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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.
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.
The journalist Michael Pollan calls the ideology of treating food like a drug "nutritionism". It has a very poor track record stretching back over a hundred years, when protein was the evil macronutrient and carbs were the good macronutrient.
His alternative proposal: eat food, mostly plants, and not too much. By "food" he mean something your (or somebody's) great-grandmother would recognize as food, not some highly processed industrial convenience product.
Take Cheetos -- from a marketing perspective there has never been a more perfect consumable product. Each puff is designed to give you a little burst of pleasure, but to have zero satiation value. It's engineered to make you eat forever.
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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.
Healthy food can be enjoyable and taste damn good. It's not about coercion, it's about teaching people to find/prepare healthy food within a given budget. And also increasing access to healthy food in a given area -- many "corner stores" only stock heavily processed "foods."
Right now, the US pays more per capita than any other OECD country.
Your outcomes are worse.
Low cost preventive care is sort of a myth
The evidence suggests otherwise.
There's a bunch of other articles with lower standards of rigor that all say much the same thing if you google 'cost of preventative care vs emergency care', for example. I'd be fascinated to see evidence to the contrary.
Extremely indulgent free medical services
Straw man. I'm arguing that socialised medical care as used by other OECD countries costs less and has better outcomes. You're arguing some fantastic exaggeration you're calling 'extremely indulgent free medical services'.
You're not even consistent. You argue first that people don't just avoid medical care because of cost, but then argue that were it free, people would use it too much.
The people advocating for universally free non-critical care (i.e 'free checkups') are generally the vendors of said services
Ad hominem.
Just be honest. The hot dog seller in the street is honest about his advocacy, and you can be too.
When you can back up your statement with something resembling facts, and avoid some fairly basic logical fallacies, your adoption of a patronising tone will probably ring less false.
Caveat. I'm from Australia, and while there are problems with our health care, I consider myself damn lucky to be able to live in country and period in history with access to the levels of civilisation that I enjoy. I'm more than happy to pay taxes to fund these services, both for myself and my fellow citizens and recognise that probably makes me a 'socialist' in the eyes of some. I consider the plight of those in the US who cannot afford medical care to be a tragedy. I've nothing to sell, and your assumption that this can be the only motivation for someone to advocate equitable access to the wealth of society says more about your motivations than anything else.