Page 86 - Time Special Edition Alternative Medicine (January 2020)

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE FOOD CURES

tor; the Cleveland Clinic sponsors
farmers’ markets where local grow-
ers accept food-assistance vouch-
ers from federal programs like WIC
as well as state-led initiatives. And ORANGES
some doctors at Kaiser Permanente They’re rich in vitamin C, which
can increase the production of
in San Francisco hand out recipes in-
certain immune cells in the body.
stead of (or along with) prescriptions These cells can control overactive

for their patients, pulled from the or- immune reactions in autoimmune
ganization’s Thrive Kitchen, which diseases such as lupus.
also provides low-cost monthly
cooking classes for members of
its health plan. Hospitals and clin-
ics across the country have visited
Geisinger’s program to learn from

its success.
But doctors alone can’t accom-
plish this food transformation. Rec-
ognizing that healthier members
not only live longer but also avoid
expensive visits to the emergency
room, insurers are starting to re-
ward healthy eating by covering
sessions with nutritionists and di-

etitians. In 2019, Blue Cross Blue
Shield of Massachusetts began cov-
ering tailored meals from the non-
profit food program Community
Servings for its members with con-
gestive heart failure who can’t afford

the low-fat, low- sodium meals they
need. In 2018, Congress assigned a
first-ever bipartisan Food Is Medi-
cine working group to explore how
government-sponsored food pro-
grams could address hunger and also
lower burgeoning health-care costs
borne by Medicare when it comes
to complications of chronic diseases. “The idea of recently that doctors have started to bridge this gap.

food as medicine is not only an idea whose time has It’s hard to look at health outcomes like heart
come,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and disease and cancer that develop over long periods
the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Sci- of time and tie them to specific foods in the typi-
ence and Policy at Tufts University. “It’s an idea cal adult’s varied diet. Plus, foods are not like drugs
that’s absolutely essential to our health-care system.” that can be tested in rigorous studies to determine
Ask any doctor how to avoid or mitigate the ef- cause and effect in a simple, straightforward man-
fects of the leading killers of Americans, and you’ll ner. Imagine how difficult it would be, for example,

likely hear that eating healthier plays a big role. But to execute a two-year study comparing a thousand
knowing intuitively that food can influence health people who eat a cup of blueberries a day with a
is one thing, and having the science and the confi- thousand who don’t in order to determine if the fruit
dence to back it up is another. And it’s only relatively can prevent cancers.

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