When she would visit her extended family in Chicago, Dr. Rachelle Dulan, a primary care physician, noticed that even though they were a few hours’ drive apart, she and her family occupied two different worlds.

“I remember visiting my family, and we would just talk about different things we were doing in school. I found that the education system there, specifically, the public school education system, was just so far behind what I was learning,” Dr. Dulan said. “It made me upset because I had access to a lot more opportunities than they did.”

Lifelong Goals

Rachelle decided at an early age she wanted to be a physician. She completed her undergraduate degree in Alabama and then attended medical school at Ohio University. Then, as Dr. Dulan, she returned to the Dayton area to be a resident at Kettering Health Dayton.

Dr. Dulan wanted to infuse her medical practice with her passion for battling inequality.

Largely, her patients needed help managing chronic conditions by modifying their habits. She quickly noticed a fundamental problem with the lifestyle changes she suggested to her patients—the guidance was impossible for them to follow.

“I would talk to my patients about eating healthy to help control things like diabetes or hypertension,” Dr. Dulan said. “I tell them what foods to get, and they go, ‘Great, now where do I get these foods?’”

Small changes, like eating more fruits and vegetables, were not as simple for her patients as they seemed.

“I was shocked,” she said. “You have to drive 20 minutes on the west side of Dayton before you can even find something like fresh fruit.”

Learning Healthy Habits

Another variable made implementing these habits difficult for her patients. Many of them, because of the lack of produce and healthy food, did not know how to prepare healthier foods.

“They really didn’t know what to do or how to cook with these foods,” Dr. Dulan said. “And in a 15-minute primary care visit, I don’t really have the time to go deep into the ins-and-outs of diet and nutrition.”

Dr. Dulan needed to tackle these two determinants of health. But she had to get creative since she’d have to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic—and there were no safe ways to gather people to teach them how to choose healthy foods and cook them.

She approached the Grandview Foundation, with an idea. What if she taught a virtual class where students would be provided with pots and pans, food, and instructions on cooking and eating healthy?

The result became a course called Food Is My Medicine, featuring Dr. Dulan as the host. Participants received free ingredients and any tools they needed to make healthy meals.

Funding nutrition

The biggest question they faced was how to fund this.

“I was made me aware of a grant through the American Academy of Family Physicians, so I applied for that,” Dr. Dulan said. “They awarded me the grant, and that pays for all the food and ingredients so that participants don’t need to pay for anything.”

The $18,000 grant allowed Dr. Dulan to jumpstart the program, which wrapped production in late 2021.

Food Is My Medicine at its core, according to Dr. Dulan, is about more than healthy cooking. It’s about implementing small changes, such as adding and subtracting certain ingredients from family recipes, reading food labels more closely, and using portion control as preventive medicine.

“My goal is to teach people overall how to be healthy,” Dr. Dulan shared. “How do we incorporate these healthy cooking and living techniques, these lifestyle modifications, into everyday life so that it becomes a part of who we are and what we do, and not just a reaction to wanting to control the disease?”

Another component of the program is instilling generational healthy habits by incorporating education for children to stop cycles of bad habits.

“I really think that I take a community approach to getting people to eat a little bit different and help to break some of those generational things that we do,” she shared.

One such example, Dr. Dulan shared, are the unhealthy habits with holiday cooking and certain cultural approaches cooking—such as adding ham hocks to greens—that are prominent in Black families or Southern cooking.

“By incorporating some of these ideas into families,” shared Dr. Dulan, “I’m hoping it’s a good tactic for community involvement and getting the whole family involved.”