is to have complex carbohydrates, or foods in their whole form (such as whole fruit), rather than highly processed foods such as white flour.

Healthy diet

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Healthy microbiome

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Healthy human

Fiber (or pre-biotics) feeds our gut bacteria, which in turn make beneficial substances such as short-chain fatty acids, which we cannot make ourselves. Our microbiome also helps increase the production of endogenous GLP-1. If we don’t eat fiber, we starve our gut bacteria, which in turn start to chew away at our gut lining. The standard American diet, rich in simple carbohydrates and poor in fiber, causes our gut bacteria to be so hungry they eat us from the inside!

To reduce inflammation, we must focus on increasing our fiber intake and the variety of fiber we eat. Fiber saves lives. A meta-analysis found a 15-30% decrease in all-cause mortality with sufficient fiber intake ~25 fiber, and higher intake levels have even more benefit. Shockingly, only 5% of men and 9% of women in the US get their minimum recommended fiber intake.

Ultra-processed foods are the anti-fiber

Ultra-processed foods can reduce microbiome health independent of lack of fiber. Food colorants, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, and other additives can be toxic to beneficial microbes. Each member of our microbiome has a specific set of fiber types it can use, so variety is key.

The Culinary Institute of America at Copia.

If I had to summarize the conference in one sentence, it would be this: Whatever your great-grandmother told you about healthy eating was probably right.

If you need help with weight loss or just improving your diet and exercise routine, reach out to us at hello@remedymetabolichealth.com or schedule a visit.