The most effective way to prevent invalidity and disability and to improve the general conditions of people with diabetes who find themselves in economic difficulty is to directly provide the quality food they need, free of charge or with very significant discounts, with simple tools such as dedicated cards or direct mailings . This is the conclusion he has come to a study called Food is Medicine, coordinated by Dariush Mozaffarian of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy of Tufts University in Boston and published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, in which, starting from real data, numerous projections have been made. And the outcome was surprising, because the direct distribution of fruit and vegetables would be, if practiced at a national level, a highly convenient measure, because it would avoid hundreds of thousands of cases of acute cardiovascular events.
In particular, if such a program were applied to all diabetics between the ages of 40 and 79 in financial difficulty, 296,000 cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes could be avoided and 260,000 years of life in good health would be gained (a parameter often used in this type of studies), at a more than acceptable cost, i.e. 18,100 dollars per year per person, against the estimated 200,000 that would have to be spent for the same purpose if one resorts to antidiabetic drugs from the GLP-1 agonist family (such as semaglutide and liraglutide). Economically, this would save the community an estimated $39.6 billion in avoided medical bills and $4.8 billion in unmissed work days, for a total of $44.4 billion saved. against an estimated expenditure of 44.3 billion dollars, nationwide. And these numbers make the distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables to diabetics a measure comparable to screening for cholesterol or blood pressure values, or to those for cancer prevention, which have similar ratios between expenditure and savings obtained. Furthermore, it would be a highly democratic measure, because it could reach all those who need it, without discrimination on the basis of ethnic group, age, gender, level of education, whether or not they have a health and physical condition insurance, and involving family doctors, pharmacies in the distribution of the cards, as well as supermarkets, local markets and proximity shops in the food distribution.
Providing fresh fruits and vegetables to people with diabetes aged 40 to 79 in financial difficulty reduces heart risks
Without going into details, Mozaffarian and his colleagues arrived at their conclusions by working on the data of 20 studies that verified small initiatives of this type, always tested on a local scale, and they saw that an increase of 0.8 daily servings of fresh fruit and vegetables (reasonable estimate of the effect of the measure), also accompanied by educational measures, would correspond to a decrease in the values of body mass index and glycated hemoglobin (the parameter that is measured to verify the state of diabetes) statistically significant, and capable of modifying the risk indices of 6.5 million poor people and people with diabetes, over a period of 25 years. Even assuming a shorter period of time, 5-10 years, the intervention would remain convenient, even if obviously with lower numbers.
According to Mozaffarian, there are the numbers to start experimenting with extensive distributions, initially also financed by private entities such as insurance companies, to verify whether the estimates he elaborates are faithful to reality and, if so, to start thinking about national programs of this type , who consider proper food as authentic medicine.
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July 17, 2023
2023-07-18 17:51:38
#Diabetes #free #fruits #vegetables #improve #health
