in Pharmacy Times” In our second interview with Samantha Citro Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Bitewell, a new food pharmacy offering food-as-medicine and healthy eating services, , learn why we need a service that bridges the gap between food as medicine and healthy eating services.Healthy Foods with Health Care Provider Recommendations, Why She Sure Needs 10 Minutes in the Examination Room do not have It's enough to understand how to manage symptoms, make lifestyle modifications, and the importance of patient care that encourages treatment with healthy foods and life-saving medications.
PT staff: So, could you talk a little bit with doctors and pharmacists about the idea of personalizing food as medicine? Can you talk about this idea of personalization? Why is this so important?
Samantha Citro Alexander: Nutrition is the basis of our health, right? What we eat is one of the few things we actively do for our health multiple times a day. We know that the food we put into our bodies is a huge part of our overall health, and is more important than physical fitness and often more than stress. It's the food you put into your body. And everyone's body is different. And each person's body needs different things.
Important points:
- Nutrition that is customized to the needs of individuals with specific conditions can improve health outcomes.
- Not all healthy foods are expensive or hard to find.
- Pharmacists and physicians should consider discussing lifestyle and medication with patients during visits.
Those of us who grew up on the food pyramid (particularly Millennials and Gen . Understanding personalized nutrition becomes even more important because we come from a baseline of false and inaccurate understanding.
Image credit: New Africa | stock.adobe.com
If you think about food as medicine more broadly, there are a lot of companies doing really interesting work in this space. Most of those companies tend to focus on one of two areas.
There are several companies that are focused on provider access. So if you're diagnosed with a diet-related illness, how do you get them to a nutritionist, nutritionist or health coach to help them get through it?
There are other companies that focus on creating or manufacturing food products suitable for different conditions. For example, a medical meal company or even a large food manufacturer that makes cereals specifically for diabetics. Get used to it. It's great that these two worlds exist, but the health care provider's recommendation of “Eat 5 servings of vegetables a day” and the recommendation of “Eat 5 servings of vegetables a day (or however many)” ” recommendations, unless there is someone in the middle to bridge the gap between them and the recommendations. A medically conditioned meal provider who creates the food.
How do we bridge this gap, and how can we translate provider recommendations into action, without intermediary farms and the like? That's why we exist. There is.
PT staff: I think you've learned a lot yourself by being the middle man, learning about both sides and understanding where the disconnect is. In your opinion, how does this fill that gap?
Samantha Citro Alexander: It was definitely a lot of learning. Before starting this job, I worked in the beauty industry for 10 years, and I felt the pain on the patient's side. I know what happens when you're diagnosed with a diet-related illness and then the world has to figure out what to do, but I'm no medical expert. My co-founder Chris was a food industry expert and had a deep understanding of what was going on on the food manufacturing side. Our job was to learn what was happening on the home provider side and find ways to fill that gap.
One of the easiest ways to explain what's going on is [with this example]. Let's say you've been diagnosed with a diet-related illness. The diagnosis is usually:
Your doctor will call you or you'll be in the exam room for 10 minutes and they'll say, “Hey! So I'll give you a prescription. We will then give you a pamphlet about some lifestyle changes you can make. See her again in a year. I'll check again in a year. ”
1 year?!
What do you do if you have 10 minutes of information and a year of information? You go to Dr. Google and say, “Okay, Dr. Google, what am I going to do?”
Some of these people will go see a nutritionist and start addressing this problem through diet, but most people don't. And both of those people need help. So if you and Dr. Google are the only ones wondering what to do, go into the farm and tell them about your condition that you are trying to manage. “I'm trying to lower my cholesterol.” We'll help you find every food option you have here that might address this problem. Which one is right for you?
If you go to your health care provider through your dietitian and say, “Okay, we're going to help you lower your cholesterol.'' “I want you to start adding more fiber to your diet,” but you still need to go to the grocery store and figure out what's in your regular diet. “Which of the 600 protein bars in front of me should I buy? How do I know which one has the right fiber ratio for me?” It's a job, so I Our team will do the work for you.your goal is to lower cholesterol [and] What you should do is increase your fiber intake. We can help you find the foods that make it happen.
PT staff: That's great. That's wonderful. So I would like to address this (or so it seems) problem. That is, people think that healthy food or high quality food is too expensive. “We can't afford that.” In your experience, why is this idea still so ingrained in this situation? And why is our current food system the way it is? Is not it?
Samantha Citro Alexander: In some ways that's true, but in some ways it's not. That makes it a very complex question to answer. When thinking about shopping at the supermarket (I'm using this as an example because I'm sure this is something most people do often and have heard of), people think of the healthiest options as Talk about “borderline shopping.” If you shop on the perimeter (meaning you shop around the perimeter of the store, where mostly produce, dairy, and meat are sold), your cart is likely to be more expensive than someone shopping in the inner aisles. there is.
Good quality produce is expensive. Dairy products and eggs are expensive. Feat and fish are expensive. But what isn't discussed is that there are better trade-offs, even if you have to shop a little more in the inner aisles. Comparing a box of lucky charms and a can of oatmeal.[which contains] One ton of oatmeal can be made into oatmeal per serving. Even if a box of lucky charms is advertised as 25 cents off, that can of oats will be much cheaper than a box of lucky charms. But comparing every single serving of everything you buy is time-consuming, and time is money, right?
When you're working on a budget, time is one of your most precious possessions. And if you're juggling multiple jobs, you don't have the time. So we created this system that's really broken and complicated for people and doesn't support them buying healthy food in a sustainable way. And when we thought about building the farm, our goal on the farm (our product vision) was to make food as medicine viable (and we talked a lot about that on this conference call). ) and to make it affordable.
When we negotiate with vendors, because we work with different grocery vendors and different prepared food vendors; [and] How we partner with them [makes it so that the] Food bought on-farm is 5% to 35% cheaper than buying it around the world. And that's on purpose. We want to make sure it's not impossible to get healthy food at an affordable price.
PT staff: I want to close it now. What I would like to ask you is that if you could share your wisdom with pharmacists and healthcare professionals who prescribe life-saving drugs, what would you tell them about the role of diet and nutrition and their accessibility for patients? How are they connected?
Samantha Citro Alexander: It's food and pharmacy. Many people are taking life-saving, life-affirming medications. However, we know through numerous clinical studies that drug therapy alone is rarely the answer. And my knowledge is that when we talk to patients about taking new medications and how their bodies respond to them, we should also think about lifestyle solutions. We have food pharmacy lifestyle solutions that help people get healthy food nutrition. This is one great way to talk to your patients about lifestyle medicine. But there are many others. So, my question is, if I'm allowed to do so at the end of this call, whoever is listening, in their conversations with patients, in addition to the medication component, do they also include the lifestyle component? means you're seriously considering spending two minutes.
