Food Is Medicine: Are You Ready For The Next Wave of Healthcare?
Featuring highlights from this week’s podcast by Mark Hyman
Medicine that comes in the form of a pill, a shot, or an IV drip – as a man-made chemical elixir designed to alleviate (but rarely cure) what ails you – aka a pharmaceutical drug – is a modern money-making phenomenon. Throughout the rest of human evolution, for thousands and thousands of years, food was the only medicine available. Somehow we’ve forgotten this fact.
Humans learned to eat enough types of foods available in the environments in which they lived in order to survive and reproduce. Over time, and with a lot of observation and trial and error, human cultures and societies learned to make teas, tinctures, poultices, syrups, fermentations and other modifications of naturally occurring substances to treat a wide array of problems. Think “traditional Chinese medicines” as a great example of this vast ancient knowledge on human health and healing.
Can we really reverse common health issues simply by eating the right foods?
The answer is a resounding YES!
Modern medicine is only just starting to circle back around again and take a much closer look at ancient wisdom on diet and health.
This week on The Doctor's Farmacy with Mark Hyman M.D., Mark Hyman interviews Mark Walker who is the Chairman and CEO of Performance Kitchen.
[I encourage you to watch this interview yourself on YouTube. You can find it here].
They are talking about Food as Medicine and how Medically Tailored Meals can be used to successfully treat chronic disease.
Let’s dive into this concept of “Food As Medicine” and take a look at what it might mean for a doctor to actually prescribe food to treat a chronic disease.
What does “food as medicine” mean?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Medicine is a substance or preparation used in treating disease.”
Therefore, when we talk about using food as medicine, we are talking about actually using the food you are eating to treat the disease or condition that you have.
This is not food in addition to drugs to treat chronic illness.
This is food INSTEAD of drugs.
Type II diabetes is a perfect example of a disease that can be reversed with food, according to Mark Hyman in this podcast, but which is rarely resolved or reversed using drugs. Drug treatments for Type II diabetes require life long usage. Food can essentially provide a cure.
But it is important to note that this concept of food as medicine goes beyond simply having a healthy diet. It’s this expanded concept in which doctors can examine patients, assess their individual situations, and tailor a food prescription for that individual. And this food prescription comes instead of a drug prescription and it can be created by a specialized food service.
What are Medically Tailored Meals?
According to the Food is Medicine Coalition:
“Medically tailored meals are delivered to individuals living with severe illness through a referral from a medical professional or healthcare plan. Meal plans are tailored to the medical needs of the recipient by a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN), and are designed to improve health outcomes, lower cost of care and increase patient satisfaction.” Source
The concept is really quite simple.
In the interview, Mark Walker talks about Medically Tailored Meals that are prescribed for 90 days. The recipient receives the meals (usually 2 per day for 90 days) that they consume as the main part of their diet. The intention is to help give the patient an understanding of what it feels like to be well again.
My personal experience with chronic pain, for example, is that you lose sight of what it feels like to not be in pain. When a treatment then shows what pain-free or pain-reduced living feels like again, there is huge motivation created to maintain that new status.
The medically tailored meal is a short term treatment or intervention to break the cycle of the chronic disease. Obviously for the benefits of the treatment to be sustained long-term, that patient needs additional education and support to shift their lifestyle and diet in ways that enable ongoing wellness.
This food intervention concept is very different from what many of us have experienced over the years going to doctors for help. Typically, in just a few short minutes with a doctor, one walks out with a drug that is supposed to provide relief.
If it doesn’t work, another drug is tried, or a secondary drug is given to treat the side-effects of the first drug. And on it goes.
Don’t get me wrong – medicinal drugs have a place in the system for sure – but when many chronic diseases could actually be reversed if we instead focused on creating a food and medical care system that supported health and wellness, you’ve just got to start asking a LOT of questions.
Health and wellness are not incentivized in the food and health systems, at least not in most of North America. It’s a big hurdle facing the food as medicine movement and folks who want a real relief for chronic conditions.
Food As Medicine – Fact or Fantasy?
One of the fascinating aspects of the interview is the discussion regarding scientific studies on food as medicine. Harvard has published a series of papers on the Food as Medicine issue (I will do some digging and track some of these down for future posts).
Mark Walker warns, however, that we all need to be vigilant and discerning about future studies trying to prove or disprove the concepts embodied by the Food is Medicine movement.
