FOOD AS MEDICINE A key part of good well-being begins with a healthful diet full of fresh foods. What are physicians doing to address the issue of food insecurity? BY NAVYA POTHAMSETTY
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ost of us have been told from a young age that “you are what you eat.” According to academic literature, access to fresh and healthy foods lessens one’s chance of developing chronic diseases such as asthma, hypertension, and diabetes. Food is an integral part of our health, but few patients receive resources to treat food insecurity from primary care clinics. Telling someone to “eat healthier” isn’t enough: people must have sustainable, accessible sources of healthy food, especially socioeconomically vulnerable populations. It’s not any one person’s
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fault. It’s a consequence of a fragmented, byzantine system of community benefits and healthcare.
An Integrative Approach Many food access problems stem from ineffective top-down regulation methods, such as policy. It’s hard to accomplish legislative changes due to bureaucracy, partisanship, and inefficiency, but there is another way to remedy the problem. Starting from the bottom-up and looking to community organizations and leaders often offers a better solution. Dr. Steven Chen, a
family physician, has a possible way of what that can look like in practice. He worked with other healthcare providers at Hayward Wellness Center to develop a program, Food is Medicine, that uses a multidisciplinary approach to treating food insecurity. In his words, Food is Medicine “gives practical, deliverable effects and allows a provider to close the gap between clinical care and upstream social determinants of health.” A half-hour appointment once every six months isn’t enough for a doctor to treat a patient’s medical needs holistically, let alone their social and emotional needs.