Food as Medicine Symposium Explores Nutrition, Health and Community

At 82, Hampton Bays resident Ann Coppola is still looking for ways to live healthier. A plant-based eater, she came to Stony Brook Southampton on September 25 with questions about nutrition, supplements and how the food she eats can support her health.

“I don’t need a prescription,” Coppola said. “I just need knowledge.”

That desire for knowledge brought community members, health professionals and others together in Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton for the Food as Medicine Symposium, a morning exploring the connections among nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, culture, social connection and long-term health.

The event, hosted by The FoodLab at Stony Brook Southampton, featured experts from Stony Brook University and beyond and concluded with a culinary demonstration and lunch inspired by food as medicine principles. Throughout the morning, speakers approached food and health from different perspectives, including medicine, healthy aging, cultural tradition and practical nutrition.

Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, executive director of The FoodLab, explained that it began year-round programming about four years ago with an emphasis on preserving local food production and helping farmers build viable businesses on small parcels of land. Now, she said, it is expanding further into nutrition education.

“One of our main missions is also to explore the power of plants and food as medicine,” Carmack-Fayyaz said. “So we are really moving into this nutrition space and trying to educate people about how you can take control of your health through food and lifestyle practices.”

That connection among food, lifestyle and community was the focus of a presentation by Raja Jaber, MD, director of lifestyle and integrative medicine at Stony Brook Medicine and clinical professor of family medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.

When Jaber first came to the United States from Lebanon, she lived in a neighborhood with many older immigrants who welcomed her. One neighbor would put a table on the lawn in the evening, eat outside and invite passersby to join. Another greeted Jaber with homemade food, traded recipes with her and gave her a cutting from a fig tree to plant in her own garden. Older residents walked through the neighborhood in the afternoons.

“The memory was this community that communicated with each other, that ate together, that grew their food, that walked, that moved,” Jaber said. “The whole collection of food connected to the earth, connected to people, to movement, is what hopefully we are trying to revive.”

Jaber used that memory to begin a discussion of lifestyle medicine and research into communities where people live longer, healthier lives. Those communities, she said, tend to share habits that include eating largely plant-based and minimally processed foods, remaining physically active, growing food and maintaining strong social connections.

As a family physician, Jaber said her goal has long been to give patients tools they can use themselves. “My vision when I entered medicine was to empower people,” she said. “To empower people to be healthier.” She eventually found her way to lifestyle medicine, which she described as especially empowering because everyday behaviors, including diet, physical activity and sleep, can influence health.

Those behaviors also work together, she emphasized. Exercise can affect metabolic health and sleep, while sleep, stress reduction, mindfulness and social connection can affect other aspects of physical well-being. “You see how everything is interconnected,” Jaber said.

Krista Zvoch, director of nutrition for StoryPoint Group, focused on food, healthy aging and quality of life. She noted that the conversation is increasingly shifting from simply extending lifespan to extending “health span,” the portion of life people can spend healthy, active and independent.

“We can live really long, but if it’s not quality of life, is that really what we want?” she asked. “So we want health span, quality of life.”

Her work in senior living has also challenged the assumption that older adults are uninterested in changing how they eat. In a survey conducted by StoryPoint Group, 74 percent of senior living residents wanted healthier menu options. The organization has developed a food-as-medicine philosophy designed to make healthier choices easier to identify while preserving residents’ independence and choice.

Zvoch emphasized the importance of preserving both choice and pleasure in dining, even as residents age or manage health conditions.

In memory care, StoryPoint shifted its approach to meals from completing a task to creating an experience. Residents eat together at large tables, caregivers present foods so residents have time to see and smell them, and staff members are encouraged to sit and share in the experience.

“It’s just love, it’s hospitality,” Zvoch said. “It went from someone just putting down a plate to hospitality.”

Sohl Lee, associate professor of modern and contemporary East Asian art history at Stony Brook University, brought a different perspective to the conversation, exploring the relationship among food, culture, memory and healing through miyeok-guk, the Korean seaweed soup traditionally associated with postpartum recovery.

While attending a lecture in Hawaii, Lee was asked two questions: “Who are you? Who do you bring with you?” Her answer led back to food and family. “I realized that wherever I go, I bring my mother with me,” Lee said. “I learned how to cook from her.”

Although Lee and her mother now live thousands of miles apart, the foods Lee learned to prepare connect her to childhood memories in Korea and to the mother who taught her how to nourish herself. Her exploration of seaweed eventually expanded beyond its role in human nutrition to its place in culture and marine ecosystems.

“These seaweed, they don’t grow alone, they grow together,” Lee said. That realization led her to think about “the relationship between my body, nourishing my body and also the planet’s health.”

The morning’s final presentation was a cooking demonstration. Paula Montagna, director of clinical nutrition at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, showed attendees how to build a nutritious meal using whole foods, preparing a sweet potato burger while explaining the roles of protein, fiber, fruits and vegetables. “The best way to nourish ourselves is with whole foods,” Montagna said.

Rather than prescribing a single way of eating, Montagna encouraged participants to think about the basic components of a balanced meal and then adapt them to their own lives.

“My concept is a bowl method,” she said. “We start the bowl with a base, we’re going to add some protein, optimize our protein intake. We’re going to wrap it in some colorful fruits and vegetables, we’re going to layer in some flavor and we’re going to try to provide some super nutrition.”

The particular foods that fill that bowl, she noted, can vary according to a person’s preferences, culture and beliefs.

Magdalena Schneiderman, an esthetician and founder of Skinhampton in Southampton who specializes in acne care, said lifestyle guidance is already part of her work with clients. She also mostly eats a plant-based diet.

“The idea that food is medicine makes a lot of sense,” Schneiderman said. She had some familiarity with the concept before the symposium, she added, “but definitely wanted to learn more.”

Coppola said she regularly attends programs at Stony Brook Southampton, from concerts and workshops to FoodLab events, because she values the opportunity to keep learning and meeting people.

“I find the people that I meet stimulating, interesting,” she said.

And at 82, she has no intention of stopping.

“I’m still happy and enjoying life,” Coppola said.

— Beth Squire