Just What The Doctor Ordered: Med Students Team With Chefs

For the past few weeks, the culinary arts students at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., have been working with some less-than-seasoned sous chefs.

One of them, Clinton Piper, may look like a pro in his chef's whites, but he's struggling to work a whisk through some batter. "I know nothing about baking," he says.

Luckily, he's got other qualifications. Piper is a fourth-year medical student at Tunlane University School of Medicine, and he's here for a short rotation through a new program designed to educate med students and chefs-in-training about nutrition.

"I think it's forward thinking to start to see, to view food as medicine," he says. "That's not something that's really on our radar in medical education. But with the burden of disease in the United States being so heavily weighted with lifestyle disease, I think it's a very, very logical next step."