Cooking for Health Optimization With Patients

Cooking for Health Optimization with Patients (CHOP) is the first known multi-site prospective cohort study with a nested Bayesian adaptive randomized trial in the preventive cardiology field of culinary medicine. It is also the first known longitudinal study to assess the impact of hands-on cooking and nutrition education on patient outcomes, with those classes taught by medical students and other future and current medical professionals who have first been trained in those classes on how to integrate diet and lifestyle counseling of patients with their respective scopes of clinical practice. CHOP is the primary research study of the world's first known medical school based teaching kitchen, The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine. Medical trainees and professionals are followed in this study long-term to understand how the classes impact their competencies in patient counseling, attitudes about the counseling, and their own diets. Patients who consent to being randomized to these classes compared to standard of care are studied within the nested Bayesian adaptive randomized trial to understand how the classes impact their health outcomes, clinical and food costs, and the costs of health systems caring for these patient populations. CHOP is designed as a pragmatic population health trial to hopefully improve healthcare effectiveness, equity, and cost by establishing an evidence-based, scalable, sustainable model of healthcare intervention targeting the social determinants of health, while complementing the pharmacological and/or surgical management of patients.