Back pain shouldn't stop you from cooking at home. Here's how to adapt
Cooking a simple meal involves a lot of movements that could strain the back. Lifting a pot filled with water to boil pasta. Standing at the counter chopping vegetables. Bending forward to put pans in the oven.
"When you're making soup, you're doing all kinds of gymnastics to get different batches of it in and out of the pot or blender," says Julie Bozo Cotte, 50, who has suffered from chronic back and neck pain for some 15 years. She loves cooking for friends, but says the condition has severely limited her home cooking.
Back pain is one of the most common reasons people seek medical care in the U.S. Around 40% of U.S. adults experience back pain each year and around 13% have chronic back pain, which endures beyond three months and can limit how much they move in their daily lives.
A new cookbook, The Healthy Back Kitchen — out this month from cooking media empire America's Test Kitchen — aims to help back-pain sufferers enjoy cooking, with mindful adaptations to their kitchen techniques.
The impact of back pain is both mental and physical, says , a spine surgeon at Northwell Health in New York City who wrote the book. "Almost universally, my patients tell me: 'My back pain is
