‘Immune broth’: California tests food as medicine
SEBASTOPOL, Calif. — On a foggy afternoon, Diana Van Ry, a retired judicial assistant, dropped by the boisterous kitchens of the nonprofit group where she volunteers to pick up rock cod, cauliflower couscous and an “immune broth” enriched with vegetables and seaweed. She planned to deliver the meals to Brandi Dornan, 46, who is recuperating from breast cancer.
“It’s food I wouldn’t have thought to make myself,” said Dornan, who started getting the meals during radiation therapy and is grateful for it. “Wow, bless their hearts.”
The Ceres Community Project — its meals prepared for cancer patients by teenage souschefs — is at the forefront of the “food as medicine” approach increasingly embraced by physicians, health insurers, researchers and public health officials.
The group is participating in an ambitious, state-funded study to test whether providing daily nutritious meals to chronically ill, lowincome people on Medi-Cal — California’s version of the Medicaid program — will affect their prognosis and treatment, or the cost of their medical care.
Over the next three years, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University will assess whether
providing 1,000 patients who have congestive heart failure or Type 2 diabetes with a healthier diet and nutrition education affects hospital readmissions and referrals to long-term care, compared with 4,000 similar Medi-Cal patients who do not get the food.
The interest in food as medicine is largely an outgrowth of the nutritional know-how acquired during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Organizations like Project Open Hand in San Francisco and God’s Love We Deliver in New York sprang up to bolster the health of people whose lives were being decimated, often by the weight loss called wasting syndrome.
As the disease became treatable with antiretroviral medicines, many groups expanded their missions to help people with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. “When you feel terrible, managing your diet falls to the bottom of your list,” said Karen Pearl, president and chief executive of God’s Love We Deliver.
The California study will build on more modest and less rigorous earlier research. A study in Philadelphia by the Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance retroactively compared health insurance claims for 65 chronically ill Medicaid patients who received six months of medically tailored meals with a control group. The patients who got the food had about $12,000 less a month in medical expenses. Another small study by researchers at UCSF tracked patients with HIV and Type 2 diabetes who got special meals for six months to see if it would positively affect their health. The researchers found they were less depressed, less likely to make trade-offs between food and health care, and more likely to stick with medications.
The study in California, which will include patients in Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland and San Francisco, dovetails with efforts like the preventive food pantry at the Boston Medical Center and medical school culinary programs like one at the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University, which has a teaching kitchen and medical student chefs leading community cooking classes.