08/09/2021
Wednesday
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Not too long ago, a group of doctors and public health experts at Massachusetts General Hospital noticed something striking: Many of the patients who routinely showed up in the emergency room requiring the most medical services were also the patients who seemed to be the most nutritionally vulnerable.
They were patients with heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and other largely food-related chronic diseases. For hospitals and health insurers, these are among the highest cost, highest-need patients. Working with a local nonprofit group called Community Services, the doctors decided to launch a study to see whether providing these patients with nutritious meals would have an impact on their healthcare outcomes.
The researchers recruited Medicaid and Medicare patients and split them into different groups. One group received regular deliveries of healthy meals that were made from scratch and designed by a registered dietitian: Each meal contained ingredients like locally caught seafood and locally grown Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, zucchinis, fruits and other fresh produce that nearby farms donated. Another group received nutritious meals, but they weren’t specifically tailored to their individual medical needs. The third group did not receive any of the nutritious meal deliveries. What the study found in the ensuing weeks was astonishing. The two groups that had nutritious meals had fewer hospital visits, ultimately resulting in a 16 percent reduction in their health care costs. And that was after deducting meal expenses.
The average monthly medical costs for a patient in the nutrition group shrank to about $843—much lower than the roughly $1,413 in medical costs for each patient in the control group.
These types of groups recognize what our federal government sadly does not: To tackle the crisis, our national food policies must be aligned with our healthcare policies. Instead of just treating rampant chronic diseases, we have to start preventing them—and we can do that with our forks.
