State leaders, physicians and healthcare advocates are discussing ways in which fresh food can play a larger role in healthcare.
They gathered Wednesday at the State Capitol in Hartford for an event titled “Local Leadership, Shared Solutions: A Food As Medicine Forum.”
It was hosted by State Rep. Jaime Foster, a Democrat representing Ellington, East Windsor and Vernon, in partnership with the Connecticut Food as Medicine Alliance.
At the center of the discussion was support of House Bill 6101, an act concerning Medicaid coverage of “food as medicine.”
The bill, first introduced last year, would integrate access to fresh produce with medical care for expectant mothers and people earning a low income.
Rep. Foster says the goal is to build a coordinated system that ensures more residents can access healthy food as part of their care.
“The Connecticut food as medicine alliance is working to bring together all the diverse stakeholders in this space,” Foster said. “The for profit and non for-profit the healthcare organizations, the research entities and were working as hard as we can to make sure that as many people as possible have access to healthy and nutritious foods and that there's a sustainable state funded way to make sure that this moves forward into perpetuity.”
Advocates say medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions and nutrition counseling can improve health outcomes for people with conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.
Some healthcare providers are partnering with local farms and food hubs to supply fresh produce to patients, while others are working to embed nutrition support directly into clinical care.
Brent Ling, director of external affairs at Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that fights food insecurity by making fresh produce available to people in need, highlighted one such initiative aimed at improving maternal health through better access to nutritious food.
“At Wholesome Wave, we manage a program that we call Food4Moms, which gives produce prescriptions to pregnant women in the state of Connecticut who are getting their prenatal care and giving birth at community health clinics,” Ling said. “These produce prescriptions around the country have proven to enhance healthy birth outcomes in a way that both helps the mom and helps save the health system money in the long run. So, we think that every woman who gives birth in Connecticut, especially the half who do it under the HUSKY Health umbrella, deserves coverage for these produce prescriptions.”
Teresa Dotson, president of the Connecticut Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, says nutrition-based care is something providers use everyday to help improve health outcomes.
“We try to approach patients with the idea that they can change their health by changing their diet and what they eat,” Dotson said. “One of the best examples of this is ‘DASH’ (dietary approaches to stopping hypertension), which is a lot of fruits and vegetables and whole grains as an alternative to taking blood pressure medication so there is truly a way for people through diet and lifestyle changes to change their health.”
In Connecticut, interest in food as medicine has grown alongside concerns about diet related chronic diseases. According to public health officials, conditions linked to poor nutrition remain among the leading drivers of health care costs and health disparities.
State Sen. Saud Anwar, senate chair of the Public Health Committee in the Connecticut General Assembly, emphasized that disparities in health outcomes are closely tied to differences in environment and access to resources.
Anwar pointed to the need for policy solutions that directly address these inequities.
“People in different communities are breathing different air and eating different foods and then we are surprised on why the outcomes are so different,” Anwar said. “That's the reality. And in order to be able to repress that we have to have policies that will be able to address this.”
Those who oppose the bill have expressed various concerns. Some of those concerns include the cost of implementing these initiatives on a statewide scale, particularly for taxpayer-funded programs like HUSKY Health.
Opponents question whether healthcare systems should take on responsibilities traditionally handled by food assistance programs.
As interest in food as medicine continues to grow nationwide, Connecticut leaders say events like food as medicine forum are an important step toward building a more integrated and equitable healthcare system.