The Missing Link in Healthcare
This article was written by a guest contributor, Jenna Bensko. Read about Jenna here.
I am now a self-proclaimed, professional jar-opener and can untie any reusable grocery bag. I know that having a reliable pair of comfortable slippers is of the utmost importance for “bad flair” days. I have learned the importance of food, rather than pills, in treating chronic pain. Rheumatoid Arthritis shaped my childhood and inspired me to advocate for alternative methods to chronic disease management.
My mom was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis in December of 2001. It came as no surprise, as my grandmother was diagnosed around the same age. Likewise, my sister and I probably have a life with RA looming in our future. Rheumatoid Arthritis is an inheritable, chronic, auto-immune disorder. This means that your body mistakenly attacks your own tissues, eating away at the lining of your joints. As an avid runner, I once feared for the day that my body would start to turn against itself and cause me to lose the ability to stretch my legs out and cruise down an open road. But that was before I started studying food. In 2019, my mother’s RA went into remission. She cut the daily medication out of her life against the advice of her doctor and used food as her medicine instead. Her success story has motivated me to advocate for the use of food as medicine on a larger scale.
When I returned home from Cornell after the end of my freshman year, I had just finalized my transfer into the Nutritional Sciences major. I started off my time in college studying Environmental Science but found that I was most interested in the food system portions of class. I would take home all the information I learned in my nutrition courses and apply it to my everyday life. I made serious changes in the way I was eating and felt the reap of the benefits in my mood and energy levels. I swapped my pizza bagels for roasted sweet potatoes and eggs, cut dairy out of my diet (dairy and my stomach were not great friends), and found a new appreciation for sautéed mushrooms. The great part of nutrition is that it doesn’t stop at the individual level. Food is a powerful vehicle for community building, social justice, healing, environmental justice, and so much more. It is deeply intertwined in our everyday lives.
Growing up, I did not see food in the same way as I see it today. Despite being a nutritionist now, I likely ate worse than the average American kid. I sustained myself off pizza bagels, pop tarts and captain crunch peanut butter cereal. Good nutrition and sustainable eating habits did not even register as concepts to my family. For this I must look to our education system and point a finger, but that’s another story.
The new information acquired in my nutrition courses influenced not only my own eating habits, but also my family’s. Over the summer I encouraged them to join me in eating fresh, local foods and to start having homemade family meals together. The lifestyle change seemed to excite my mom most. We both anxiously awaited grocery shopping day and perused every recipe book we could find in our spare time. Since that summer, my mom has stuck with a clean, nutritious diet for four years now. Despite the medical advice of her doctors, she stopped taking her RA medication one year ago; because of the healthy lifestyle she has embraced with food, she has actively put her RA in remission. She can now go through a day pain-free, has recently taken up cycling, and she makes the most delicious vegan carrot cake I’ve had to date.
After graduating last spring, I began working as a Psychosocial Support Nutritionist for the Boston Living Center, a nonprofit community and resource center for the HIV positive community. In this role I have been involved with the Food is Medicine State Plan initiative. In Massachusetts, food insecurity alone is associated with over $1.9 billion in avoidable medical expenses each year (Children’s HealthWatch, 2017). The Food is Medicine plan envisions a health care system that recognizes the critical relationship between food and health, and ensures access to nutrition services that residents need to prevent, manage and treat chronic conditions.
In a small number of cases in Massachusetts and across the country, interventions that use food as medicine are being incorporated into models of care for those with complex chronic illnesses, such as HIV. These interventions include three options: medically tailored meals (either delivered to the home, or picked up at an emergency food site), medically tailored grocery bags, and prescriptions for CSAs/produce. These interventions were created to address separate issues of access that low income and/or chronically ill patients may face. The bill is currently being reviewed and has a reporting date scheduled for April 1st.
A member of the Boston Living Center spoke at a hearing for the bill this past January. The member’s immune cell count doubled since making a lifestyle change that included more nutritious, whole foods. This accounts for one of many stories I’ve heard from the members at my job.
It was 2,000 years ago that Hippocrates advised “let food be thy medicine.” Food is so much more than the neon packaging we see in the convenience store. Food not only has the power of medicine, but the ability to bring people together, a way to stand for sustainability, and a medium to fight for social change. Believe me, I’ve seen the impact it has in my own life, my mom’s, and the members I work with every day.
This article was written by a guest contributor, Jenna Bensko. Read about Jenna here.
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