Blogs
Food is Medicine
Incorporating Food and Nutrition in the Healthcare delivery System to Prevent, manage and treat Lifestyle and diet related chronic diseases.
There are many studies worldwide which use Food as Medicine to prevent, manage and treat various illnesses. Rapidly Increasing number of doctors prescriptions focus on therapeutic meals & use of supplements along with regular treatment pathways.
20% of deaths worldwide are attributed to suboptimal diet, more than any other risk factor including tobacco. Current studies in using Food and Nutrition indicates that such interventions delivered in the healthcare system might be associated with improved health outcomes and reduced costs.
In a US study with 1020 participants, receipt of therapeutic meals was associated with a 16% net reduction in overall healthcare costs, 49% fewer inpatient hospital admissions, and 72% fewer admissions into skilled nursing facilities compared with the control group. Robust training mechanism is required to develop expertise in this field.
In the US, for example, healthcare professionals (other than registered dietitians) receive very little or no food and nutrition education during training, with less than 1% of lecture hours spent on nutrition education in medical school. India also has a similar challenge with very less focus on this subject.
These findings suggest that there is a huge potential for food and nutrition use to play a prominent role in the prevention, management, treatment, and even some cases reversal of diseases.
Healthy Lifestyle and Diet
V-CARE: A Recommender system for diet and lifestyle management after root cause health profiling: in healthy patients & patients with chronic disease.
○ From the ten leading causes of death in the world, at least seven are directly related to diet choices which include heart disease, cancer, lung disease, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and kidney disease.
○ There is abundant Clinical evidence available that shows that a healthy diet in patients promotes the prevention and reversal of 80% of chronic diseases. There is a lack of an automatic food recommendation system (including micro nutrient supplements) customized to individual requirements based on root cause health profiling for both healthy patients and patients with chronic disease.
○ V-Care dynamically builds a root cause health profile of the user based on answers to dynamic real-time medical questionnaires including clinical history, laboratory and vital parameters data. Our indigenous Analytical model determines nutritional deficiencies in the Profile and recommends which typical foods are compatible or not with the user’s health conditions.
○ This is applicable to healthy users for disease prevention and users with chronic diseases for disease reversal including diabetes, hypertension, metabolic disorders etc.
○ Completing the V-Care medical questionnaire creates early awareness and prevention of a potential lifestyle disease.
○ The methodologies implemented in V-Care make it possible to obtain very accurate users’ health profiles that match with the diagnosis made by the doctors using standard clinical procedures and guidelines. Evidence based Clinical Flow-charts for most chronic diseases are incorporated in the V-Care medical questionnaires.
○ The questionnaires employed in V-Care have been designed by our medical specialists and are original, thus they cannot be found in the literature.
○ V-Care provides individualized nutritional recommendations according to user health profiles for both healthy patients and patients with chronic disease.
○ V-Care also provides customized therapeutic diet regimens which have been individualized for different disease stages, e.g. For Pre-Diabetes and Diabetes taking medicine the diets will be different.
○ For each food, nutrition facts, and indication are provided. The nutritional guidance improves the quality of life of healthy patients and improves clinical outcomes of patients with chronic disease.
○ In addition, advice is provided on required supplements, suitable forms of exercise based on medical profile and mental health management.
V-Care architecture
- V-Care User Profiler
- V-Care User History
- V-Care User Reminder
- V-Care User Food Filter
- V-Care User Customized Plan
V-Care User Profiler
○ V-Care User Profile is created by answers to specific questions about clinical parameters to the users which can infer the user’s health status.
○ A set of questions used to profile a specific pathology is called a questionnaire. Questionnaires are adaptive, that is, the next question to submit to the user is obtained by analyzing the previous answer.
○ This solution allows conveying to the users only relevant questions related to their real health status, making it possible to define the health profile accurately, thus avoiding providing unsuitable advice.
V-Care User History
○ V-Care User History saves all changes made by the user so that the data can be used to monitor the user’s health status.
V-Care User Reminder
○ V-Care through the Reminder module can detect possible incongruence related with the newly entered values and the stored data.
○ In the case that the entered values are probably incorrect, the system points out the potential incongruence to the user that can decide to revise or not the entered value.
○ In this way, the system taking into account the user’s history will provide information about his/her up to date state of health and an automatic assisted procedure (diet, supplements, exercise) to manage his/her personal profile.
V-Care User Food Filter
○ V-Care Foods Filter can advise from the food list submitted by the user, the foods compatible with his/her health status that can be eaten without side effects.
○ V-Care also provides a detailed eating plan based on the medical profile of the patient.
○ The results are conveyed to the users in a format, specifying the correct quantity of each food that can be eaten daily, furthermore, advising alternative foods that can help tackle the health problems.
V-Care User Customized Plan
○ V-Care dynamically builds a root cause health profile for the user, which is necessary to determine nutritional deficiencies in the profile and recommend which typical foods / lifestyle changes are compatible or not with the user’s health condition.
○ After the user has been profiled, the system recommends the following:
○ What typical foods can be consumed?
○ V-Care gives to the user’s information on typical foods in two different ways:
- By automatically suggesting foods according to the user’s health profile;
- By showing the nutritional properties for each food stored in the database, including benefits and side effects on pathologies and specific health conditions.
○ In addition, it provides recommendations on:
- Which exercise would be most suitable to improve health.
- Appropriate suggestions on mental health improvement.
V-Care Services
- Root cause analysis and medical profiling for the purpose of early identification and prevention of lifestyle diseases.
- Root cause analysis and medical profiling for chronic diseases.
- Supplement recommendations based on existing health profile.
- Customized nutrition/ food plan according to medical/ health profile.
- Exercise recommendation based on health profile.
- Recommendations to improve mental health based on medical history.
- Customized therapeutic diet regimens which have been individualized for different disease stages. e.g., pre-diabetes, diabetes managed with medicine, diabetes managed with insulin.
- Customized lifestyle plans which help to reverse various lifestyle diseases.