 Today, we are taking your health back with me, Wendie Lowe. We are coming to you from our studios of Fintech Hawaii in downtown Honolulu and my home office in Makiki. Today, we shall be looking at food as medicine, and we have a special friend who will assist us with this. Her name is Dr. Annie Wiseman from the Kirkkorian School of Medicine in Las Vegas. Certified in Mind Body Medicine, Annie will be teaching us how to shift our relationship with food to a healing relationship. All right. Lowe, and welcome, Dr. Annie Wiseman. Aloha, and thank you for having me. You sound so local with that aloha going there, because I met you in Hawaii, so you are Hawaii in my mind and in my heart, and I'm sure in your heart as well. Oh, yes, yes. We have many, many people from Hawaii in Las Vegas, and one of my favorite massages to do is Lomi Lomi. That's excellent. So, Annie, before we get started, please share a little bit about yourself. Sure, thank you. So, my name is Annie Wiseman. I grew up here in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I became, gosh, I had a really interesting journey to this point. I was in college in Northern Nevada, and when I was 20, I was involved in a really serious automobile accident, and I was very blessed. I lived, obviously, and I had survived with a severe traumatic brain injury. And so I had to relearn all kinds of things, and this is when really looking at health and well-being shifted for me, and I started to learn about a lot of different ways to heal. After college, I ended up going back to school to become a massage therapist, which then changed my whole life. I thought I was going to work on cruise ships and play around and travel the world, and our first class was a pathology class. And in that class, I met, I got to start volunteering and working with people living with HIV and AIDS and providing massage therapy to them. And that first day, one of the clients told me that no one had touched him like that since their diagnosis. So it just really impacted me profoundly, and over those months, the people that were coming for regular massage, their non-verbal body language was changing, and a lot of them that were having blood work done, they were sharing with me that their T cells and their viral loads were showing differences. So I started to look at the literature and ended up surprisingly, ended up going back to graduate school a couple of years later and then becoming getting my PhD after that. So I became a researcher as a massage therapist. Well, what humble beginnings with profound finding, you know what I mean? Exactly. The gift of touch is so healing. And you nailed it by figuring it out young and then allowing that touch to guide you in where you are today. I think we all know it intuitively, right? Like when our children, if we have children, if they are struggling, we go to comfort them. And it seems to me like somewhere around maybe adolescence or puberty, that's when we back off a little bit. And so I worked with a lot of people with a lot from all of the different ages over the years. And I think that we just need a lot more like community and connection and touch is so, so profoundly impactful on our health and well-being. And we, you know, we here in Hawaii, we're very blessed because every time we see someone, you know, like when I met you, I just run up and give you a hug and, you know, that just says welcome. I love you. I don't know you yet, but I love you already. And I know that there's going to be more great times ahead of us. But the door was open because of the touch, because of that hug. And tell me, tell me that we do, I mean, when we greet each other. So that's so, wow. So luckily we live in Hawaii. We already appreciate all of that, that you that you're sharing with all your students and giving them that gift. So I need to ask you, why do you do the work you are doing? Why do you do this? Well, while I was, gosh, working as a massage therapist, I had like three jobs all through graduate school. And one of them was I worked in a hospice with people at the end of their life. And in the evenings, I would go to school and I was a student of public health. And for me, it didn't make sense that like we were doing this amazing holistic care at the end of somebody's life. Every day, patients, not every day, many days, patients would ask me why it was not until the end of their life that they were getting care like with massage therapy and all of the different things we offered in hospice. And in the evenings, when I would sit in my public health classes and I would learn more about prevention and population health wide approaches, it just made sense to me that we could take this model of care that is so beautiful, that is provided at the end of life. Like what would happen if we could take that model of care from birth all the way through the lifespan? So we do it really well in hospice and end of life or in palliative care. However, like for for the rest of life from the time we're born throughout our lifespans, often our care isn't really that cohesive and we don't have these teams working together. So I just got really interested in it. And around that time, the Kirk Korean School of Medicine was forming and it was at that time called the UNLV School of Medicine. We didn't have a name or yet. And the founding dean and I met because one of my three jobs I was working on a community health grant. We were funded through the Office of Adolescent Health and we were funded to provide comprehensive sex ed in African American churches. And it was a really incredible intervention. And our founding dean came and I was the person working the check-in table. We started and she asked me about my research. I told her about my work and I ended up getting hired to start this well-being and integrative medicine program at a brand new medical school. So it was a very interesting alignment and very unexpected. And from the beginning, I wanted nutrition and food to be a core tenet of what we were teaching. And I'm not a nutritionist by training. I am a person who loves food. So I