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Allison Collins, MD

Director of Lifestyle and Culinary Medicine
Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara
Mountain View, California, United States

Allison Collins, MD is a pediatrician, certified culinary medicine specialist, and board-certified lifestyle medicine intensivist. She specializes in working with children, teens, and families to prevent, treat, and even reverse chronic disease through lifestyle change.
Dr. Collins is the founding director of Lifestyle and Culinary Medicine at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara in Northern California. She created Cook for Health, an innovative virtual culinary medicine program, and launched several intensive lifestyle medicine programs for both pediatric and adult populations. She regularly teaches in person as well as virtual plant-forward culinary medicine classes to patients of all ages as well as to physicians, residents, and other medical professionals.
A passionate advocate for food as medicine, Dr. Collins leads both virtual and in-person cooking demonstrations for medical teams and at conferences and has helped transform the food environment at Kaiser Permanente campuses. She partnered with local caterers, Sodexo Magic cafeteria services, and inpatient food teams to develop the Thrive menu—bringing flavorful, plant-forward meals to staff, patients, and visitors.
Beyond clinical care, Dr. Collins is a frequent speaker, recipe contributor, and thought leader in the fields of culinary, lifestyle, and food is medicine.
She earned her B.S. in Psychology and Biomedical Engineering from Tufts University, followed by a Fulbright scholarship in Indonesia, where she conducted pioneering research on pediatric obesity. She received her MD from the University of California, San Diego, where she was awarded the American Nutrition Society Fellowship, and completed her residency at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.
Dr. Collins joined Kaiser Permanente in 2010. She became board-certified in Lifestyle Medicine in 2018, completed her certification as a Lifestyle Medicine Intensivist in 2021, and earned Culinary Medicine Specialist certification in 2023.
She serves on several regional and national committees, including the TPMG Lifestyle Medicine Task Force, the KP National Food is Medicine Center of Excellence, the KP National Healthy Picks Committee, and the National Food Sourcing Committee—helping to shape healthy food policy across Kaiser Permanente’s campuses nationwide.
In her free time, Dr. Collins enjoys trail running, hiking, skiing, developing recipes, cooking with her two daughters, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.

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