Make Prescriptions is part of the growing public health effort to provide medicinal foods that can prevent or alleviate chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and chronic high blood pressure. ,
In the largest study of these programs, researchers looked at 3,881 people living in low-income neighborhoods who received food stamps through nine programs in a dozen states, from California to Florida.
Participants were given coupons or cards ranging from $15 to $300 a month to buy more fruits and vegetables at markets and grocery stores.
The study looked at the amount of food adults and children consumed before and after ingesting their “prescribed” fruits and vegetables, as well as measures of cardiovascular health, food insecurity and self-reported health status. A study published Tuesday in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes found that adults who participated in the programs ate about 30 percent more food per day.
At the end of the programs, adults reported eating an average of 0.85 cups more fruit and vegetables per day. The children involved in the study ate 0.26 cups more – or about 7% more – than before the programs.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most Americans do not eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables per day.
The US Department of Agriculture estimates that a person would need to spend between $63 and $78 per month to consume the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables. Poor nutrition can lead to health problems over time.
“We face an ongoing epidemic of diet-related diseases,” said Kurt Hager, an associate professor at the UMass Chan School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “In the past, physicians had very few options to improve their patients’ diets other than limited access to nutritional advice.”
When comparing before and after participants, the effect of more fruits and vegetables on blood pressure was “about half that of commonly prescribed medications, as demonstrated by a simple change in diet,” Hager said. adults and children participating in the programs had heart disease or type 2 diabetes or were at risk and were recruited because of food insecurity (lack of access to adequately nutritious food) or because they were recruited from a health center that had a low supply situation had enrolled number of patients – income neighborhood. None of these programs have been previously studied or evaluated.
Each program lasted an average of six months and ran from 2014 to 2020. ,
product prescription programs have grown over the past decade and particularly the last two to three years since the COVID-19 pandemic.Existing studies on prescription product programs have shown that product coupons would encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables. However, it’s unclear whether eating more apples and carrots is associated with better health outcomes, such as lower blood pressure, Hager said. It is also unclear whether people had better health because they ate more fruits and vegetables, or if the corresponding improvements in cardiometabolic health were due to the fact that money spent on fruits and vegetables increased health Corrected household food insecurity. Approximately 56% of households surveyed are food insecure.
“These programs can work by removing the stress and anxiety that comes with not knowing where your next meal will come from,” says Hager. By the end of the programs, the risk of household food insecurity had been reduced by a third. Kevin G.M. Volpp, director of the Center for Health Motivation and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, said studies like Hager’s cannot be used as evidence that these programs resulted in improvements in blood pressure or blood sugar.
“We really need randomized trials to answer this question more systematically,” Volpp said. A varied diet consisting of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes can improve your health.
Mitchell S.V. Elkind, director of clinical sciences at the American Heart Association and professor of neuroscience and epidemiology at Columbia University, called the study “a wonderful analysis” that suggests prescription drug programs have benefits. However, researchers would need to do a randomized trial “like a drug,” he said.
Circulation is published by the American Heart Association.The Rockefeller Foundation funded a major seven- to 10-year American Heart Association initiative to conduct additional research to determine if “prescription foods” are a cost-effective way to treat and reduce the risk of these chronic diseases. said Elkind. “If we don’t solve this problem, our healthcare costs will continue to skyrocket and heart attack, death and obesity rates will remain among the worst in the world,” Elkind said. “We have to get better at that.”
