医生：回去吃点白切鸡就好啦
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用“食疗”来预防疾病似乎又重新流行起来：医生为病人开的“处方”是蔬菜或整顿饭，让他们更健康、更能抵御疾病。这真的有效吗？很多人都认为有效，但要证明起来有点难。
人们经常谈论个别食物的健康益处，例如蓝莓富含抗氧化剂，羽衣甘蓝这种所谓的“超级食物”则含有大量的维生素 K 和维生素 C。关于特定食物健康价值的争论一直存在，但医学界最近出现了一个新趋势：医生会给病人开具降压药，但也可能开出健康食物“处方”，比如一袋新鲜的肉和蔬菜。
马林娜·麦克纳（Maryn McKenna）是一名聚焦于科学和公共健康的科学记者，同时也是美国埃默里大学（Emory University）人类健康研究中心（Center for the Study of Human Health）的高级研究员，教授健康与科学写作。她近期在《美国医学会杂志》（JAMA）上发表了一篇关于“食品即药品”（food is medicine）运动的新闻文章。
她表示，“食品即药品”理念的特别之处在于，它是在医疗系统的明确参与下为人们提供健康的食品或食材，用于制成健康的食物。病人收到定制的膳食处方或者食材处方后，可以拿着处方去免费领取农产品。
美国有一位著名儿科医生莫娜·汉娜-阿蒂沙（Mona Hanna-Attisha），她曾在十年前帮助曝光密西根州弗林特市自来水铅超标事件。汉娜-阿蒂沙十分关注儿童营养，她的儿科诊所隶属于美国密西根州立大学（Michigan State University）医学院，从 2015 年起，她就在诊所给病人开具农产品处方，这些农产品在诊所同处一栋楼里的农贸市场里就可以买到。
汉娜-阿蒂沙选择了弗林特市中心一个独立实体农贸市场，专门把诊所搬到了它的二楼。对每个来诊所的孩子，汉娜-阿蒂沙都会给他们家一份 5 美元的代金券用来买楼下的农产品，后来代金券升到了 15 美元，并且拓展到了多个不同的可用门店。
麦克纳说，这个方法成功改善了孩子们的营养状况。汉娜-阿蒂沙为这个项目开出了 55,000 张处方，并发放了相应的代金券。现在，孩子们的水果、蔬菜、纤维、全谷物和乳制品的摄入量都有所上升，不过……[查看全文]
Can Food Work as Medicine?
Tanya Lewis: Today on the podcast menu, we’ve got: food. There is renewed interest in using food as preventive medicine: offering patients vegetables or entire meals to keep them healthier and more resistant to disease. But will prescribing produce really work? A lot of people think so, but it’s been a little hard to prove.Josh Fischman: People talk a lot about the health benefits of individual foods. I hear a lot about blueberries. They’re supposed to be filled with antioxidants that stop cell damage, for instance. You got one, Tanya?Lewis: Yeah, kale! It’s a superfood, or so they say. It packs a ton of vitamin K and vitamin C.Fischman: Okay, I confess, I know very little about kale and have no idea how I would eat it.Lewis: Well, I actually know a pretty good recipe for massaged kale salad.Lewis: Yeah, you just take raw kale and rinse it, and then you add lemon juice and olive oil and salt and pepper and just, you know, massage it until it tenderizes into a nice salad.Fischman: Cool, I’ll totally take your word for that.The other food I was thinking about was my grandmother’s chicken soup. It was supposed to be a cold remedy. Actually, it was supposed to be a remedy for just about anything in my family.Lewis: That sounds tasty. While we’re at it, I believe that chocolate croissants are scientifically proven to be good for the soul. But don’t fact-check me on that.Fischman: Oh, no fact-checking here!Debates about the health values of specific foods go back and forth anyway, and you’re probably tired of the whiplash. So today we are not going to talk about blueberries or broccoli or chocolate croissants by themselves.Lewis: We’re going to talk about a trend in medicine in which doctors prescribe healthy food, like bags of fresh produce, just like they’d prescribe blood pressure medication. And a colleague of ours just wrote a news article about this “food-is-medicine” movement in the journal JAMA.Maryn McKenna: What “food-is-medicine” is, what makes it distinctive, is it is getting people healthy food or groceries that will create healthy food with the explicit involvement of the healthcare system. So prescribing medically tailored meals or prescribing groceries or actually giving people prescriptions to go and get produce for free.McKenna: I am a journalist, I focus on science and public health. I'm the author of a couple of books and a science writing professor and a contributing editor at Scientific American.Fischman: It's great to have you here, Maryn.McKenna: Happy to be here.Fischman: Now, can you tell us how a food-is-medicine program works?McKenna: In what I think is the most interesting example, there's a very famous physician in Michigan; her name is Mona Hanna-Attisha.Fischman: We know that name because Hanna-Attisha is the pediatrician who helped expose the high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water a decade ago—levels that were really toxic.McKenna: But she also is an activist for children's nutrition. And since 2015, through her own pediatric clinic, which is part of Michigan State University's College of Medicine, she has been writing produce prescriptions for a farmer's market that was in the same building as her pediatric clinic.Fischman: In fact, Hanna-Attisha moved her office above the market to make it easier for patients to get their food.McKenna: She moved into the second story of a freestanding brick-and-mortar permanent farmer’s market in downtown Flint, Michigan. And for every child who came into that clinic, she gave that child's family initially a $5 voucher for produce downstairs; it's now $15, and they've expanded to a couple of different sites.Lewis: Sounds like a really clever idea. Has it actually made people healthier, though?Fischman: Well, it’s certainly improved the kids’ nutrition. The Flint program has written 55,000 prescriptions for this food and given out the vouchers. Now, the amount of fruits and vegetables and fiber and whole grains and dairy that the children ate went up—though...[full transcript]
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