Novel Longitudinal and Propensity Score Matched Analysis of Hands-On Cooking and Nutrition Education versus Traditional Clinical Education among 627 Medical Students

Dominique J Monlezun; Benjamin Leong; Esther Joo; Andrew G Birkhead; Leah Sarris; Timothy S Harlan

doi:10.1155/2015/656780

Novel Longitudinal and Propensity Score Matched Analysis of Hands-On Cooking and Nutrition Education versus Traditional Clinical Education among 627 Medical Students

Adv Prev Med. 2015:2015:656780. doi: 10.1155/2015/656780. Epub 2015 Sep 8.

Authors

Dominique J Monlezun¹, Benjamin Leong², Esther Joo³, Andrew G Birkhead⁴, Leah Sarris⁵, Timothy S Harlan⁵

Affiliations

¹ The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70119, USA ; Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA.
² Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, Long Beach, CA 90806, USA.
³ The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70119, USA ; Harbor-University of California Los Angeles Medical Center, Torrance, CA 90502, USA.
⁴ The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70119, USA ; University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60612, USA.
⁵ The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70119, USA.

Abstract

Background. Physicians are inadequately equipped to respond to the global obesity and nutrition-associated chronic disease epidemics. We investigated superiority of simulation-based medical education with deliberate practice (SBME-DP) hands-on cooking and nutrition elective in a medical school-based teaching kitchen versus traditional clinical education for medical students. Materials and Methods. A 59-question panel survey was distributed to an entire medical school twice annually from September 2012 to May 2014. Student diet and attitudes and competencies (DACs) counseling patients on nutrition were compared using conditional multivariate logistic regression, propensity score-weighted, and longitudinal panel analyses. Inverse-variance weighted meta-analysis (IVWM) was used for planned subgroup analysis by year and treatment estimates across the three methods. Results. Of the available 954 students, 65.72% (n = 627) unique students were followed to produce 963 responses. 11.32% (n = 109) of responses were from 84 subjects who participated in the elective. SBME-DP versus traditional education significantly improved fruit and vegetable diet (OR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.07-1.79, p = 0.013) and attitudes (OR = 1.81, 95% CI: 1.40-2.35, p < 0.001) and competencies (OR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.54-1.92, p < 0.001). Conclusions. This study reports for the first time superiority longitudinally for SBME-DP style nutrition education for medical students which has since expanded to 13 schools.