OAKLAND – U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra came to Oakland’s Wilma Chan Highland Hospital Friday morning to help Alameda County prescribe more vegetables, change patient behavior, and provide support. Hear how training is treating, preventing, and reversing disease.
Federal officials now want to implement this program nationwide.
Research shows Alameda County’s Recipe4Health program is helping residents stay healthy.
The program is based on prescribing healthy foods, behavioral changes such as more exercise, and training doctors and staff to use foods rather than drugs to treat, prevent, or reverse certain chronic conditions. .
Now, with the help of $2 million secured by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), the federal agency can start scaling up.
“We all use this food as medicine,” Becerra told a news conference at the hospital.
“Today, we are challenging states to ‘participate in treating food as medicine,'” he said.
Roque Centeno, a patient in the Recipe4Health program, didn’t think it was right for her at first.
“I learned to eat better,” Centeno said.
Now he eats vegetables with almost every meal, he said. he doesn’t eat sugar He doesn’t even put sugar in his coffee.
Now he is not pre-diabetic or anxious.
“Thank you for the program,” Centeno said.
Thirty-two percent of patients enrolled in the program had improved indicators of diabetes and prediabetes, and 67% had improved cholesterol, an indicator of cardiovascular care.
Alameda County Superintendent Lena Tam said, “These are the kinds of results we’d like to see as part of federal programs going forward.
Food as Medicine was an initiative spearheaded by the late Alameda County Superintendent Wilma Chan. Becerra said he was with Chan when he was last officially in Auckland.
“I talked to her about this,” Becerra said. “This was her one of Wilma’s major projects. I know she looks down at her and she says, ‘I thought Oakland would come true.'”
