Cooking for Health Optimization With Patients

Cooking for Health Optimization with Patients (CHOP) is the first known multi-site
prospective cohort study with a nested Bayesian adaptive randomized trial in the preventive
cardiology field of culinary medicine. It is also the first known longitudinal study to
assess the impact of hands-on cooking and nutrition education on patient outcomes, with those
classes taught by medical students and other future and current medical professionals who
have first been trained in those classes on how to integrate diet and lifestyle counseling of
patients with their respective scopes of clinical practice. CHOP is the primary research
study of the world's first known medical school based teaching kitchen, The Goldring Center
for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine. Medical trainees and
professionals are followed in this study long-term to understand how the classes impact their
competencies in patient counseling, attitudes about the counseling, and their own diets.
Patients who consent to being randomized to these classes compared to standard of care are
studied within the nested Bayesian adaptive randomized trial to understand how the classes
impact their health outcomes, clinical and food costs, and the costs of health systems caring
for these patient populations. CHOP is designed as a pragmatic population health trial to
hopefully improve healthcare effectiveness, equity, and cost by establishing an
evidence-based, scalable, sustainable model of healthcare intervention targeting the social
determinants of health, while complementing the pharmacological and/or surgical management of
patients.