think about how every single thing we put into our mouths has the ability to impact our health and well-being. So also thinking about that, also thinking about all of the things that go through our heads that impact our bodies. So it became really important to me to try to create a program that honored food and nutrition and nutrients in a way that gave our future doctors the ability to think about food as part of the medicine that they're prescribing. You know, I understand that a lot of Ivy League universities, a lot of universities, the medical schools, when I speak to a lot of the graduate, I ask them, hey, how much nutritional, how many nutritional classes did you attend and is on your list? And they, some of them said none. And I was very surprised, Annie. And is this true? This sadly is true. There's a I forget the exact requirement for hours. It's low. It's very low. And but there's hope. There's reason for hope. Like David, David Eisenberg, I think he's at Harvard. He's been doing some incredible work, Melinda Ring at Northwestern. I mean, there are people across the country. We have like teaching kitchen collaboratives. We have this health meats food program that Dr. Harlan created that we use. There are so many people in medicine that are starting to really, I say, starting, they've probably been doing this for a while. I'm only eight years in. There is a real movement that I'm noticing where people want to know more. They want to live differently and their patients want more. So it's a really great intersection of this opportunity. And I think how we've all lived through the COVID pandemic. I think that we've seen in so many ways how interconnected we all are and how our health impacts each other. And so I think we've got this beautiful opportunity right now to really reimagine what health is and well being and how we take care of ourselves, how we take care of each other, how we take care of our planet. I think there's a real symbiosis going on here. Yes. And I know you have a friend or you know of a former chef and probably he's practicing culinary medicine, but he was a chef first. And then he became a doctor. And so he could implement the knowledge of cooking and the value of great cooking, healthy cooking into his medical practice. Would you like to speak a little bit about that? Sure, I'd love to. So this is Dr. Timothy Harlan. And he he's who created the health meets food curriculum that we use. And he's up in Washington, D.C. Now he was at Tulane when I first met him. But it was incredible when our Dean, Dean Kahn came to UNLV. He had asked me if I would start this health meets food curriculum. And I was so excited because previously we would just go. The wind hotels here so graciously open their doors to us. And their chefs would host our medical student and they would do a demonstration, a cooking demonstration. They would talk about how they had really changed their recipes or created their recipes to have a lot of helpful benefits. And then they'd allow our students to do a tasting. And they also have a really unique concept. Their kitchen, their back of the house where the employees eat is set up in a way that I absolutely love. It's like red, yellow and green, like a stoplight. So when you're going to eat, you know, like the reds would be things you shouldn't eat that much. Yellows and then greens. And so it was really cool for our students to think about this because they're going to be working in hospital systems, which also are systems that provide food for tons of people. So I think it was really cool to do that. And now we have the opportunity. We started it during COVID, so we were virtual just like this. But what I loved about it is we were all cooking together in our own kitchen. And so we were separate, but together. And it was fun. We started usually at 8 a.m., which is just a rude time to get up and start cooking, but we would be in our jammies and we'd go through the case studies. And it's it's really cool because what Dr. Harlan created were robust clinical case studies that the students could work through where a patient would present with these different symptoms. These were their habits and social and behavioral health is my background. And that's such a challenging behavior change is challenging for all humans. So it was really fun for our students to have to kind of role play and think about how would you talk to a patient about their dietary habits, their lifestyle habits and while we were cooking. And then we'd all played our food and our students are very artistic. So their plates would come back today. We'd have them take their gorgeous and then they'd explain what they made. And then we'd go through the case studies and we got to do that quite a bit, which was really fun. And so, Annie, that's that's the key right there, the power of food. That's the any food is the power of the right food to help the body heal. You know, I'm like they like I broccoli says that food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. And so you're exciting them by being able to cook and be creative to present a delicious, healthy meal. I mean, they're going to continue on with this style. I'm so excited to hear about this, Annie. Oh, thank you, Wendy. I'm so excited to do it because food for all of us has its own meaning and it can carry so much weight and emotion. And, you know, we we work within this with the Center for Mind, Body Medicine. We do this mindful eating meditation. We'll do an exercise where we'll have people draw different things about their relationship with food. So occasionally we'll bring that in with our medical students as well to have them really take a minute. And I ask them like think about which part of yourself you're feeding right now. All right, as your physical body hungry, is this your emotional body? Is this your mental body? Is this your spiritual body? Well, I mean, even the traffic light system, the green, yellow, red, I mean, that's a great visual. And so, you know, whether you're with them or not, when they're eating a meal, they're going to say, well, that