NUNM Food as Medicine Institute Partners with Saint Luke’s Hospital

Tweet

The National University of Natural Medicine (NUNM) has announced it has formed an educational partnership with Saint Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, MO, to collaborate in the delivery of clinical and community education nutrition workshops and research in the Midwest. The Food as Medicine Institute Alliance was created to help expand community-based nutrition education by promoting better dietary choices to reduce chronic diseases.

The new Food as Medicine Institute (FAMI) Alliance will help establish the growth of the NUNM Food as Medicine Everyday (FAME) series of community workshops through the Muriel I. Kauffman Women’s Heart Center at Saint Luke’s Hospital. The workshops are based on the NUNM FAME nutrition and cooking curriculum, which was launched in Portland in 2011. The first series of FAME workshops at Saint Luke’s are scheduled to begin February 13, 2018.

Leading the FAMI Alliance is Julie Briley, ND, the co-founder of FAMI and the FAME workshops. Dr. Briley, who co-authored Food as Medicine Everyday, Reclaim Your Health with Whole Foods (NUNM Press, 2016) with FAMI co-founder Courtney Jackson, ND, said the partnership with Saint Luke’s Hospital, “is a collaboration that’s helping to bridge the gap between Western biomedicine and naturopathic medicine by using nutrition to prevent and treat disease.”

NUNM’s Food as Medicine Institute was established in 2014 to promote nutrition education not only among the public, but also among health care professionals seeking to expand their understanding of the relationship between health and nutrition as a means of preventing and reducing chronic disease. The popular FAME program is a 12-week series of workshops comprised of nutrition lectures followed by hands-on cooking demonstrations of simple whole-foods meals that participants help prepare and share at the end of the class. The unique 90-minute classes are taught by licensed naturopathic physicians or graduates of NUNM’s Master of Science in Nutrition program.

Dr. Briley said that nutrition is a key component of naturopathic medical training as graduates are licensed as primary care physicians. “We have long known that nutrition is a foundational building block to helping patients achieve and maintain better health,” she explained. “The FAMI Alliance will expand community-based nutrition education and help reduce chronic diseases using food as medicine. We’re very excited to expand the FAME series of workshops to the Midwest and welcome Saint Luke’s Hospital as a founding member of the FAMI Alliance.”

“Many women are unaware that heart disease is the number one killer of women in the U.S. We know that one in four women will die of some form of cardiovascular disease,” added Marcia McCoy, RN, MSN, director of Saint Luke’s Muriel I. Kauffman Women’s Heart Center. “ Our Center is taking a proactive approach to help empower women to take charge of their heart health and to address it before it becomes a problem. The FAME workshops, programs and research we’ll undertake with NUNM are ideal complements to the other tools we’ve developed at Saint Luke’s to help assist women in their health journeys.”

McCoy said Lucas Schubert, MScN, an NUNM nutrition graduate and trained FAME educator, will spearhead the FAMI Alliance at Saint Luke’s Muriel I. Kauffman Women’s Heart Center as its nutritional health coordinator, developing and teaching the FAME series workshops, providing individual nutritional consultations, and overseeing additional nutritional programs.

For more information, visit www.saintlukeshealthsystem.org/food-medicine-everyday-fame-program.