Feeling unwell?
You’ve got options, and from what the nutritional zeitgeist tells consumers, we have medicine, exercise and (of course) diet choices — and those choices are all yours. Drink milk for strong bones, while also increasing your chances of ovarian cancer. Chocolate is good for you, while sugar is bad. And while we’re at it — what type of sugar is the worst?
Though choosing a “healthy lifestyle” has long been a decision that seems to fall on the individual consumer, U.S. government leaders are beginning to acknowledge their role in the narrative about food — representing a cultural shift in attitudes about the government’s role in health and diet habits, according to Corby Kummer, a senior editor at The Atlantic, an award-winning food writer and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy.
Kummer joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio Tuesday to explain the government’s role in the “food as medicine” movement, and whether or not this shift could lead to more equality in the national food system.
“It’s not just individual diet,” Kummer said. “It’s if you serve people meals that can help improve their health or reduce their symptoms of diabetes and other chronic illness, you can keep them out of the hospital and you can keep them out of health care centers, you can keep them out of the emergency room and therefore save billions of dollars. That’s the whole thesis of this movement.”
These medically-tailored meals are personalized meals delivered to the homes of low-income patients with chronic illnesses as part of an ongoing study to determine the effectiveness of the “food as medicine” thesis. While a federal proposal, pitched by Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, among others, to test this meal program nationally was rejected in the 2018 Farm Bill, the program is currently being rolled out in Boston, San Francisco, Denver and New York City, among others.
“They’re trying to measure exactly the effect of these medically tailored meals on people with kidney disease and people with diabetes and say, ‘Here are the reduced healthcare costs over six months [or] over a year with the goal being getting medicare and medicare reimbursement,” Kummer said. “They’re really pushing this idea of subsidizing and running pilot programs to show these reduced healthcare costs for these medically tailored diets.”
Last year’s Farm Bill included other federal initiatives to promote healthier eating, including expansion of the fruit and vegetable subsidy program to $250 million, a new $25 million Produce Prescription Program and the strengthening of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
According to Kummer, some of the recommendations may take years to take effect.
“They’re great recommendations we would all like to see,” he said. “If you don’t start pushing for them years in advance, then it takes years to enact these things, as it did with food safety, as it did with getting SNAP provisions for school food. It takes a long time for this to happen, it’s years of building information consensus, and that’s what they’re trying to do.”
