Free deliveries of fresh produce improved blood sugar in adults with diabetes

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Key takeaways:

• Free weekly produce deliveries and nutrition counseling lowered blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes.
• The majority of participants were already food insecure at baseline.

Free weekly deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables alongside nutritional counseling significantly reduced blood sugar among adults with type 2 diabetes, a speaker reported.

The results of a pre-randomized controlled trial that provided 6 months of free weekly produce deliveries and nutrition counseling with registered dietitians or nutritionists via telephone to patients in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health system were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions.

Dariush Mozaffarian

“These results support the potential for treatments in health care that provide nourishing food to improve health outcomes for low-income adults with Type 2 diabetes,” Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said in a press release. “Our secondary analysis suggests that benefits may be greatest when people are receiving healthy food and may wane after the program ends, indicating that, like other treatments for Type 2 diabetes, long-term intervention may be important for some patients.”

For this trial, 450 patients in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health system (mean age, 59 years; 85% Hispanic; 65% women) were randomly assigned to high- or low-dose deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables and nutrition counseling or a control arm that received none. Eligible participants were adults enrolled through Medicaid (MediCal) who had type 2 diabetes and at least two hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) values more than 7.5% in the past 12 months.

Produce amounts were scaled based on household size and cost ranged from $90 to $270 per household for the high-dose intervention and $90 to $180 per household for the low-dose intervention.

The primary endpoint was change in HbA1c at 6 months.

At enrollment, HbA1c was 9.4% and 58.3% of participants were food insecure; baseline characteristics were similar between the intervention and control groups.

Participants that received fresh produce deliveries experienced significant reductions in HbA1c at 6 months compared with the control arm (0.37%; 95% CI, 0.71 to 0.04; P = .028).

The reduction in HbA1c was not significantly different between high- and low-dose intervention arms, according to the presentation.

“The availability and affordability of fresh foods and vegetables are key social determinants of health for people managing diet-related health conditions. Providing healthy foods and dietary counseling can be an important complement to medical care,” Claudia Nau, PhD, research scientist in the department of research and evaluation at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, said in the release. “Addressing barriers to living healthier lives can help to improve disparities in health among people of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic groups.”

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