As part of our Thanksgiving week special focus, we present Dr. Gourmet: Timothy S. Harlan, M.D.
The following biography is from Dr. Gourmet’s website.
“A practicing, board-certified Internist in New Orleans, Tim’s love of food preparation began as a teenager working in the restaurant business. Starting as a dishwasher, he worked his way up to managing his first restaurant by the age of eighteen. Along the way he learned cooking from many fine chefs, and at age twenty-two opened his own restaurant: a small country-French café.
Three years operating Le Petit Café—creating menus, being a chef and teaching cooking classes—were challenging and creative. Closing the restaurant to return to school was an important turning point. Dr. Harlan originally intended to pursue a degree in hotel and restaurant management, but events led him toward medicine and the decision to become a physician.
After finishing an undergraduate degree in anthropology and biology at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Harlan went on to study at Emory University School of Medicine. Working as a caterer throughout school, he continued to be involved with food and cooking but noticed a lack of knowledge in the medical field about eating healthy and eating well. Neither patients nor health care providers understood much about a healthful diet. Patients, it seemed, were usually told not what they could eat but, rather, what they could not eat.
In medical school, Dr. Harlan wrote It’s Heartly Fare, a book best characterized as a food manual for patients with cardiovascular disease. It is published by Pritchett & Hull Associates, with the fourth edition going to press in the fall of 2005. His latest book, Hand on Heart , is published by ENDpapers publishing.
Dr. Gourmet has been an on air consultant to the TV Food Network show Cooking Thin. He is also a host on the DIY network show, AskDIY, with segments airing on the DIY network as well as in syndication. In 2002 The Dr. Gourmet Show, which aired on regional public television, won an Emmy® award.
Dr. Gourmet® is a natural outgrowth of Dr. Harlan’s interest in good food and good health: “Eating well and eating healthy is the same thing,” he says.
For more information about Dr. Gourmet, please visit his website.
