Food as Medicine Update 2024 to highlight nutrition through entire life cycle

The University of Toronto’s eighth annual Food as Medicine Update will run this Friday, November 1, featuring local and international experts sharing new research on nutrition across life stages.

“We’re looking forward to being able to cover development and nutrition across the life cycle, from young to old,” says John Sievenpiper, symposium chair and a professor at U of T’s Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition. “It's an opportunity to understand how children, adults and older adults are different, but also the common practices we can apply irrespective of age.”

This year’s accredited event will be both virtual and in-person at U of T’s Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus.

Researchers at the Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine created the Food as Medicine Update to help fill a critical gap for physicians and health professionals, providing nutrition education to improve the care they provide to patients.

“All of the guidelines for chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease indicate that diet and lifestyle are at the cornerstones of therapy, yet in the past physicians haven’t always had the education, tools or resources to actually support patients with that,” says Sievenpiper, who is also a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto and nutrition theme lead for U of T’s MD program, as well as a professor of nutritional sciences and medicine.

“At this update, we're trying to provide some information that will allow them to have those discussions.”

A key feature of the Food as Medicine Update is the Rundle-Lister Lectureship in Transformative Nutritional Medical Education, which recognizes outstanding contributions to translational research in the field of therapeutic diets and chronic disease prevention. The award was established by a gift from alumna Margaret Rundle, an alumna of U of T’s MD Program, and her husband Stephen Lister.

Uma Naidoo, a psychiatrist, professional chef and nutrition specialist, is this year’s recipient of the Rundle-Lister Lectureship. She is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of nutritional psychiatry at the hospital’s academy.

Naidoo is a recognized leader in understanding how food contributes to mood and mental health and has written two books on the topic, This Is Your Brain on Food and Calm Your Mind with Food.

“Dr. Naidoo’s work in nutritional psychiatry is contributing significantly to this emerging field,” says Sievenpiper. “This is a very exciting and dynamic area of research that we’re looking forward to sharing with those at the conference.”

Naidoo will speak about transforming food moderation into a sustainable lifestyle. Since many people know what healthy eating is, but tend not to do it, her talk will focus on how physicians can help making eating healthier more appealing for patients to have better physical and mental health throughout their lives.

“My work, platform and belief system is about embracing what a person eats but helping them to tweak it to the best version of foods they will eat — meeting them where they are and helping them from there,” she says. “This is a marathon not a sprint, but changes are sustainable when a person is guided to the decisions with patience and research-backed information and without judgment.” 

Registered dietitian and bestselling author Leslie Beck will also speak about using nutrition to navigate menopause.

Laura Chiavaroli, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Temerty Medicine and an affiliate scientist at Unity Health Toronto, will talk about strategies for using evidence-based digital health tools to translate nutrition guidelines into clinical practice, particularly for aging populations. Other speakers include:

• Kozeta Miliku (nutritional sciences, Temerty Medicine)
• Catherine Birken (paediatrics, nutritional sciences, Temerty Medicine and The Hospital for Sick Children)
• Richa Agnihotri (paediatrician and assistant clinical professor, McMaster University)
• Emilio Ros (emeritus investigator, Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi Sunyer, Barcelona)
• Teela Johnson (emergency and family physician, Providence Healthcare)

The speakers will cover paediatric nutrition, including developmental origins of health, as well as nutrition in older adults and the link between climate, food and health.

“Physicians in busy family practices have patients of all ages — paediatric to geriatric — so it’s important for them to look at nutrition throughout the life cycle,” says Sievenpiper.

“We hope this year’s event provides them with clinically relevant nutrition information for different age groups that helps them feel more confident and competent in having these conversations with their patients.”

The Food as Medicine Update is hosted by the department of nutritional sciences, the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, and Continuing Professional Development at the University of Toronto.

The event will run Friday, November 1, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m, virtually and in-person at the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, 108 College Street, Toronto.