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The Secret to Better Health May Be Eating Delicious Food
How one Stanford nutrition expert is rethinking everything he’s learned about how to get people to eat healthier
Forty years ago, Christopher Gardner — then a philosophy undergrad in upstate New York — was tired of being asked about his protein sources when he told people he was a vegetarian. He dreamed of opening up his own vegetarian restaurant, but he wanted to make sure he understood nutrition first. “So I went and got a Master’s degree in Nutrition Science that turned into a Phd that turned into a faculty position at Stanford that turned into millions of dollars in NIH funding to run randomized controlled trials on nutrition,” he says.
Gardner has led studies in his field for 20 years and his findings have been consistent: To be healthier, people should eat more vegetables and less red meat and processed foods. But teaching people about nutrition didn’t seem to result in much change. “I’d go to medical conferences and share my research, and people would eat candy bars while they listened to me talk,” he says.
The issue, he realized, wasn’t that people didn’t know which foods were healthier. They just didn’t want to eat them. People wanted food that tasted good. Gardner’s recent research has focused on building a new framework for nutrition that doesn’t compromise on things like taste or environmental sustainability for the sake of health.
He calls his approach “stealth nutrition” — taking health out of the equation and focusing on other incentives for eating healthy food, like ethics and, just as important, taste. Now, through his Menus of Change University Research Collaborative—developed in partnership with The Culinary Institute of America (CIA)—Gardner works with chefs and researchers at universities across the country to serve unapologetically delicious, sustainable food that also happens to be healthy.
As more institutions catch on, Gardner hopes social norms around food will continue to shift, resulting in more healthy people who enjoy eating their food. I talked to him about the history of stealth nutrition, the role of delicious food in encouraging healthy eating, and what he hopes for the future of nutrition.
