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Doctor-gourmand Ralph Felder works with MIME students to promote healthy eating

When Ralph Felder M.D., Ph.D. (Mathematics ‘71) sought to reach a wider audience for his message about healthy eating, he connected with the students in the MIME (Master's in Immersive Mediated Environments) program in the Department of Telecommunications at IU. The MIMEsters’ out-of-the-box ways of thinking made sense for publicizing Felder’s unconventional but scientifically rigorous approach to diet and nutrition.

“My whole purpose is to give people a logical way to think about eating,” says Felder, who currently serves as the director of cardiovascular nutrition at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona. “This is what we would call an evidence-based diet. It’s not crazy. It’s based upon principles, and the basic idea behind the book is that we dose foods the same way doctors normally dose pills.”

The origins of his 2007 book The Bonus Years Diet go back to his days in the medical scientist training program at Stanford, when a casual introduction to the chef at his favorite Chinese restaurant soon grew into a job and a love for preparing fine cuisine.

“One of my colleagues in the laboratory had made friends with the owner of a Chinese restaurant right in the neighborhood of Stanford, and he introduced me to the chef,” Felder says. “I started going to the restaurant and becoming friendly with him, and over time realized that I wanted to learn more. He started letting me go into the back of the kitchen. He saw talent right away—so he started me off as a busboy!”

While working in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant, however, Felder not only learned how to hold a cleaver but the pleasures of creating delicious meals. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard, Felder headed back out west to practice medicine, and indulged his newfound appreciation for cooking by enrolling in the culinary arts program at the Art Institute of Phoenix. His vocation and avocation overlapped when he found himself advising patients on cooking techniques along with cardiovascular nutrition. Making the decision to eat more healthful foods is that much easier when the foods appear in delicious meals you’ve prepared yourself.

“I often mention that I had all these great Nobel-prize-winning professors in biochemistry when I was at Stanford, all of which I have forgotten,” Felder says. “But I never forgot how to stir-fry.”

Eventually, Felder wanted to spread his advice for healthy cooking beyond the level of individual patients, and began working on recipes to raise nutritious meals into an art form. In 2005, an article in the British Medical Journal by Dr. Oscar Franco caught his eye, and The Bonus Years Diet was born.

Franco’s article was in response to a 2003 article in the same journal that proposed that everyone—not just patients with conditions, but everyone—reduce their heart risk by taking a pill containing six cardiac drugs. Franco developed a nutritional prescription of common foods that would have the same beneficial effect as the drugs, without any potential side effects.

Felder contacted Franco, and together the pair began developing an eating plan that employed Franco’s nutritious foods. The basic ingredients for healthy eating in The Bonus Years Diet are:

One 5-oz. glass of red wine daily
Two oz. of dark chocolate daily
Four cups of fruit and vegetables daily (measured raw)
Three 5-oz. servings of fish per week, preferably wild or organically raised
One clove of garlic daily, cooked or raw
Two ounces of nuts daily

“Each one of those foods has an effect on the endothelium, or the ‘Teflon lining’ of the arteries,” Felder says. “So, for example, the red wine and the fruits and vegetables will have an effect on your blood pressure. The nuts will help to lower your bad cholesterol. The chocolate will help to drop your blood pressure. The seafood decreases cardiac arrhythmias, it helps to prevent clotting which helps the endothelium. Basically we’re dosing foods the same way doctors dose pills, but it’s a lot more fun and a lot safer.”

When The Bonus Years Diet came out in 2007, Felder did a string of television and radio appearances to promote the book, but found he was reaching a traditional audience of health-conscious dieters. When his efforts to promote the book came to the attention of the IU Alumni Association, Felder got connected with Tom Gillespie and the MIME program. The ultra-creative MIMEsters—specialists in new media and multiplatform products and solutions—embraced Felder’s needs, and the ideas flew.

Felder came to Bloomington several times to work with the students, giving lectures and hammering out ways to reach larger audiences with the theme of healthy eating. Unfortunately, the results never achieved viability, for a number of reasons beyond Felder’s and the MIMEsters’ control. “I think it turned out to be more difficult than we initially expected,” he says. “It was a great opportunity, but it never came to fruition the way I probably liked it.”

His latter-day IU experience was still a positive one for Felder. “What amazed me was how much more sophisticated the students are than I was at their age,” he says. “They’re in a completely different league than I was. If I had to go and compete against these students, I wouldn’t have a chance, and I’m not being facetious. These people are really really sharp. I’m glad I got my degree many years ago, or I’d be out to lunch.”

Today Felder is still working to promote his message of healthy eating in a context of fine cuisine. “What I’m really interested in is education, and if people can go to The Bonus Years Diet website, and learn the basics of it and the reasons for it, that’s great,” he says. “If they want to buy the book and get more recipes, that’s great too—but the important thing is to get the word out and to have people begin to think about their health the same way doctors think about their patients’ health.”