Living to Eat, Eating to Live: Food as Medicine and Pleasure

A lecture and hands-on cooking class finished with a family-style meal with a glass of wine.

Join Sharon Meyer and Annie Obermeyer for a delicious, illuminating and educational evening around food and health. We will explore both food as medicine and food as pleasure – two concepts that many mistakenly view as oppositional while nothing could be farther from the truth! Let’s change the conversation: healthy eating is not deprivation. In fact, at its best food functions as both medicine and pleasure. Learn to you cook for yourself and others in a way that optimizes your health and thrills your taste buds. Explore core nutritional principles and debunk common myths around fats, carbohydrates, proteins, spices, sugar, portion size and supplements. We will explore a wide range of topics such as: hormones, gut health, inflammation, the microbiome and much much more. Please email info@18reasons.org upon registering to share any questions or topics that you'd like Annie and Sharon to know before class. There's so much to cover within this topic, so with your help, we can steer the conversation into the most common requests from the students.

We hope to see you for a night of an exploration of health and culinary delights. Please bring your questions, curiosity, and palates!

MENU

Bone broth based soup (demo)

Braised lamb shanks, tzatziki & herb sauce

Spiced fall vegetables

Seasonal salad

Roasted figs with fresh farm cheese, honey, olive oil (demo)

Sharon Meyer, DipION, CNC is highly skilled functional medicine trained nutritionist with over 20 years of experience, homing her practice at the Institute for Health & Healing, Sutter Health’s Integrative Medicine wing. She specializes in cancer, auto-immune diseases, heart health, digestive health, weight loss programs, elimination diets, anti-inflammatory diets and cleanses. Sharon has lectured around the world, from London to California, frequently featured on television, radio, and in print. She is also a qualified Cordon Bleu cook! Sharon creates recipes as she speaks, tailoring her recommendations to her client’s preferences and circumstances. She also relies on high-quality nutritional supplements with strong scientific research, demonstrating how healthy eating is key to optimum health. Sharon determines the status of various body systems, including digestion, immune system, hormone balance, and many others. She is engaging and compassionate, ready to provide nutrition information or design a practical, customized approach to nutrition that is flexible and easily adopted. Sharon grew up in South Africa, graduated from the Institute of Optimum Nutrition in London, a cutting-edge program founded by Patrick Holford, author of the popular book The Optimum Nutrition Bible. She is thrilled to teach her first class at the inspiring 18 Reasons.

A San Francisco native, Annie Obermeyer grew up in a family who loved to eat and cook in this vibrant food mecca of a city. Since childhood, storytelling, food, and Zen Buddhism were the three legs of Annie’s barstool and remain so to this day. While working at the Public Theater in New York, Annie started her own private chef business called Impossible Tomato, the name her Italian teacher gave her as a child – the shoe fit! Shortly after that, Annie lived, studied, and cooked at San Francisco Zen Center for three years. There, she learned what cooking mindfully truly means. Annie spent the summer of 2018 as a guest cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. This past fall she cooked for a group of spectacular playwrights as resident chef at SPACE on Ryder Farm, an artist in residency program on the grounds of a 223-year-old working organic farm in Putnam County, New York. Annie is honored to work at The Institute for Health & Healing, where she works with people living the IHH mission of healing people and transforming health care. Annie believes that food has the power to transform, heal, unite, and delight. She is thrilled that nourishing others allows her to explore life fully through myriad lenses. By gathering around a table, we discover the world, ourselves, and each other.

^{Photo courtesy of Unsplash contributor Katie Smith}