Leaders in New York City healthcare held a roundtable discussion Friday to talk about the upcoming expansion of lifestyle medicine — including plant-based diets — in six NYC hospitals.
Doctors Mitchell Katz, Michelle McMacken and Nichola Davis as well as dietician Lilian Correa were joined Feb. 18 by executive director of the Mayor’s office of Ethnic and Community media José Bayona to talk about the new developments in making plant-based lifestyles more accessible to patients across all five boroughs.
The meeting Friday was intended to spread the word about the new expansion of the Health + Hospitals nutrition and lifestyle medicine program, started by Dr. McMacken, Dr. Davis and Lilian Correa at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan.
The nutrition and lifestyle medicine program will soon be available at qualifying Health + Hospital sites at Jacobi, Lincoln, Woodhull, Kings County, and Elmhurst hospitals, as well as Gotham Health, Vanderbilt.
The program was developed to serve those living with health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease as a means of easing symptoms through holistic and plant-based medicine.
“This program was something I really became passionate about as I worked in the Bronx,” said Dr. Davis. “I’ve done all of my clinical work in the Bronx and I really just felt like there has to be another way that we can help patients that just didn’t involve adding more and more medications. So I was beyond thrilled to help Dr. McMacken launch the program at Bellevue several years ago and I am so so excited that we are now able to launch this across the system.”
The program teams up patients with a group of specialized experts including a plant-based doctor, a registered dietician and a health coach who all work in tandem to create a personalized lifestyle plan.
This plan usually follows six aspects of lifestyle changes; a healthy plant-based diet, physical activity, stress reduction, sleep health, social connection and avoidance of unhealthy substances like tobacco or alcohol.
“This approach really works,” said Dr. McMacken during the roundtable. “We’ve actually seen in our Bellevue program really positive behavior changes in our patients and also very promising clinical outcomes, like weight loss for individuals who are living with obesity. We’ve seen improved blood sugar in patients with type two diabetes – some of them were actually able to put their diabetes in remission with the lifestyle changes. It is incredibly gratifying. This program is really among the first of its kind in a public healthcare system.”
Another issue that the nutrition and lifestyle program aims to address is the difficulty of accessing healthier food options like fresh fruits and vegetables. Doctors and dieticians within the program will be able to refer patients to services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) if families are unable to afford these healthier options.
“The price of healthy foods is really challenging,” Davis said during the roundtable. “I think that one of the things that we work on with our patients is how do they address those barriers. How do we help them to afford these healthier foods? So things like assessing them for food insecurity, enrolling them in benefits or helping them to enroll into benefits like SNAP. We’ve worked with getting farmers markets at our facilities so our patients would have access to those fresh fruits and vegetables. So we look at all these different ways of trying to make produce more affordable and available for our patients.”
The nutrition and lifestyle program also helps encourage not only the individual patient to make lifestyle changes, but their family members as well.
“In many cases what we’ve seen [is that] our patients who make changes influence their family members,” said McMacken. “Their kids are influenced, the whole household starts to move in a healthier direction and that’s a wonderful thing to see. Moving towards family lifestyle programs is another wonderful idea because we really want to capture parents and children together as they grow into a healthier lifestyle.”
Individuals can visit the NYC Health + Hospitals website or call (347) 507-3695 for more information.
