Art and nutrition - and how to combine them for healthier patients

The acting director of nutrition and dietetics at Acadia University feels there is no higher art form than food.

Catherine Morley drives this point home in the classroom,teachingher students never to lecture patients about proper nutrition when they're sickbut to explain it to them through art.

That includes bringing people together to prepare a meal.

"Food is the greatest art form ever," she said. "So when they engage people in, let's say, cooking together () people open up and talk."

Understanding patients

In March, Morleywill bringa talk to the University of Prince Edward Islandto show students a different take on preparingfor their health and human services careers.

She believes that art can help health professionals understand what their patients go throughand createnew opportunities to approach their illnesses.

But before they can bring the art to thepatient, they must first explore it themselves, she said.

Morley has created a program where students are required to make art that explores an illness. It teaches them to think like their patients, she said.

Past projects included building the digestive system from buttons, or a student who cast her leg to learn about the impact of diabetes on the body.

"They think it's weird and I must be insane," she said in an interview with Mainstreet P.E.I. on Thursday. "And then they have to embark on this creative process,

"And they say this is really the hardest assignment I ever had but it's the one where I learn the most."

Better than giving lectures

Morley said she first came up with this approach in universitywhile researching the way people eat when they become seriously ill.

Her supervisor told her that nobody wrote about the subject before, so she made it her doctoral project.

"When I graduated, I found some of my colleagues said that's not even really a topic, that's not something to study," she said.

"And I thought, well, what else is there to study if you're a dietician working with people who are ill?"

Disappointed, she switched to taking night courses in textiles.

That's when she discovered how she could use art in her career and how to teach others aboutways to engage with their patients, she said.

"That's very different from having people in a room and giving them a lecture," she said. "We know that doesn't work."

Morley's original talk was scheduled for Friday as part of UPEI's 2017 Arts and Science lecturebut had to be postponed because ofthe pending snowstorm.

A date for the March lecture has not yet been set.

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