Viewpoint: Treat food as medicine

Credit: Healthy for Life Meals
Credit: Healthy for Life Meals

Diet is one of the three key components to a longer life (along with exercise and sleep), and it offers the highest and largest potential to change health and longevity.

That message, however, isn’t getting through.

Decades of information-based efforts to change people’s eating habits—via K-12 classroom education and prominent nutrition-information labels on packaged foods—has accomplished little. …

To break this impasse, we are going to have to think outside the box. We need bolder action on several fronts, such as new types of health professionals that make nutrition their No. 1 priority and more effective dietary interventions, among other things.

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Healthspan professionals would do things differently in that they would take the time to analyze (with the help of AI) which particular diets, drugs or procedures are likely to produce only temporary results and point physicians toward more-personalized therapies with a higher potential to optimize healthy aging.

We also should consider treating food like medicine, with insurers and government payers reimbursing or heavily discounting healthy food and dietary programs that clearly lead to disease regression. 

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here

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