HEALTHY SOIL, HEALTHY PEOPLE: FOOD AS MEDICINE
with Steven Chen, Devon Klatell, Stephanie G. Patterson & Wendy Slusser
Steven Chen, MD
Chief Medical Officer, Alameda County Ready4Health
Steven Chen, MD is the chief medical officer of Alameda County Recipe4Health, a nationally recognized “Food as Medicine” program embedded in Federally Qualified Health Centers that prescribes regenerative and/or organic produce paired with health coaching to treat, prevent, and reverse chronic conditions and food/nutrition insecurity. By intentionally sourcing food from local regenerative/organic farms, Recipe4Health creates a health multiplier effect that generates co-benefits to human health, economic health, ecological health, and health equity.
Devon Klattel
Vice President, Food is Medicine, The Rockefeller Foundation
Devon Klatell is Managing Director, Food Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. In this role, Ms. Klatell leads the Foundation’s work to advance a more nourishing and sustainable food system in the United States. Currently, she is collaborating with schools, healthcare insurers, hospitals, food service businesses, policy advocates and communities to increase consumption of healthy, protective foods by vulnerable children and families. In addition, Ms. Klatell oversees the Foundation’s work to prevent wasted food in the U.S., which
seeks to eliminate the enormous environmental, social, and economic costs caused by food waste. Throughout her time at the Foundation, Ms. Klatell has designed and implemented a variety of food system strategies alongside the Foundation’s grantees and partners. These include programs to bring more whole, nutrient-rich foods into our national food recovery system, advance sustainable protein production and consumption around the world, activate city-level strategies to prevent food waste, disrupt the status quo of school meals, and recruit the healthcare sector as an ally in building a healthier food system.
Prior to taking on her current role, Ms. Klatell led the process to refresh the Foundation’s global point of view on food and agriculture. She previously led the Foundation’s Strategic Planning team, which designed implementation models, resource plans, risk assessments and impact targets for the Foundation’s global initiatives. In that role, Devon worked on the Foundation’s initiatives to address energy poverty, connect unemployed African youth with the digital economy, and reduce postharvest losses. Before joining the Foundation, Devon was a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners and at Booz & Company. Ms. Klatell holds a B.A. from Harvard University in cognitive psychology and an M.A. in food systems from New York University, where she researched behavioral economics in addition to a broad array of cultural, historic, economic, and regulatory food issues.
Stephanie G. Patterson, MD, MS
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics and Critical Care Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Dr. Patterson conducts translational research evaluating host-microbiome interactions during critical illness. She is investigating the gastrointestinal microbiome in patients with congenital heart disease and critical illness to establish ways microbiome changes impact patient nutritional and infectious disease outcomes. Her multidisciplinary team is working to establish a microbiome biorepository which will be foundational in the study of microbiome and metabolomic alterations during specific disease states and discovering treatments to optimize the gastrointestinal microbiome and improve patient outcomes.
Wendy Slusser, MD
Associate Vice Provost for the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA
Dr. Wendelin Slusser is Associate Vice Provost (AVP) for the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI) Center at UCLA, building a culture of health and equity through a collective impact model for the over 85,000 students, staff, and faculty, and beyond. She is also HS Clinical Professor of Pediatrics in the UCLA School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor in UCLA School of Public Health, and Co-Founder and Academic Director of the UCLA Fit for Health program.
As a Pediatrician and Educator for UCLA Pediatric Residents for 20 years at the Venice Family Clinic she emphasized in her teaching to care for patients holistically including addressing the multiple determinants of health. Her leadership for the UC wide Global Food Initiative inspired the establishment of the UC Healthy Campus Network (HCN), based on the successes of Semel HCI Center. As a co-leader of the UC HCN, Dr. Slusser has led efforts to integrate health equity into the UC system with initiatives such as UC Diabetes Prevention Program, the UC Sustainable Practices Policy, Healthy Vending Initiative, and Healthy Beverages Initiative. In addition, she led the Campus Recovery and Response Task Force’s Wellness & Work Expectations Work Group to ensure the UCLA community’s well-being issues were addressed in the campus COVID- 19 pandemic response plans.
She has long been an advocate for healthy food for young children in LA schools and was the PI on the Fruit and Vegetable Bar Intervention study that inspired national legislation: former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools. She was also the PI on the Prevention of Childhood Overweight through Parent Training Intervention Project focused on low-income preschool children and their parents that inspired the LA County Department of Public Health to adopt the parenting curriculum countywide. Her research includes evaluating the outcomes of a nutrition education curriculum for medical, nursing and pediatric residents. In 2008 she was Awarded the Beverlee Myers Award of Excellence, given annually to an individual who has exhibited outstanding leadership and accomplishments in public health in California; she was selected in 2010 to be a member of the Institute of Medicine committee, Obesity Prevention Policies for Young Children; and in 2020 she received the Venice Family Clinic Visionary Award. In her free time, she leads the sustainability efforts for the Slusser Ranch in the Russian River Valley as a member of a fifth-generation California farming family.