To be honest, we’ve already seen LOTS of questionable studies regarding particular natural foods like garlic, Vitamin E, Vitamin C wherein the subsequent news headlines claim that “they don’t work”, but the reality is that the study design had little chance to prove anything except failure.
We have to be discerning as consumers and ask serious questions about how research is designed, what data is collected, and how results are interpreted.
In the podcast, Mark Hyman likens this kind of half-baked study to giving someone “five milligrams of aspirin for your headache every other week and see if that works”. Of course that dosage and frequency has no hope of success.
The same will ultimately be true with some food as medicine studies wherein the tested treatment simply has no real chance of working, such as giving one meal a day for 12 days in an effort to reverse a chronic health issues. That is just unrealistic to begin with.
According to Mark Walker in this podcast interview:
“And so that's happening a lot in the space is that people have budgets, they want to tiptoe into the space and say, “Okay, I want to see if food as medicine works.” We have RFPs right now that are saying this: “I want to prepare a meal a day. I want to pay for a meal a day for four weeks”. And I'm like, guys, I just I don't have a whole lot of confidence that supplementing their [the patient’s] existing diet is gonna work. Our philosophy is you got to replace their existing diet, because if you don't do that, then they still are eating a large portion of their diet and crap. So there's a lot of business issues with it, business questions that people have. I've largely seen that most people are believers on the clinical side. They just don't know what a proper deployment of the benefit is. ” Source
It is going to take time for the food as medicine system, and the health insurance processes that support patients, to evolve into an exacting science wherein a doctor can accurately prescribe a meal plan to reset your system and get you onto the road to recovery. But what an exciting concept to be working towards!
The long and short of what I learned listening to this episode is that food as medicine is a movement that is far more advanced already in the US than I understood it to be. Companies like Performance Kitchen exist and actually provide Medically Tailored Meals right now. And some American health insurance plans already cover this service.
I am not sure there is anything quite this clear in Canada as yet.
In British Columbia, even in my small town, the farmer’s market has a voucher program that helps low-income families buy fresh foods directly from farmers. But this is focused on improving overall diets, and the affordability of healthy foods in general, rather than a specific meal program to treat a specific illness like Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, autoimmune, heart disease or other chronic conditions.
Health Care of the Future
Hopefully, as the food as medicine movement gains the support of documented success stories, as doctors begin to receive more education on nutrition and diet, and as the power of nature and natural systems (including food) are found to heal our modern health issues, then we will see a decreasing role of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of chronic diseases.
The challenge in holding this outlook, of course, is that there is a huge vested interest that wants to see the profit-driven, corporate-controlled systems in health care and foods maintain their status quo.
The fundamental shifts in our societies to embrace personal responsibility in health care, to embrace food as medicine, and to demand services that support health rather than sickness are starting to happen. Ultimately they will need to include political shifts, which in theory should be possible.
I think everyone knows that the cost of health care cannot continue to rise at astronomical rates year after year (currently $4.3 trillion in the US and over $331 billion in Canada).
Food as medicine will save these systems millions (billions?) of dollars annually while providing for higher quality of life of patients. In theory that would let drug therapy refocus onto issues where it is needed most.
In the meantime, such a change would mean shifting from our current “sick care” system to a true health care format.
What can you do now?
If you live in the US, you can check-in with your health insurance provider to see if food as medicine type services are currently being covered for chronic illnesses.
For the rest of us, the first step as individuals is to become educated about the power of food to heal our bodies and minds.
Here at The Naturalized Human, I started the Mind-Body-Food Connection page to bring together the latest research on how we perceive food through our senses, and how our senses link food to our minds and bodies. This is a starting point to understand our human evolution and biology in relation to the foods we eat.
Paid subscribers get access to all of the posts on the Mind-Body-Food Connection page, while free subscribers only receive the first of each 3-part series being developed on each sense.
For example, the exploration of our senses begins with: The Eye of the Beholder series. In it I explore how our vision influences the way in which we find our food (part 1 - free), how the food industry tries to manipulate our sight for their own benefit (part 2 - paid), and how nature can reset our relationship with food through our eyes (part 3 - paid).
I also encourage you to watch the interview with Mark Walker yourself or find it on your favorite podcast system. It was released 30-Aug-2023.
And share your thoughts about food as medicine in the comments. Would you be willing to try a prescribed food plan to treat a chronic disease?