Dr. Kristina Carman, a naturopathic doctor, nutritional therapist, and Senior Fellow in Nutritional and Holistic Health at the Independent Medical Alliance, marks medicine’s 250th year by returning to its oldest treatment room: the kitchen. Before medicine became a system of codes and prescriptions, she reminds us, it was grandmother’s broth, ginger for nausea, and honey for a cough. Not every old remedy held up, but the instinct beneath them, that what we take in matters, was sound. As medicine modernized and gained extraordinary lifesaving tools, nutrition was pushed to the margins; most physicians, Carman notes, finish their entire training with less than a single week’s worth of nutrition education. Then came the chronic disease epidemic, and with it conditions no pill can fix at the root.

Her framework is simple: food is not just fuel, it is information, a set of instructions the body reads at every meal. Yet we chase glucose monitors and supplement stacks while skipping the vegetables, eating too fast, too stressed, and too distracted to digest well, until we become a population overfed and undernourished at the same time. Root-cause care, Carman argues, asks what is missing, what is inflamed, and what is depleted rather than stopping at a diagnosis and a matching drug. Patients who have been handed a label but never a path don’t need shame; they need something practical and doable. When they get it, they stop being passive recipients of a diagnosis and become participants in their own healing.

Check out these related resources from IMA below, followed by the full video transcript.

Transcript

Dr. Kristina Carman: Hello everyone, I’m Dr. Kristina Carman, an IMA Senior Fellow, and today we’re going to talk all about food as medicine.

Before medicine became a system of codes and prescriptions, it was actually a kitchen. It was the grandmother’s broth when someone was too weak to eat. It was ginger for nausea, honey for a cough, rest, warmth, and something nourishing simmering on the stove. For most of human history, food was the first thing we reached for when someone we loved got sick. Not because people had studies, but because they had instinct, intention, attention, and time.

Now, not every old remedy was right. I understand that plenty were useless and some were actually harmful. But the instinct beneath them, that the body can be supported, that what we take in matters, that instinct was sound. And somewhere along the way, modern medicine, for all its genuine brilliance, set it aside and set it down.

So let’s bridge that gap a little bit, from kitchen wisdom to pharmaceutical dependency. As medicine modernized, it gained extraordinary tools: antibiotics, surgery, imaging, emergency care that saves lives every single day. I’m not here to romanticize the past or dismiss any of that. But in this rush toward what was new and measurable, nutrition got pushed to the margins. It became the thing you mentioned at the end of a visit, if there was time. Eat better, exercise more, and then out the door you go.

And a lot of that is structural. Most physicians finish their entire medical training with only a handful of hours of nutrition education, often less than a single week’s worth across years and years of school. It isn’t that doctors don’t care. It’s that the system was built to train them exhaustively on disease and pharmacology and almost not at all on food. So those tools became dormant, while others were taught to use the prescription pad, to use the procedure. And for a while, that seemed to work.

But then came the chronic disease epidemic: metabolic disease, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, gut disorders, conditions where no single pill fixes the root. And chronic disease has forced medicine, finally, to look back at the things it set down before: food, metabolism, inflammation, the gut, sleep, stress, movement, those fundamental basics.

Here’s how I think about it in my own practice. Food is not just fuel. Food is information. Every meal sends a set of instructions your body needs and reads, for your immune system, your hormones, your metabolism, your gut bacteria, your brain, your energy, and the level of inflammation. You are quite literally in a conversation with your body several times a day.

And this is where I want to be honest about how far we’ve drifted. We live in a moment where every possible gadget, supplement, and program is at our fingertips. Continuous glucose monitors, $100 supplement stacks, elimination protocols, biohacks. I use some of these tools with my patients. They absolutely have their place. But we’ve become very good at chasing the advanced and very, very poor at doing the basic. We’ll buy the supplements, but we’ll skip the vegetables. We’ll track the data, but eat standing over the sink, in the car, in 90 seconds, half distracted and never actually tasting the food.

Because it isn’t only what we eat that we’ve let slip, it’s how we eat. We eat too fast to digest well. We eat while stressed, which shuts down the very system that’s supposed to break food down and absorb it adequately. We graze all day long and never give the body a chance to rest. We’ve stopped cooking, stopped sitting down, stopped eating together.

And yes, our food supply has real problems. It’s more processed, more depleted, more engineered to override our fullness than ever before. That is true and it does matter. But it cannot become the excuse that lets us off the hook for the part that we can do and that we can control: eating real food most of the time and eating it with some attention.

The outcome of letting these basics slip is exactly what fills our clinics. We’ve become a population that is overfed and undernourished at the same time, taking in more calories than ever before while running short on the fiber, the minerals, the protein, the actual nourishment the body needs. And the body does keep score: blood sugar that won’t settle, inflammation that won’t quiet, guts that won’t calm, and energy that never quite returns.

So root-cause care asks a different set of questions. Not just what is the diagnosis and what is the drug that matches it, but what is missing here? What is in excess? What is inflamed and what is depleted? And so often the answer lies in the ordinary, unglamorous, everyday way a person eats.

From a patient’s perspective, I see this constantly. Someone comes in having been told very clearly that they have a disease. What they’ve almost never been told is how to rebuild, how to actually get well day by day. They have been handed a label, and then sometimes a prescription, but not a path. And what they don’t need is more shame. They don’t need fear or punishment for where they’ve ended up. What they need is a version of food as medicine that actually gives them some hope. Something practical, something doable, something that fits with an actual human life.

That is the quiet power of food. When I sit with a patient and we work on the basics, it’s not glamorous at all. Real meals, enough fiber, enough protein, slowing down, eating in a calm state, tending to their gut and to their sleep. Something shifts, and it shifts quietly over time. Not just in their labs, but in their sense of agency, because for the first time they have a role in their own healing. They are not a passive recipient of a diagnosis. They are a participant in their healing. And that changes everything about how recovery feels.

So I’ll leave you with this. Food as medicine is not fringe. It is not an alternative. It is one of the oldest, most well-established foundations of healing we have, and it belongs at the center of how we treat and prevent chronic disease. Not as a footnote, but as first-line care, sitting right alongside everything modern medicine does well.

The future of medicine, I believe, has to begin in the kitchen, with the family and the physician back in the same conversation. We don’t need to choose between science and nourishment. We need both. Thank you.

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