Over the past 6 months, we’ve been seeing a surge in comments from diet and health research-ers that we’re heading to a future where ‘you are what you eat’ will take on a whole new dimension. We’re talking about ‘prescribing’ certain foods to treat specific ills…
The highly-touted Mediterranean Diet: A place we can
all go, to support the Food Is Medicine principle…
The notion that shortages or overloads of specific foods in an individual’s diet could be causing them specific ills is being looked at more and ore seriously with every passing month. In fact, many physi-cians, nutritionists and specialists are saying custom-tailored diets for every single patient could be the way to go for maximum health in the future.
Panacea or pipe dream?
The idea has been around for a while. But it’s been met with a great deal of skepticism. Medical and related professionals who know too to well that the notion of there being a ‘silver bullet’ for any given disease or condition is myth than fact.
But a series of new findings, particularly over the past year, has revealed such strong associations between specific foodborne ‘ingredients’ and the control or cure of certain ills that the idea is being looked at again. I addition, discovery of a number of testing techniques has made it possible to tell whether specific patients could benefit from specific food-centred treatments.
Impressed…
So impressed with potential were researchers at the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University that they’ve conducted a wide-ranging speculative study estimating whatcould happen if all 50 states provided medically tailored meals to individuals with diet-sensitive health conditions.
In a specific word, the team calls the potential for improved health outcomes and health care cost savings… ‘Staggering’.
What they did
The study set out to calculate objectively the financial impacts of ‘medically tailored meals’ on health care individual US states could expect to see if every state adopted the plan.
Researchers first defined ‘medically tailored meals’ as, “prepared, home-delivered meals, typically provided to people with complex health conditions and high acuity of care based on a referral from a medical professional or health plan, as the focus of their operating plan.”
The three-pronged goal would be to, “improve diet-related health outcomes, reduce financial strain and improve associated well-being, address disparities, and reduce health care spending.” An ambi-tious aim, to be sure.
What they found
The team discovered that, “if every U.S. state adopted the model, the nation could save approx-imately $32.1 billion in net health care costs in the first year alone and prevent 3.5 million hospi-talizations per year due to complications from chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.”
“The most striking finding [was] that med-ically tailored meals, assuming full uptake by eligible individuals,” would produce savings in 49 of 50 states.
For example, Connecticut would benefit the most, saving around $6,300 in health care costs per patient per year. Another 48 states states would each show cost savings of some amount per patient. Alabama would be the only outlier where medically tailored meals would not produce fiscal savings. Even there, tough, the plan would be cost-neutral – not a loser. And patients would still reap the health and social benefits of the plan.
The takeaway
“These results emphasize the potential for policymakers to integrate medically tailored meals into health care coverage at scale,” Shuyue (Amy) Deng, first author of the study report, shared in a statement.
And it appears the ball is already rolling in some parts of the country. A separate team from Tufts conducted a survey earlier last year found strong public support for ‘dietary interventions’ via med-ically tailored meals across the US. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has developed the framework of a ‘Food Is Medicine’ initiative based on funding approved back in 2023.
The current study also notes, “The broad public interest in Food Is Medicine interventions suggests that there would be demand for efforts by grocery stores, pharmacies, farmers markets, and food delivery programs to partner with health systems, insurance providers, and technology vendors to incorporate Food Is Medicine approaches in their retail offerings.”
My take
We’ll see… What concerns me as a third-party observer is, what will happen to the Food Is Medicine ‘movement’ if Trump Health and Human Services czar JFK Jr. continues to slash and burn programs – especially new, innovative ones – to effect health care sector savings.
~ Maggie J.