looks like a red light. I think I shouldn't order that looks like a green light. I'm going to have a double serving of that. So you've already instilled into them the best part of being into the medical profession, not just for their patients, but for themselves and their families that they're going to impact. So I'm so excited to just for the results of your students and the direction that you're leading them towards. So congratulations. Thank you. It's really fun. I think these are the things that can change our health outcomes. You know, the better food that we are eating, the more food we have access to that is good for us. You know, we we live in a food desert in Las Vegas. There's, you know, coming to Hawaii and seeing just how lush and green and, you know, we live in such a different climate. So also thinking about creating sustainable gardening out here, there's a lot that does grow. And so really thinking about that connection to the earth, where we're getting our food from, what we're putting into our bodies. I also I'm pretty lack about judging foods. I used to one of the professors that taught with me is a wonderful, wonderful being and she she was fully vegan, which was great for me. I'm not I eat just about everything. And so in talking to our students, you know, they would ask what is good? What is bad? And we'd look at the data and, you know, a lot of there's great data around the Mediterranean diet. But I also would encourage our students to be kind. If you're choosing to eat this, eat it, enjoy it, and then be done with it. Please don't beat yourself up. Oh, for sure. And that's why we live the 80, 20 rule 80 percent of the time you do the best you can do. You come through the red light, you know, the green light and the yellow light. And then 20 percent of the time you go for it. You have that piece of chocolate cake that you really want to have and enjoy your life and the attitude, but you have to reward yourself. Otherwise, it gets kind of tough just eating all the right foods all the time. So if you can't, that's great, but it's hard. So don't beat yourself up and reward yourself. Well, and food is pleasurable as well. You know, it's such a sensory experience. So I also want them to fully take their time and smell it and look at it and taste it and just really enjoy what they're doing. Because many of the students I work with, they're incredible, they're all wonderful and they're under such a high level of stress. And just what they're expected to know is immense. So I love for them when you get the opportunity to feed yourself, make it count, enjoy the heck out of it. Please, if you can, put your phone away. Turn off your television, go sit outside, make it a whole thing. I mean, ironically, they're studying to save the world. They're studying and putting all that knowledge and information into their minds and their bodies so that they can save the world. But they've got to save themselves first. Yeah. And they've got to create the healthiest person, the healthiest doctor so that they can be the mentors and the guy, the light for others to see. Because otherwise, if they're not healthy, how can they promote? Right. Right. Yeah. That's quite important. And so I mean, when you think about it, right, they, they a lot of medical students, they drink a lot of coffee, they don't sleep. And those are all the things that you've got to take care of your body. Your temple is yours. Only you can do that. So how does nutrition fit into your integrative medicine classes? So we basically work with our first and second year students quite a bit. So in our integrative medicine class, we have time that's chunked, like blocked out about four hour block through the different sections of their learning that's paired with. So we'll pair the curriculum with where they're at. And basically, like when they're in cardiovascular, we'll pick the curriculum from health meets food that's paired up with cardiovascular. And then we'll do a health meets food class together. We'll work with our nutrition department. We've got this wonderful Dr. Laura Kreskel that we've been working with. And her students will work, her graduate students work with our medical students. And we come over to their teaching kitchen and we cook together and we go through the cases together. And that's been incredible. We just started doing that this semester. But often we do it at home on Zoom in our jammies or whatever. And then we go through the cases that way. So my goal is to continue doing this where we have the virtual options. So I like all the students to be cooking in their own kitchen. So they really get the embodied experience of what it's like to go to the grocery store and select your food and prepare it. And then we'll probably continue doing the in-person gatherings with the graduate students of nutrition because they're amazing. And then my long-term goal is really to bring this into the community. I would love for our medical students. There's community modules in the health meets food curriculum. I would love for them to go out into the community, teach cooking, work in different neighborhoods. I think it's such, I mean, it's a basic human thing. We love to eat together, be together. So I think it's a great way to create more community and improve health. I think that's a great program to get started and to go ahead and spearhead. I know that here in Hawaii, we have Walk With A Dog. And so, yeah, so we do Walk With A Dog with Dr. Teresa Wee here. But can you imagine Cook With A Dog, right? That is my dream. I love it. Yeah, Cook With A Dog. And, you know, these guys, they all love to be creative and they want to outdo each other with healthy and tasty. In Hawaii, we say ono, so healthy and ono. And it can be done because we've been doing it for many years. But have a doctor or a medical student and have them create these, you know, these dishes, these culinary experiences. And then have them come in like you want to do, teach these people. Not just, you know, the people that are sick, but everybody should get excited about it, you know, and