Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Dr. Sarah Gillis
In a world where technology advances at lightning speed, it is easy to look at the latest scientific breakthroughs and believe that good health is something we can simply manufacture and prescribe. We can map genetic mutations at the molecular level and open blocked arteries in minutes.
Yet the actual rhythm of human life doesn’t happen under the sterile fluorescent lights of an exam room. It happens at home. It is lived over a rushed breakfast before work, while packing school lunches, and in the grocery store aisles on a Tuesday evening where well-meaning health advice collides with real-world prices, busy schedules, and the sheer exhaustion of a long workday.
For generations, we have credited Hippocrates with the famous proverb, “Let food be thy medicine.” While historians tell us he never wrote those exact words, his ancient writings in the Hippocratic Corpus — specifically the treatise De Alimento — captured a more realistic truth: what we put on our plates can act as either a remedy or a ruin. It is a beautiful, enduring idea, but a wide gap remains between the science we teach in medical schools and the simple, daily realities of the families we serve.
That wide gap between the clinical exam room and ordinary life is exactly why I help teach “Food Is Medicine,” a course co-directed by my colleagues Dr. Harminder Grewal, Chair of Family Medicine for Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine and Premier Health, and Robin L. Anglin, MS, MA, RD.
The course is ambitious. Rather than just offering basic advice to eat more vegetables, our students study the deep relationships between diet and chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, examining food insecurity, produce prescriptions, and the practical challenges of integrating nutrition directly into standard healthcare.
The inspiration for this new way of learning came straight from the medical students. “Medical schools have traditionally focused on the treatment of diseases,” Dr. Grewal explains. “Healthy nutrition is one of the most important medical interventions for primary prevention of at least 80% of chronic diseases. Our medical students led the charge, and we worked right alongside them to build it.”
