Research flags nutritional opportunities to promote health and combat diseases

Researchers advocate leveraging nutrition-based interventions to support and complement conventional medical treatment, in a review article. They underscore this will require a shift to producing more health-promoting foods, such as whole foods, minimally processed foods, and some processed foods. 

The authors stress that the food processing industry and supply chains must adapt to these new scenarios. They note that food supply chains, production, and processing techniques are essential to enable the use of food as part of someone’s health plan to prevent or help treat acute and chronic health conditions and diseases. 

Complementary technologies and methods, such as delivery services, wearable tech, health-monitoring apps, and data-driven consumer behavior analysis, help drive food-based interventions. 

The review article published in Advances in Nutrition concludes: “We should better deploy the potential of food for promoting health and combating disease and acute and chronic health conditions.” 

“We consume foods multiple times per day, in contrast to most medications. Continuous, long-term exposure to its nutritional compounds has a huge potential to help prevent diet-induced diseases. Food should, therefore, become a key part of lifestyle medicine.”

Food is Medicine benefits

The article is the most recent in a series of studies on using food to complement medical healthcare. Last month, we discussed expanding nutrition-based interventions in the US with a professor at the Food is Medicine Institute, who said sufficient scientific evidence supports the benefits of Food is Medicine.

The review authors note that using Food is Medicine has a “high potential to reduce healthcare costs” as it focuses on prevention and complements medical treatments, reducing the medications consumers need to take. 

“Furthermore, this might lead to improved disease management, reduced disease severity, and fewer inpatient hospitalizations.” 

Food-based interventions range from prevention to treatment at different implementation levels (Image credit: Food is Medicine Institute).The article explains that these interventions have different implementation levels, depicted in the Food is Medicine pyramid. From prevention to treatment, the pyramid’s base focuses on population-level healthy food policies, followed by nutrition security programs, produce prescription programs, medically tailored groceries, and medically tailored meals. 

“Dietary interventions, even adhering to the country’s dietary guidelines, effectively help to prevent and treat diseases and acute and chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, different types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, or obesity,” reads the paper.

Scientific studies underscore the benefits of many of these interventions. For example, research suggested that a national produce prescription program in the US could prevent 296,000 cases of cardiovascular disease and help people with diabetes and food insecurity live more years in good health.

Meanwhile, the US Food is Medicine Institute researchers predict that nationwide implementation of medically tailored meals could save around US$32.1 billion in healthcare costs in the first year of implementation. 

Advancing implementation

The authors call on governments, the food industry, and academia to promote adherence to healthy and sustainable diets and enable a Food is Medicine approach. 

“Governments can contribute by providing health-promoting guidelines and legislation, industry can contribute by developing nutritious products and using responsible marketing to stimulate healthy choices, and academia can identify nutrition-health relationships and enlarge the scientific base of personalized dietary approaches.”

By focusing on prevention and complementing medical treatments, Food is Medicine can help reduce healthcare costs, say the authors.To increase acceptance of these interventions, the researchers urge physicians and healthcare insurance to better implement and promote dietary prescriptions. Moreover, they say that financial support can greatly impact people’s access to healthy foods and adherence to these interventions, for example, by subsidizing fruit and vegetables. 

The review article also highlights that technological advances help enable Food is Medicine interventions as they allow patients to be reached and treated in ways that were not feasible before. 

The authors highlight that interventions in the food industry will “require a shift to making available whole foods, minimally processed foods, and selected processed foods. The resulting food preservation and processing infrastructure needs to be expanded.”

To overcome bottlenecks to healthier diets, they call for increased production of nutritious and sustainable foods, reducing food and nutrient losses, adjusted prices to make them more affordable, or adding incentives to healthier foods and reducing demand and production of less healthy and sustainable foods. 

They note that Food is Medicine interventions can include more processed foods, such as plant-based meat substitutes or fortified foods, to help “trigger consumers to eat certain foods and nutrients that support their health and add nutritional value to existing ingredients.” 

Tailored versus generally healthy diets

The authors also observe a trend toward segmentation and individualization of diets in Food is Medicine. For example, interventions focus on specific patient segments without specialized treatment per individual or tailor a diet to a particular person or medical treatment. 

Expanding nutrition-based interventions will require the food industry to produce more whole and minimally processed foods.They caution that quantifying health improvements is crucial to proving the added value of such individualized interventions to consumers compared with adopting a generally healthy diet. 

“It is unclear which level of individualization of interventions produces the largest health benefits at the lowest costs for the patient, healthcare system, and climate.” 

“A balanced and varied diet based on whole foods and natural ingredients can get us a long way and will hold all the essential components the human body needs,” they add. 

Meanwhile, individualized treatments are challenging given people’s interindividual variability and the complexity of the body’s response to food and related factors, such as dietary habits, genetics, lifestyle, and biosphere. 

The paper highlights that companies and start-ups are “betting big” on personalized nutrition. These provide digital-assisted nutrition advice, coaching, or meal delivery to simplify advice and enable scaling. 

They stress that this approach needs more rigorous clinical validation and argue that the targeted, individualized nutrition effect is not fully reached. “However, improving the patient’s health and well-being can likely be achieved by improving the current diet, as many people still do not adhere to the standard dietary recommendations.”

The paper states that true individualization requires a systems approach that accounts for the “patient’s genetics, lifestyle, and environment and its response to all nutritional components inside the many food items consumed.”