Abstract
Nutrition programs for people recovering from alcohol and other substance use disorders must address nutritional depletion, cardiometabolic risk, and the practical ability to maintain adequate meals. This narrative review integrates plant-based nutrition research, addiction-care guidance, raw-food studies, and culinary education evidence to propose a recovery kitchen framework informed by retreat practice. Vegetarian and vegan interventions can improve selected cardiometabolic markers, but trials in general populations do not establish addiction treatment efficacy or a raw-food dose response. Strict raw diets may compromise energy intake and some micronutrient adequacy. The framework therefore treats medical stabilization and adequate nourishment as prerequisites, combines fresh produce with useful cooked and fortified foods, and prioritizes indication-based supplementation. Its distinctive proposition is that a retreat should be evaluated partly by the nutritional skills and food access participants retain after leaving. Practical meal designs and a staged implementation pathway are provided. A proposed randomized feasibility study would compare hands-on culinary training with attention-matched education while holding food provision and clinical care comparable. A separate controlled study would be needed to isolate raw-food exposure. The central hypothesis is that sustainable dietary quality, nutritional adequacy, and transferable meal skills offer a more defensible basis for recovery support than dietary strictness.