Celebrating the Science and Soul of Vegetables with Dr. Michael Compton

Tonia's Kitchen

I had a lot of fun talking with Dr. Michael Compton about his passion for veggies. Enjoy the interview!

What do onions, beets, tomatoes, and kale have in common? According to Veggie Smarts: A Doctor and Farmer Grows and Savors Eight Families of Vegetables , they’re all part of an edible botanical puzzle that holds the key to how we eat—and why we should eat better.

Written by Dr. Michael T. Compton, a public health physician turned organic farmer, Veggie Smarts is a joyful, nerdy, and nourishing exploration of the eight families of vegetables that make up most of our plant-based plates: Brassicas, Alliums, Legumes, Chenopods, Aster Greens, Umbellifers, Cucurbits, and Nightshades.

Part nutrition guide, part farm memoir, and part scientific curiosity cabinet, Veggie Smarts is already a #1 New Release in Vegetarian Diets on Amazon. Dr. Compton pairs his medical expertise with the dirt-under-his-fingernails perspective of a small-scale organic farmer in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley, where he traded in city life for a field full of carrots, tomatoes, and possibility.

About Dr. Compton

Dr. Michael T. Compton is board-certified in psychiatry, preventive medicine, and lifestyle medicine—a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine, and a Member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. As a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, he has a deep understanding of what makes people feel secure, content, and happy; he also happens to have expertise in healthy lifestyle behaviors and nutrition. Having grown up on a dairy-farm-turned-beef-farm in rural southwestern Virginia, embracing a whole-foods, plant-predominant eating pattern might not have been in his genes. But creating a garden with his two green thumbs from Granny definitely was. Attending college at Mary Washington, medical school at the University of Virginia, and specialty training in psychiatry and preventive medicine at Emory University took this proverbial boy off the farm, but as all who know the old saying might suspect, the farm had not been taken out of him. In a mid-life burst of productivity, he built a compact, organic-certified vegetable farm and got smart about growing and savoring vegetables. To learn more about Dr. Compton visit: http://www.drcompton.health/

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