California Study To Examine the Influence of a Healthy Diet On Patients (nytimes.com)

"According to The New York Times, the state of California is funding an experiment through The Ceres Community Project to test the influence of a healthy diet on the recovery of state Medicaid patients with long-term serious illnesses," writes Slashdot reader MonteCarloMethod. From the report: Over the next three years, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford 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 don't get the food.

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 racked up about $12,000 less a month in medical expenses. Another small study by researchers at U.C.S.F. tracked patients with H.I.V. 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 their medications.

Comments

Food

[phantomfive]

Food is not an easy thing to get a handle on.

Re:Food

[cayenne8]

Actually...I"m wondering, for this study, what exactly their definition of "Health Diet" will be???

If it is the same shit following the US food pyramid, full of grains, carbs and low fat, I can guess they're likely NOT going to get that pleasant of an outcome.

If they go mostly all veggies and non-processed foods, they'll see a lot of improvement, but I think they should also try different groups in different considerations of "healthy" diets....Mediterranean type, kept/low carb types, vegetarian......etc

I think not only would they show eating better helps health, but also, what is the best form of "Healthy" diet?

Re:Food

[b0s0z0ku]

Good food is cheap if you cook it yourself. Big bag of salad greens: $2. Big bag of tomatoes: $4. Cheese $3. Onion $1. Pepper $2. $12 + oil/vinegar gives you salad for approximately a week, even in an expensive area like NYC. Chicken/fish aren't expensive, nor are rice, potatoes, or greens. You can eat well for less than fast food costs every day if you know how to cook half decently.

Re:I'm guessing this has less to do with healthy f

[another_twilight]

You pay one way or another.

You can pay for emergency treatment when people can't afford to visit a doctor for anything less than life-threatening emergencies, by which time a condition that could have been treated cheaply and with a better patient outcome is now an expensive, risk laden venture with poor prognosis. Worse, it's tying up a system that would be better serving emergencies that couldn't be anticipated or treated.

You can try to make emergency services a user pays proposition, but then you risk increasing the wealth inequality even further, increasing crime and you pay for police, a slower legal system and increased prisons, not to mention having a growing population that are in poor health creating a pool for infectious disease.

Maybe the math doesn't perfectly balance. It's hard to put a dollar value on quality of life and engagement with the social contract, but most other first world/OECD countries achieve better health outcomes for more people, for less money and lower cost to most citizens than the US. Using some flavour of nationalised health care.

There are some things that are terrible when government run, just as there are some things you don't want to let people profit from. Health care is one of the latter.