Choosing healthy food is a recommendation to keep the body healthy and not getting sick. With the development of research, food is currently becoming a therapeutic treatment to support a person's recovery when sick.
The therapy is the Geisinger Program which was launched in 2017 by the Geisinger Health System in one of the hospitals owned by the Fresh Food Farmacy community. This community provides healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, lean meat and low-sodium choices for patients in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, and teaches them how to incorporate these foods into their daily diet.
The Geisinger program is one of a number of breakthrough efforts that ultimately regard food as an important part of patient medical care. This program also treats food as a medicine that can have the power to heal.
More research reveals that human health is broader than the drugs they drink and tests performed. Health is influenced by how many people sleep and exercise, how much stress they carry, and what they eat each meal.
Food is a special focus of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, even entrepreneurs who are frustrated by the slow progress of drug treatment in reducing food related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. They are also driven by the growth of research that supports the idea that when people eat well, it will remain healthy and more likely to control chronic diseases and may avoid them altogether.
"When you prioritize food and teach people how to prepare healthy food, look, it can end up having more impact than the drug itself," said interim president and CEO of Geisinger Dr. Jaewon Ryu, quoted from Time.
The problem is finding healthy eating is not as easy as taking pills. For some people, healthy food is not available and is not affordable. To overcome this, in the United States some hospitals have worked with local wholesalers to give discounts on fruits and vegetables when patients provide "recipes" written by doctors.
For example, some doctors at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco share food recipes instead of putting prescription drugs for patients. Patients can take it at Thrive Kitchen, which also provides cheap monthly cooking classes for members of their health plans.
"The idea of food as medicine is not just an idea whose time has come. It is a very important idea for our health care system," said cardiologist and dean of the Friedman University Faculty of Science and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian.
It is difficult to see the health results of food for diseases that have been chronic. Food is not like drugs that can be tested in rigorous studies that compare people who eat a cup of blueberry a day or not to determine whether fruit can prevent cancer.
Food is not the same as medicine when it comes to how to act on the human body. Drugs and food can contain a number of ingredients that are useful, and may not be useful, which work in different systems.
Doctors also know humans eat not only to feed body cells. However, eating food is often due to emotional influences, such as feeling happy or sad.
"It's much cheaper to give someone three-month statins [to lower their cholesterol] than to find out how to make them eat healthy food," said professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Eric Rimm.
The power of food as medicine gained scientific credibility in 2002. At that time the US government released the results of studies that refer to diets and exercise programs to fight drug treatment for type 2 diabetes.
The Diabetes Prevention Program compares people assigned to a diet low in saturated fat, sugar and salt which includes lean protein and fresh fruits and vegetables with people who are assigned to take metformin to lower blood sugar. Among people who are at high risk of diabetes, those who use metformin reduce their risk of developing diabetes by 31 percent compared to those who use placebo.
While those who modify their diet and exercise regularly reduce their risk by 58 percent compared to those who do not change their behavior. This is almost double the reduction in risk compared to drug consumption.
A study in 2010 showed that food can treat disease. Medicare is replacing the first lifestyle-based program to treat heart disease.
That is based on decades of work by the University of California, San Francisco, cardiologist Dr. Dean Ornish. Under the plan, people who have heart attacks turn to low-fat diets, exercise regularly, stop smoking, reduce their stress levels by meditation and strengthen social relationships. In a series of studies, he found most of them lowered blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels and reversed some blockages in the heart arteries.
In recent years, other studies have shown the same benefits for healthy eating as the Mediterranean diet in preventing recurrent events for people who have heart attack. "Obviously people who are trained in how to eat Mediterranean foods rich in beans or olive oil get more benefits than what we found in statin tests in the same way [to lower cholesterol]," Rimm said.
The therapy is the Geisinger Program which was launched in 2017 by the Geisinger Health System in one of the hospitals owned by the Fresh Food Farmacy community. This community provides healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, lean meat and low-sodium choices for patients in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, and teaches them how to incorporate these foods into their daily diet.
The Geisinger program is one of a number of breakthrough efforts that ultimately regard food as an important part of patient medical care. This program also treats food as a medicine that can have the power to heal.
More research reveals that human health is broader than the drugs they drink and tests performed. Health is influenced by how many people sleep and exercise, how much stress they carry, and what they eat each meal.
Food is a special focus of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, even entrepreneurs who are frustrated by the slow progress of drug treatment in reducing food related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer. They are also driven by the growth of research that supports the idea that when people eat well, it will remain healthy and more likely to control chronic diseases and may avoid them altogether.
"When you prioritize food and teach people how to prepare healthy food, look, it can end up having more impact than the drug itself," said interim president and CEO of Geisinger Dr. Jaewon Ryu, quoted from Time.
The problem is finding healthy eating is not as easy as taking pills. For some people, healthy food is not available and is not affordable. To overcome this, in the United States some hospitals have worked with local wholesalers to give discounts on fruits and vegetables when patients provide "recipes" written by doctors.
For example, some doctors at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco share food recipes instead of putting prescription drugs for patients. Patients can take it at Thrive Kitchen, which also provides cheap monthly cooking classes for members of their health plans.
"The idea of food as medicine is not just an idea whose time has come. It is a very important idea for our health care system," said cardiologist and dean of the Friedman University Faculty of Science and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian.
It is difficult to see the health results of food for diseases that have been chronic. Food is not like drugs that can be tested in rigorous studies that compare people who eat a cup of blueberry a day or not to determine whether fruit can prevent cancer.
Food is not the same as medicine when it comes to how to act on the human body. Drugs and food can contain a number of ingredients that are useful, and may not be useful, which work in different systems.
Doctors also know humans eat not only to feed body cells. However, eating food is often due to emotional influences, such as feeling happy or sad.
"It's much cheaper to give someone three-month statins [to lower their cholesterol] than to find out how to make them eat healthy food," said professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Eric Rimm.
The power of food as medicine gained scientific credibility in 2002. At that time the US government released the results of studies that refer to diets and exercise programs to fight drug treatment for type 2 diabetes.
The Diabetes Prevention Program compares people assigned to a diet low in saturated fat, sugar and salt which includes lean protein and fresh fruits and vegetables with people who are assigned to take metformin to lower blood sugar. Among people who are at high risk of diabetes, those who use metformin reduce their risk of developing diabetes by 31 percent compared to those who use placebo.
While those who modify their diet and exercise regularly reduce their risk by 58 percent compared to those who do not change their behavior. This is almost double the reduction in risk compared to drug consumption.
A study in 2010 showed that food can treat disease. Medicare is replacing the first lifestyle-based program to treat heart disease.
That is based on decades of work by the University of California, San Francisco, cardiologist Dr. Dean Ornish. Under the plan, people who have heart attacks turn to low-fat diets, exercise regularly, stop smoking, reduce their stress levels by meditation and strengthen social relationships. In a series of studies, he found most of them lowered blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels and reversed some blockages in the heart arteries.
In recent years, other studies have shown the same benefits for healthy eating as the Mediterranean diet in preventing recurrent events for people who have heart attack. "Obviously people who are trained in how to eat Mediterranean foods rich in beans or olive oil get more benefits than what we found in statin tests in the same way [to lower cholesterol]," Rimm said.
No comments:
Post a Comment