The Cooking Doc Blake Shusterman wants to help you enjoy healthy food

0330.GJ.Feast.TheCookingDoc.BlakeShusterman.1.WilliamCrooks — Photo by Will Crooks

Dr. Blake Shusterman, aka The Cooking Doc, wants to change your buds. Your taste buds, that is.

“People around here just need a lot of help knowing what healthy eating is and how to do it,” he says.

A member of the Carolina Nephrology practice, Shusterman promotes #ChangeYourBuds on his monthly “The Cooking Doc” YouTube cooking videos designed to help people learn to not just tolerate, but enjoy healthy food, maybe even more than the unhealthy food they currently crave.

What started five years ago as a fun and practical way for Carolina Nephrology to help their patients’ necessary diet changes be less difficult has evolved into an educational resource for anyone interested in changing their diets.

“People who have kidney disease have a very specific diet, especially if they’re on dialysis, so the idea was to make a cooking show that was kind of tailored to them,” Shusterman says. “The beginning of last year I kind of wanted to broaden it out to healthy eating in general.”

Now, rather than focusing just on kidney health, which often means lower fat or sodium diets, he’s gearing his videos to be about healthy eating for a much broader audience of people interested in changing their diets without sacrificing flavor or enjoyment.

“One of the things I’ve tried to push in my cooking is ‘change your buds,’ so you go from shrimp and grits or fried vegetables or fried chicken and kinda change the way your taste buds enjoy food to the more baked foods or learn to kind of make flavors that you like in a different way, but it takes time,” he says.

Shusterman and his film crew and marketing team, PECULIAR, set up shop in his Augusta Road-area home once a month, and over the course of an afternoon, they film him cooking between one to four recipes.

Some of the segments focus on healthier versions of a typically unhealthy dish, such as fettuccini alfredo, substituting cauliflower for the heavy cream, or buffalo chicken dip made with low-fat cream cheese and tofu. Other times, the recipes are naturally low-fat and low-sodium dishes, such as baked fish or salads. But, most of the time, they are all vegetable-heavy, and rather than relying on excessive salt for flavor, Shusterman tries to use interesting ingredients, herbs, and spices that may expand the palate of his viewers.

The result is essentially like having a doctor in the kitchen with you while you’re cooking, he says, helping to guide your decisions, and in many cases, introducing new ingredients or preparation methods that will promote good health rather than contribute to physical problems.

“More and more doctors will start doing things like this,” Shusterman says.

He encourages his viewers to embrace whole grains, a variety of vegetables, fish, limited meat and dairy, and minimal sugar. And his advice extends beyond cooking at home to making choices when dining out.

“Every restaurant makes their shrimp and grits, but they don’t focus on a good healthy option,” he says, citing one of the most common dishes on local restaurant menus.

But, he says, there are healthy options on menus if diners know what to look for. One good starting point is finding out which restaurants source their ingredients from farms in the area, which should mean a higher quality and more nutrient-rich produce than items shipped from South America, for instance.

“Locally sourced is very important, and Greenville is starting to do that,” he says.

Portion size is another factor. Often, restaurant portions are much larger than someone should eat in one sitting, Shusterman says.

“Sometimes people go out to dinner or lunch and they think, ‘Oh man, I’ve gotta get the bang for my buck. I’ve gotta eat everything on my plate because I’m spending $7 on a meal,’ but if you split it, you get two meals,” he says.

Visit www.thecookingdoc.co for more information or The Cooking Doc YouTube channel for all of the videos.