Ivan Kenneth Zapanta, RND, MD, FPCP, DPCMNP
Food is Medicine. Culture is the Key.
Ivan Zapanta didn't set out to be a nutrition doctor. He set out to understand why patients kept getting sick from things that were, at least partly, preventable. The answer kept coming back to food.
He completed BS Community Nutrition at UP Diliman, earned his RND, then went to UST for medical school. The order mattered — he wanted to understand what people eat and why before learning to treat what goes wrong. During Internal Medicine residency at Makati Medical Center, the picture became clear. Food was almost always part of the problem. It was rarely part of the plan.
What he kept seeing wasn't complicated. Bodies perform better when they're fueled correctly. Metabolic disease doesn't appear overnight — it builds, quietly, through years of eating patterns that nobody corrected because nobody explained them properly. The information was out there. Patients just weren't getting it in a form they could actually use.
That led him to a Medical Nutrition fellowship at St. Luke's, post-graduate training most Philippine physicians don't complete. Not to add another credential, but to close the gap himself: write the prescription and the nutrition plan in the same consultation, grounded in the same clinical reasoning.
His work today is built on a simple premise. Food is medicine. Getting it right — understanding how what you eat shapes your metabolism, your energy, your long-term health — is not a lifestyle trend. It's basic. It's just rarely treated that way.
He practices at 9 Metro Manila clinic locations and remains committed to making accurate nutrition information accessible to more Filipinos.