Rupy Aujla - The Doctor’s Kitchen - Supercharge your health with 100 delicious everyday recipes

Rather than focusing on ridding myself of a condition, I had concentrated my efforts on providing my body with the best environment I could. I worked at being well in mind and body as much as possible. The complex interplay of food on our physiology, our DNA and even the microbes residing in our gut is a universe of science in itself. Without delving further into the analysis, what my experience reaffirmed for me was the immense power of lifestyle and the incredible ability of the body to ‘self heal’ if given the correct nutrition.

My family’s story, my personal story and those of the thousands of patients across the world who have managed to reverse and prevent disease using lifestyle medicine is my motivation for writing this book. This is my opportunity to share the information I’ve gleaned on my journey so far, and the journey I am still on.

Medical experience

My GP training was brilliant. I was experienced in multiple medical specialities, equipped to diagnose and skilled at providing emotional support. However, I was horribly inept at addressing the root cause of the biggest problems facing primary care across the globe: lifestyle-related illness, including diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

Beyond the ineffective recommendations of a low-fat, low-calorie diet we propose for weight loss and cholesterol control, there are no tailored diets for conditions. From my personal experience, I knew there was much more to food than just a collection of macronutrients and the simplistic view that we eat for energy purposes. I was ill equipped to give advice because nutrition training at medical school was lacklustre. So, to help myself and my patients, I decided to do the research.

I scoured journals, watched presentations, attended international nutrition conferences and began to unravel a magnitude of clinical evidence highlighting the impact of food on disease. I read thousands of papers, studies, editorials and books dedicated to nutritional medicine, and was shocked that medical schools cover this entire body of evidence in just a few uninspiring lectures.

I began to start my consultations by enquiring what patients would eat on a daily basis: how do you start your day? What time do you eat at night? Do you snack incessantly after meals? My clinics were more engaging and my patients loved the emphasis on nutrition. Convincing them that the key to longevity and good health was accessible using delicious recipes that I would tailor to their lifestyle, was motivational. I was able to inspire people to take control of their conditions through food in a way I hadn’t done before with just medications. I began to focus on promoting wellness habits, rather than just diagnosing disease.

My diabetic patients would improve their blood-sugar control, arthritic patients would lose weight and become more active and even those who had no significant change in their body composition felt better in themselves. Realising that I could combine my passion for recipe creating and flavour with a career dedicated to healing people was a revelation for me.

But, I couldn’t keep writing recipes for every patient in my consulting room. I was seeing over 40 patients a day, plus home visits, plus paperwork and prescriptions. It was just not sustainable. And that’s when the idea of ‘The Doctor’s Kitchen’ was born: a multi-platform resource inspiring patients to appreciate the beauty of food and the medicinal effects of eating well. A YouTube channel, Instagram account and blog where I could confidently direct patients to gain evidence-based information, lend my perspective on healthy eating and teach them how to cook their way to health.

An accumulation of poor dietary and lifestyle choices often leads patients to the emergency room and it’s partly my experience in A&E that’s brought me on this journey. It’s often a surprise to patients when their emergency doctor starts enquiring about their dietary habits, but acute care and chronic disease are related in many ways. Sometimes it’s a culmination of factors that results in tragedies like a heart attack, stroke or even a nasty skin infection that’s linked to poor diabetes control. Separating diet and lifestyle from acute medicine blinds us to the solution for our overburdened healthcare systems. I truly believe the answer lies in the quality of our community care where food plays a pivotal role. Practising good nutrition and lifestyle medicine means we can pre-empt disease rather than react to it in the emergency department.

Plates over pills

I want to make this clear so there is no doubt on this statement: food is medicine. It’s not my opinion, I’m not saying it because it’s fashionable and trendy, it’s quite frankly a fact.

We have a library of studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of nutritional interventions on lifestyle diseases that are society’s biggest killers. My job is to give you a flavour of the science and encourage you to value the importance of mealtimes. We need to understand that what we put into our bodies dictates how they function and deal with illness.

When I refer to food as ‘medicine’ I’m not talking about simply using ‘natural medications’ or food supplements instead of pharmaceuticals. I don’t advocate swapping your cholesterol-lowering drugs for a bag of nuts if you have abnormal biochemistry, for example. A traditional pharmaceutical model of healthcare where symptoms are treated individually is not the answer to our Western healthcare woes. It’s important that we don’t look at food like a ‘pill’. No magic bullet in the form of turmeric supplements, green tea shots or pomegranate juice exists, I’m afraid.

A complex interplay of diet, sleep, exercise and stress underlies the root cause of disease. This relationship between our environment and human biochemistry is alien to most conventionally trained doctors like myself, and we must redress the balance. 1The reason why I’m so nutrition focused and I believe in the power of ‘plates over pills’ is because it’s the easiest, most cost-effective and evidence-based method of preventing and reversing disease. The effect of a Mediterranean diet on cancer, 2diabetes 3and cardiovascular risk 4,5is a simple example of this statement in action. By improving patients’ diets we can drastically reduce the likelihood of all three common debilitating conditions to a far greater degree than any number of pills or surgical interventions. 2,5

This is the direction in which medicine should be heading. Nutrition, along with other lifestyle factors, is where we need to concentrate our studies and resources. I’ve come across enough research and had enough personal experience in clinic with patients to judge that nutritional medicine is not a fringe concept. Dietary strategies are being trialled to reverse diabetes 6,7and even address the tricky and controversial subject of dementia. 8The added advantage of taking a nutritional approach to tackling disease is the beneficial upshot of eating well, compared to the many side effects associated with medications. I’m always plagued with guilt whenever a patient suffers an adverse side effect from medication, of which there are many examples, from swollen legs as a result of blood-pressure drugs to an increased risk of fractures related to antacid medications. 9

In general practice there is a clear need for medications, but where a cost-effective, evidence-based alternative exists and has a plausible mechanism of action I would encourage us as a scientific community to investigate and embrace it. I urge physicians and patients to explore the multitude of other treatment methods before we succumb to medications for chronic conditions. This needs to happen. Healthcare systems across the Western world are crumbling under the weight of growing financial demands 10,11and no matter how much we invest in novel therapeutics we must always start with simple diet and lifestyle measures. I am here to empower you.