From Michael Roizen, M.D. (Dr. R)
Chief Wellness Officer, Cleveland Clinic
Food is powerfully evocative and has the ability to convey some of our sturdiest memories. I vividly recall, for example, the first time that five-cent hamburgers were sold in fast food joints. I also think fondly of the early advertising campaign claiming that CorningWare plates and serving dishes were indestructible. (My father promptly tried to show us how permanent it was by dropping one to the ground; it shattered, and I learned that there are exceptions to all science.)
As I embarked on my career as a doctor, I also learned about the medicinal power of food and the secrets behind proper cooking techniques. When I became dean of the College of Medicine at State University of New York Upstate Medical University, I quickly developed a curriculum that taught students how to cook healthy meals in an elective class called Culinary Medicine. We limited the class to 20 students, but 63 tried to register that first year. That was about the time I was developing my cooking expertise as part of RealAge (a system that calculates your true biological age versus your calendar age based on your lifestyle and other risk factors). I made 10 recipes a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks with a cooking partner, Donna Szymanski, and my nutritional partner, Dr. John La Puma.
I had always eaten food, of course. But that was the moment when I really found food. Through RealAge, I learned that eating well is more than just ingredients; it is also, just as crucially, about preparation and technique. You can help your body by learning to make foods you love that are also loaded with health benefits.
In my work as the chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic, as well as my work with Dr. Mehmet Oz, food and food preparation have always been the foundations for giving people the power to change their lives. Jim Perko, our executive chef and culinary medicine master at the clinic, says you should never eat food that doesn’t love you back. In this book, we’re taking it one step further by adding in the variable of time.
I’m privileged to work with Dr. Michael Crupain on this methodology. Through my work as chief medical consultant to The Dr. Oz Show and his role as medical director of that program, I quickly realized that both our approaches were rooted in science—and we had the same goals of helping people better understand food. It was a match made in the kitchen!
Now, we’ve put together the plan that combines the what and the when—all with the goal of getting your body synchronized like a world-class orchestra so that your life can hit all the notes you want it to.
From Michael Crupain, M.D., M.P.H. (Dr. C)
Medical Unit Chief of Staff, The Dr. Oz Show
If you can still remember the time you were three, you may recollect a favorite toy or singing songs with your parents. For me, those memories revolve around food. I remember making cookies with my mother, and how delicious lobster tasted. Because I was introduced to cooking at a young age, I’ve always loved the process more than my peers do. I baked pies and bread in elementary school, and I grilled pizzas (before it was fashionable to do so) when I was in high school.
As the years passed, I found myself returning again and again to the experimentation of cooking. It was one of my favorite activities the year I moved home to New York City as I prepared to apply to medical school. We lived across the street from the World Trade Center; when the towers collapsed in 2001, we had to leave our apartment for months, and found ourselves eating out a lot as a result. It was then that I got really excited about good food. I remember a time we were waiting at a restaurant that had really bad service—we had been there forever and they hadn’t even delivered a morsel of bread. All of a sudden, when a man in a chef’s uniform walked in carrying a loaf, we jokingly asked him for some. The next thing you know, he invited me into the kitchen. I ended up working weekends there for the year, and later in other kitchens.
In medical school, I started a pastry club and taught other students how to cook. Then, during a month off of my neurosurgery residency, I went to cooking school in Italy. Each morning, we went to the market and prepared the traditional Mediterranean diet dishes of the Apulia (Puglia) region. The teacher, who was American and has since become a good friend, told us that his cooking school and its students allowed him to live the life he dreamed of. That stuck with me.
I ended my neurosurgery residency after two years because it took me away from some of my most important passions: food and cooking. That’s when I discovered the field of preventive medicine. Most people have never heard of it (and neither had I); it’s a specialty that takes care of populations and tries to keep them healthy, rather than treating patients only after they’ve been stricken by disease. I was drawn to this area of concentration because it allowed me to combine my interests by focusing on the intersection of food, agriculture, and health.
I always knew food was an important part of medicine; I witnessed this firsthand after a close family member changed his health post–heart attack by adjusting his diet and lifestyle habits. But up until this time in my training, I never saw a way to actually specialize in this branch of medicine.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I did my residency, helped me find a way. Its motto is “Protecting Health, Saving Lives Millions at a Time.” There was no better way to achieve this than working in the media. After completing my residency program, I went to work at Consumer Reports, where I ran the food safety testing program. There, I was able to dig deep into the science of food and agriculture, leveraging the power of the most trusted brand in America to educate consumers and advocate for meaningful food safety and sustainability changes.
Now, at The Dr. Oz Show, I help shape the content of a program that millions of Americans welcome into their homes every day. Each week, we are shifting the culture of our country to one of health, where people are focusing more and more on what they eat (who had heard of kale or flax seeds before Dr. Oz?). I’m excited to collaborate in these pages with Dr. Roizen as we zoom in on the next phase of improving our diets—and ultimately our health: the when.