I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in the Wall Street Journal:  “A Delicious Prescription:  Chefs and Doctors Are Teaming Up to Create Health Food You Might Actually Crave.”

The article talked about how famous functional-medicine doctors like Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Frank Lipman are teaming up with famous chefs such as David Bouley and Seamus Mullen to show that, as Ann Wigmore said, “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison”, meaning that we should look at food as medicine.

I’m hoping that this isn’t just a fad, but that doctors are recognizing what traditional medicines from around the world have long known about the healing properties of food.

Doctors, you see, typically don’t learn about nutrition in medical school, and if they do, it’s usually about macro nutrition things like calories, carbohydrates and maybe vitamins.

In my experience, mainstream doctors have pooh-poohed the benefits of removing certain problem foods and/or the addition of health-promoting foods.

In fact, one of our ex-pediatricians advised me to take my older son to McDonald’s and give him Pediasure when he was finally diagnosed as failure to thrive, as if that would solve his problem.  It didn’t.  There was way more to the story than that, and giving my son non-nutritious, toxin-laden food was not the answer.

Fortunately for us, unfortunately for them, some of these famous doctors like Dr. Hyman and Dr. Susan Blum have had their own health crises, and they realized that food was a large part of their own recovery journeys.  In fact, Dr. Blum has a state-of-the-art kitchen at her office, where a staff chef teaches about cooking for health.  Let’s hope more mainstream doctors take a cue from them and decide to write prescriptions for more fruits and vegetables.