Second Harvest Food Bank’s Community Meal program played a key role in Wake Forest University School of Medicine, (WFUSM)’s “Meals for Moms” pilot study that uses food as medicine for new moms who had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.
Managed by Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina’s Providence Chefs, the Community Meals team prepared and delivered 10 medically-tailored meals a week for three months to the new moms so that WFUSM researchers could measure the impact of proper nutrition on gestational diabetes.
“They have just been the best community partner we could ask for,” said Morgana Mongraw-Chaffin, Assistant Professor in WFUSM’s Department of Epidemiology & Prevention.
The pilot study is funded by a grant from the North Carolina Diabetes Research Center. In addition to meals, WFUSM provides moms with weekly emails and short videos on healthy behavior and monthly virtual visits that teach postpartum self-care, dietary awareness and suggestions for starting physical activity. Participants agree to wear a glucose monitor at the beginning and end of the 3-month study to measure impacts.
“As soon as they give birth, we deliver 10 frozen meals to their door every week,” said Heather Martin, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships for Second Harvest. The meals meet specifications set by the WFUSM research team and are high protein and low in carbohydrates with healthy fats, Martin said.
Approximately half of the team who prepare community meals are graduates of Second Harvest’s Providence Culinary Training program. Students who are currently enrolled in the culinary program help prep ingredients for the meals. Some of the food they help prepare goes to individuals in their own neighborhoods.
“They’re going to put their heart in it,” said Butch Eddinger, Kitchen Manager of Community Meals. “We try to make sure everyone does some of the deliveries and gets to see the reactions – and let the moms see these are the people making your meals.”
A key part of a healthy lifestyle is a healthy diet, and “few people actually have access to that, especially in this area, there’s a lot of food insecurity,” Mongraw-Chaffin said. “We all know a healthy lifestyle really impacts chronic disease risk. If you can’t afford healthy food, you’re limited in what you can do.”
The Providence partnership proved perfect for this study, which Mongraw-Chaffin called a “true collaboration.”
“They have just been so supportive and flexible with this small study,” she said. “We really couldn’t be doing this without them.”
Early results show that moms who participated agreed they had eaten a healthy diet, and they would be able to afford the ingredients. Additionally, 80 percent said they plan to change their diets.
“This kept me focused on a goal to be healthy and gave me support,” a mom in the study said.
WFUSM plans to publish results of the program early next year. Their goal is to conduct a larger study that includes Spanish speaking moms and meals for the entire family, especially those families with food insecurity.
Researchers sought feedback from moms throughout the three-month-long pilot to identify ways to improve their next study, which will be larger with more moms and also those who speak Spanish. However, even without Spanish language materials, WFUSM reached a diverse group of moms.
“It’s a challenging time in people’s lives,” Mongraw-Chaffin said, and this study is helping to identify what is realistic for a new mom to do. We’re hoping we can get this to be free for the people who need it the most.”
The understanding of “food as medicine” has been a focus of Wake Forest Baptist Health for several years, according to Dr. Joseph A. Skelton, Professor at WFUSM and Director of Brenner FIT® (Families In Training), who works in the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Epidemiology and Prevention.
“Wake Forest Baptist Health has been instituting screening for food insecurity in clinic settings, then making referrals and providing other resources to patients for some time,” Skelton said.
“Before/during/after COVID shutdowns, we focused more on providing direct resources within the clinic settings, providing food bags with combinations of foods for recipes and staple food items for home kitchens to relieve financial burdens. We regularly assess what items are being used and what they prefer and customize as best we can to provide those items, really trying to link this basic human need to their health. Further, we teach nutrition through cooking to many students and to families in the community.”
Skelton has worked with Second Harvest’s Providence team in previous health-focused efforts, and he recognized the benefit of collaborating with the Food Bank..
“They are the experts,” he said. “Instead of reinventing the wheel or trying to learn on our own, we went to the experts, who have been absolutely wonderful to work with. When we put on a culinary medicine program, Chef Jeff Bacon was right there to help! He also helped us design our mobile food kitchen and make connections to vendors to make the whole process easier.”
Second Harvest’s work to build food secure and healthy communities for all logically links the provision of food to meet basic need and healthy food. The Food Bank already prepares food tailored to nutritional needs of specific populations, such as growing children in after school and summer feeding programs and aging adults through senior meal programs.
“What the medical meals are going to do is take that knowledge and spread it across all our programs so everyone will be getting nutritious meals,” Eddinger said.
Second Harvest made a commitment to the “food as medicine” movement in its strategic plan, Martin said.
“I think it’s always good when you can feed a person,” she said. “Feeding a person in a way that is nutritionally specified to their needs and can give them better health outcomes tomorrow is optimal, and that’s what this program allows us to do.”
“We had worked with other medical partners before to provide meals; this was the first one that allowed us to tailor the meals to a specific medical condition,” Martin said. “This is our first truly medically tailored community meals program. This is the first time we have gotten to that level of nutritional specificity.”
Second Harvest is one of five organizations selected from across the county to participate in a year-long, medically-tailored meal accelerator training program, led by the Food Is Medicine Coalition (FIMC), Community Servings, God’s Love We Deliver, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School. A team from Second Harvest will travel to Boston and New York and visit programs that are successfully implementing food as medicine on a large scale.
“The future of good health in our community and in our nation will come from collaboration between groups like Second Harvest/Providence and health care centers like Wake Forest Baptist Health to work in concert to address the social needs that impact an individual’s and a community’s health,” Skelton said.
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