The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.

- Plato

 

Sometimes a physician comes along who recognizes this fundamental truth expressed by Plato, and finds a way to treat patients’ bodies and souls with equal passion and humility. As doctors, we know instantly when we are in their presence. Their compassion is at once humbling and inspiring. We are made better by our interaction with them. A community with a doctor of this sort is truly blessed. Birmingham is such a community. Luis Pineda is such a doctor.

 

Born and raised in Guatemala, Dr. Pineda (“peen-AY-dah”) originally had no plans to come to the United States at all. After medical school, he intended to spend his life practicing as a family doctor in his home country. However, a colleague challenged him to take the ECFMG – the foreign equivalent of the U.S. boards. He easily passed the test, which put his life on an unexpected path. “Once you passed the test, there was a lot of pressure to do something with it,” he says.

 

With the door open for post-graduate training in the U.S., the young (and slightly reluctant) Pineda packed up and left his lush tropical home for the high plains of Lincoln, Nebraska, where he completed a combined Internal Medicine/Psychiatry residency. He initially planning to stay in Nebraska for good, but when the opportunity arose to attend a Hematology/Oncology fellowship in warmer, greener Birmingham, he jumped at it. “Truthfully”, he says with a chuckle, “the snow [in Nebraska] got to me after a while.” 

 

During his time as a fellow at UAB in the early 1980s, the thought process that would become the nucleus of his life’s work began to take shape. Cancer patients were starving. Food was available, but patients wouldn’t eat because it tasted bad to them. Finding the existing solutions to this problem to be insufficient, Pineda researched the literature on nutrition in cancer patients. He was ultimately disappointed. “The information out there was scientifically-correct, in a sense, but it was one-dimensional,” he says. He found that all the literature focused only on the nutritional requirements for someone in treatment - lots of protein, for example - but omitted discussion of how to get patients to actually eat it. He searched the literature, and taught himself the finer points of neurobiology, while conducting informal research.

 

Certain foods, due to their chemical composition, caused taste receptors to be stimulated, and other foods caused them to "reset" so that they could be stimulated again. This effect was accentuated if a more neutral agent was used in-between to facilitate the resetting. In other words, by resetting the receptors, food could be made to taste good, even to cancer patients who had altered taste receptors. Furthermore, it could be made to continue to taste good, through precisely the same mechanism employed when one “cleanses the palate” by sipping wine between bites of food.

 

“At a certain point, I realized I was lacking something. I needed to learn how to cook,” he says. In his off time, he attended Culinard, the formal cooking academy at Virginia College in order to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. “I explained to them what I was doing, and they were very supportive,” he says. He learned the techniques for cooking for people with normal tastes, then altered them to tailor them for cancer patients. Upon graduation, now a certified chef, he threw himself into compiling recipes for cancer patients. “My recipes had to meet certain strict criteria,” he says. They had to address nutritional value while enhancing taste, smell, and swallowing ability, and while simultaneously controlling diarrhea and/or constipation. The recipes work. Cancer patients can enjoy food again, and for that they love Dr. Pineda.

 

He certainly would have made a fortune several times over, but for one small problem with his business model: he gives the books away. Through his non-profit organization and his website, www.cookingwithcancer.org, he distributes the books and recipes to anyone who wants one. All of this magnanimity has made Pineda a bit of a local celebrity, although his celebrity won’t be local for long. The American Cancer Society recently asked to include CD-ROMs of his cooking techniques and recipes in their patient packets to be distributed nationwide – for free; of course.

 

He is excited about the future in the field that he played no small part in pioneering. Armed with colloidal solutions, microscopic taste-containing beads, and a more complete understanding of the senses of taste and smell, “molecular gastronomy” is joining the ancient art of cooking with a very new and very advanced science. He speaks about the boundless possibilities, still with the breathless anticipation of a young college student.

 

Pineda isn't all work, though. He is a family man. He and his Alabamian wife of 30 plus years, Diane, have four children, whose varied pursuits reflect their Renaissance-man father’s eclectic interests. Of their three daughters, the eldest is a businesswoman working with non-profit groups to aid in the further development of Central America. One is an art history student with plans to study design, and one is a high school athlete. His son studies Asian culture and history. Oh, and the family business? Not to worry - Pineda’s eldest daughter has just enrolled in cooking school.

 

“Medicine in this country has been very good to me, my friend,” he says in immaculate English with an endearing Latin-accented formality. “It is my greatest aspiration to be the kind of guy who doesn't just write the proper prescription. I want to be the kind of guy who also cares.”

 

Mission accomplished, Dr. Pineda. Mission accomplished.