Healthy eating, more movement: one doctor’s real prescription
Dr. Doug Klein is known around his clinic for just biting into a big bell pepper like it’s an apple. After all, the family physician and University of Alberta professor treats food as part of the prescription he gives out — and he practises what he preaches.
After earning a master’s in public health, Klein saw the limits of clinical care: many people simply lacked the skills and knowledge to improve their own health. He wanted to change that.
In 2011, he founded the Canadian Health Advanced by Nutrition and Graded Exercise (CHANGE) Alberta research team, which studies lifestyle interventions. That research helped inform his first program — the CHANGE Adventure Camp for Kids, a cooking camp run by one of the city’s most beloved foodies, Gail Hall. Then, in partnership with Alberta Blue Cross, Klein’s team launched the CHANGE Health Community Program (CHCP), a year-round wellness program.
He also co-founded the MOVE program, where adults are paired with professionals for weekly fitness sessions. And in 2021, the CHANGE Health Alberta team launched the CHANGE Centre, which acts as a physical hub for healthy lifestyle retreats. Now, he’s excited about building Gail’s Kitchen as a legacy to Gail Hall’s incredible contributions and passion.
We sat down with Klein to discuss the origins of CHANGE Adventure Camp, Gail’s Kitchen, and how his year-long program pairs nutrition and physical activity to help patients reverse metabolic syndrome.
What drives your passion to create healthy lifestyle programs?
What I see on a day-to-day basis is how that system fails to really do what’s best for patients; and what we need is a system that actually promotes and protects health. That’s what I’ve been working for — to build that other system.
What are some of the issues you see?
So much of what actually makes up our health is a combination of what we eat, how we move, but also who our parents are, where we live, what education we’ve had access to, all of those types of things.
Most of my work is around metabolic syndrome [a combination of conditions including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol levels and obesity], or a pre-diabetes condition because I kept seeing patients who were starting to develop high blood pressure and their sugars would be up. I kept telling them that they needed to change how they’re eating, and be physically active, but they didn’t have the basic skills to do that.
That was really the launch of CHANGE Health. I thought if this is good for adults, we really need every child to grow up with these skills. And so, I wondered, how can we help build programs that build these life skills for children and families?
Could you talk about the first steps you took toward making this happen?
Ten years ago, I met Gail Hall, Red Seal chef in the community, food activist, award-winning caterer and a lovely, lovely woman. When I met her I would never have guessed the impact she would make on my life.
I said I wanted to build a summer camp for kids, where they would learn how to cook, as well as sort of move and run around, play games, and connect with nature. And she said, “I love it.”
It wasn’t just that she was in the meeting room thinking that we should do this. It was: “I’m going to show kids how to cook.” She was all in.
She ended up helping build CHANGE Adventure Camp, and building a model that would inform future programs.
The idea was there, but it certainly wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without Gail.
Unfortunately, she had breast cancer and she passed away later that year, but she helped get it started. The CHANGE Adventure Camp is still running — this is going to be its 11th summer. I’m really grateful to Gail.
I always told Jon Hall, her husband, that at some point I would like to build Gail’s Kitchen, which will be a teaching kitchen for children and families. It will be a legacy to her. We’re starting to do some work now around creating that permanent teaching space.
It will be a place to share knowledge, access to food, and there’ll be a farm-to-table aspect of connecting with local food producers and providing high quality food to the people who need it. Making your own meals and knowing how to make them in an economical way is a really important piece of food security.
There is also discussion around Gail’s Kitchen being part of a larger hub that would also house the work we are doing currently out of borrowed spaces. But that’s all in the very early planning stages.
We’ve started to gain input through a survey [on the Gail’s Kitchen web page] because I want it to represent what the community needs and wants. Fairly quickly, we’ve had quite a big response with ideas and people who want to donate. We’re building a model that blends philanthropic support, community investment, and program revenue. Fundraising has just begun and people can contribute [on the website].
Both Jon Hall and Charlie Rothman, a chef and good friend, are part of the team.
Many people know they need to change their habits, but they struggle with it. How does your program break through those challenges?
Changing habits is hard. Really hard. If you’re going to change a habit, getting a bit of help three months down the road for one hour at a time: no behaviour scientist would recommend that as a behaviour change strategy.
What we’ve done with the program is have them meet with the family doctor or member of their primary care team first. Then they get connected with an exercise specialist and a dietician who they’ll see weekly for 12 weeks. Once they make those initial changes, we run into the core maintenance phase where they meet with the specialist and dietician every month for the remaining nine months.
This is all backed by science. Having those tight timelines drives behaviour change and those regular touch points with different members of the team gives them the knowledge and more practice to build new habits.
Do you have stories of people whose lives have changed due to some of the programs you run?
Definitely. Many people have become far more physically active than they were before. One particular patient was off their medication for about 10 years due to lifestyle improvements.
We know that one in five Canadians has metabolic syndrome; that’s a huge number of people — over 200,000 in Edmonton. Research demonstrates that we can reverse their disease process. They can get healthier.
I can give a patient a medication that will control their sugars, cholesterol, blood pressure, and at the end of the day, I don’t know if they’re that much healthier. But through our year-long program people get supported with diet changes, physical activities, and building new habits. We’ve demonstrated that about 23 per cent of patients who go through the program will actually reverse metabolic syndrome.
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