Your Grandma Was Right About Chicken Soup: Food as Medicine

Grandma was very wise. From adages like “So eat a little something” to “feed a fever” to her chicken soup cure, most of us survived.

Imagine that it has taken medical science all these years since, and a clinical trial, to reach a similar conclusion, thanks to our colleagues at Kaiser.

See: Article in JAMA Health Forum

What did they do?

Approximately 12,000 hospitalized elderly patients, average age 79, 4000+ with heart failure, and nearly 8000 with other illnesses, were offered a home meal delivery service for the 30 days after they went home from the hospital. They received either 2 or 3 meals per day depending on their insurance plan and health condition. Meals were shipped and delivered weekly.

They were compared with large groups of similar patients who were hospitalized in the years before the program became available, and were also compared with patients who were offered the program but either refused or could not be contacted.

What did they find?

Depending on the health condition and the comparison group, the meal group had a 25-50% decrease in risk of dying within 30 days. The trend continued up to the 60 days of follow-up available. There was also less risk of rehospitalization.

What can we learn from this?

Imagine if a drug company produced a pill that decreased your risk of dying within 30 days and kept working indefinitely. We would be clamoring to have the FDA approve the pill and line up at pharmacies to get it.

Yet providing meals to old sick people is not rocket science. Nor, compared to medications, hospitalization, or the cost of dying, is it very expensive. So why should this be news?

Yes, the US is unique. We spend more money on “health care” than any other country, (at least twice as much per capita) yet our results are not as good as other countries. In fact, our life expectancy is shorter, but our infant and maternal death rates are worse than similar “developed” nations. (For data, see: US compared with other countries)

Perhaps it is because as a nation we spend much less on social services and public health. For details, see the book “The American Health Care Paradox” by Bradley, Elizabeth, and Taylor, Lauren. 2013 which provides both data and case studies. It is reviewed here: Book Review and available for purchase by those interested. Totaling up our huge medical costs and our relatively stingy social service and public welfare costs, we get the results we deserve.

So, to make our country healthier, we need to address the life circumstances of both individual patients and our population. “Do we really love our neighbor as ourselves”? Our resource allocation does not show that we do.

Making sure all our neighbors get adequate food and nutrition is a rather minimal but basic start.