like, like Jamie Oliver does that in the East Coast and then in Glen with all the students. And he teaches them how important the good, healthy food is. So get them excited like that. And those programs will be amazing, Annie. And if you need help, I'll come and help you to organize and watch over and do all of that because that's exactly what your passion and your desire, your drive, you're going to be very successful at that. And let's get it started. Thank you. Yeah, the little sparks are flying. And I think it was so fun to run into you at that restaurant. It was so delicious and delightful. And I think about, you know, with the ingredients that we're using in these recipes, it's so fun to have the students look with the different herbs or spices and to understand, this is our first pharmacy. This is where healing begins. And you know, many of our students, you know, in our integrative medicine class, we talk about plants a lot and different and energy and crystals and traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. And we go through all kinds of this Kabbalah somatic technique and we use all kinds of different healing modalities. But I love, love, love when they start looking up these herbs and spices and they realize like, oh, this can help my patient. Right, right. And I think for patients, yeah, for patients, it gives us a lot of agency too. I'm not a medical doctor and I feel pretty, it's empowering to know that I have things that I can do that will impact my health in a really positive way. Right, you know, just real quick, I was talking to my friend. I have two daughters and when they were babies, I really didn't feed them baby food. But when I lived in Hong Kong, we just boiled down rice and we put in some meat for flavor and then a lot of spinach and veggies and we cut it up and we cooked it together like a porridge and that's what we fed our baby. And you know, the taste, initially that's what your babies get acquainted to, not that processed stuff. And so my children, now they're grown, they bring that sort of food. So at a very young age, it was instilled into their bodies, the veggies and then just the simple food of the simple taste of the veggies. And so if you gave my daughter a plate of spinach and rice or a bowl of broccoli and rice, she'd be in hog heaven. OK. And because from the time they were babies, that's what we fed them, you know, the good healthy food from the earth, not the things that came out of the cans. And when you continue to instill this to your your students, your medical students, girl, you got a program that's going to be successful. I'm so excited to hear more about it. Oh, thank you. I love what you did for your daughters. And that's what the really what I'm trying to do with these students also is it connects us to the earth more as well. When I know where this grew or I am selecting something and putting it in my body and it was alive or is alive. That's such a different sensation or energy than. Sometimes it's been processed and opening a can or a box. We'll do this thing in our guided meditation for mindful eating, where we all ask them to envision like if it's chocolate like the cocoa bean where it grew and the soil that nourished it and the hands that picked it. Yeah. And so we go through all of these different steps so that they can really think about all of the different things that your food goes through until it becomes a piece that's coming into your mouth. And I call it like the origin story. You think about your food's origin story. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's that's so important because people don't think like that. And, you know, sometimes you show a kid a tomato and they ask them, hey, what is this? And they go, oh, Auntie, that's an apple. I'm like, no, because the only time they saw a tomato was ketchup. You know, and I'm speaking of a lot of the inner city kids and they don't know where their food source comes from. So it's our job. It's our responsibility. Even the doctors when they go for a baby or visit, they should ask them these things. So then coming from a doctor, a person of authority, these kids may take a different look at what the doctor is really asking them versus, hey, how do you feel today? Well, I'm sick. That's why I'm here. So how's your food intake? You know, and get them thinking like that. Sickness, eat more food. I may get well faster. Oh, that's a good concept. Yeah. So, Annie, I know that you are certified in mind, body medicine. What is mind, body medicine? It is the best thing I've ever learned. So the Center for Mind, Body Medicine mind, body medicine is the connection between our minds and our bodies. And it's basically bringing that agency back into ourselves where we get to know and really spend time with how we're feeling, regulating our nervous system through breath, through connection, through movement, through food, through drawings. So there's lots of different techniques that we teach with the Center for Mind, Body Medicine. Primarily we work, we do this work in small groups. So we just finished one with our medical students last week, and it's beautiful. We breathe together. We check in about how we are right now in this moment. And then we learn a new skill and then we share again. And this is the work that will change the world. I love it. They're doing it in the Ukraine this summer and this work's been going on for 30 years all over the globe. Wow, exciting. So maybe we get a trip to Ukraine together. I'd love to go. They're doing such important work there to help. Wow. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. That is the whole key, right? They're as simple as that. But Dr. Annie Weissman, we've run out of time for now. I just want to mahalo you for taking the time of your busy, busy schedule. She, Dr. Weissman is the director of well-being and integrative medicine. I am Wendy Lowell and we will see you back in about two weeks with another edition of Taking Your Health Back. Aloha and mahalo to Dr. Annie Weissman. And donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.