Welcome to Commune, a global wellness community and online course platform featuring some of the world's greatest teachers.

We are on a mission to inspire, heal, pass down wisdom, and bring the world closer together.

This is the Commune podcast where each week we explore the ideas and practices that help

us live this healthy, connected, and purpose-filled life.

You can learn more about our courses, our community, and everything we do at OneCommune.com.

Okay, so my guest on the show today is Dr. Robert Graham.

Dr. Graham is a Harvard-trained physician, receiving a Masters of Public Health,

and he is one of less than 20 doctor chefs worldwide as he obtained his culinary degree from the

National Cormé Institute. So you won't be surprised by Dr. Graham's primary message,

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. In 2010, Dr. Graham was featured in the Wall Street

Journal in an article entitled

Teaching Healthy Ways to Doctors in the Kitchen. Since then, he has taught over 200 healthcare workers,

mostly medical residents, how to prepare healthy and delicious plant-based meals. In June 2012,

Rob birthed the Lennox Chill initiative, with a mission to bring

yoga and meditation into the hospital setting, to offer health care workers tools to better

manage work-related stressors and positively impact their health and wellness. And in 2013,

Dr. Graham created Victory Greens, the first educational and edible

rooftop garden at a hospital in New York City. The Lenox Hill Hospital cafeteria and

patients have been eating the fruits of his labor ever since. So on the show, Rob and I talk about

the opportunity that COVID provides to have a public initiative for healthy food.

We talk about the Farm Bill, Food Deserts, the SNAP program, the detrimental impact of sugar, the alarming rates of chronic disease,

and how we can build partnerships between the private sector, insurance providers, and physicians to medicalize healthy food.

...