HL20: Rebecca Katz—Cooking Up Sustainable Nourishment

In our annual HealthLeaders 20, we profile individuals who are changing healthcare for the better. Some are longtime industry fixtures; others would clearly be considered outsiders. Some are revered; others would not win many popularity contests. They are making a difference in healthcare. This is the story of Rebecca Katz.

This profile was published in the December, 2014 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

"The food that we eat is critical. It has to be not just nutrition. It has to be translated to the plate."

Master chef Rebecca Katz's quest to change the American diet started with a life-altering event: Soon after the Californian finished culinary school in 1999, her father began a battle with laryngeal cancer.

"I went back east to cook for him, and I didn't know how to cook for someone with cancer," she says. "There was nothing to guide me. I realized how helpless I felt. My father became my guinea pig."

The process of culinary experimentation during her dad's treatment and recovery led to the publication of Katz's first book, One Bite at a Time, in 2004—and convinced her that food is a key element in cancer care.

The secret sauce of cooking for cancer patients is "understanding their transient taste changes as they go through treatment," Katz says. "The nerve endings are affected by chemotherapy and radiation. Look at your palate like a switchboard, and you're always having brownouts."

Over the past decade, a host of scientific studies have verified the nutritional benefits of several whole foods, herbs, and spices, such as anti-inflammatory effects. Katz found, for example, that carrot and ginger soup is a great dish for many cancer patients undergoing head and neck radiation therapy. "Their taste buds are on fire. Almost anything they eat is just too acute."

She says preparing palatable meals for cancer patients is crucial to their treatment and recovery, particularly when temperamental taste buds turn favorite foods foul. "If something doesn't taste good, or the expectation isn't met, you'll push food away."

In 2000, Katz cooked for her first group of cancer patients for a week. "It was the most rewarding experience I have had in a kitchen—to see how the act of food could bring joy into people's eyes." Now, she teaches cooking techniques to oncologists. "It's quite an enlightening experience for doctors," she says. "They can look at their patients with a different eye to see why their patients don't eat."

Now that she's seen how food can positively influence cancer care, Katz is promoting "sustainable nourishment" as a way to fundamentally improve American health. "It's looking at food and cooking food in a way that's delicious and nutritious—food you like and cooking you like. It's not just a diet, it's a way you live your life."

She says sustainable nourishment needs to rise to the forefront of efforts aimed at containing a growing tsunami of chronic illnesses in the United States, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Many people suffering with chronic illnesses are hopelessly noncompliant with doctors' dietary recommendations because they aren't aware of the savory alternatives to their forbidden favorite foods.

When she teaches cooking to people with chronic illnesses or their caregivers, Katz says she never speaks about food in terms of the "can have" and "can't have" lists that doctors give their patients. "This is what I say: 'Here are the restrictions, here is what's going on, here's what we can do so you don't feel deprived.' You have to navigate different foods in different ways."

Katz says there's no excuse for the vast majority of Americans not to eat healthy, delicious food that fends off disease and helps heal the sick. "You'll have people who say they can't afford to eat healthy. Dollar for dollar, I can take you through the grocery store and prove that's not true."

A major component of sustainable nourishment involves encouraging Americans to return to eating whole foods, fruits and vegetables, rather than industrially processed food with high sugar and fat content, she says. "We used to be a community of producers—growing our own food. Now we're a community of consumers. … We have to go back in time to when food was considered important. The food that we eat is critical. It has to be not just nutrition. It has to be translated to the plate."