"We have a term 'groceries.' It's an old term but it means basically what you're buying, food, it's a pretty accurate term” – US president Donald J. Trump. Providing people with groceries is increasingly being seen as the basis for many viable interventions that can be used to prevent or treat chronic diseases. Sometimes referred to as ”Food Is Medicine” these food-based interventions are ideally integrated into health care and tailored for people’s specific health conditions and/or social needs. These specific food prescriptions can involve food delivery, pick-up, or voucher provision, and often include varying levels of nutrition and culinary education. Unfortunately, few high quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been conducted in this area, because “just giving people groceries” within an RCT can be very challenging. In this session presenters will discuss the how to, results from, and lessons learned along the way of conducting grocery intervention RCTs. Speakers for this session are: Dr. Dana Lee Olstad, PhD, RD and Dr. Bohdan Luhovyy, PhD. Together they will help attendees develop an understanding the challenges related to grocery intervention research and strategies to help address them.
Food and Human Nutritional Sciences, and Internal Medicine - Section Endocrinology
University of Manitoba
Dylan MacKay is an Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Chronic Disease in the Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences and the Department of Internal Medicine Section Endocrinology at the University of Manitoba. He has a background in human nutritional sciences, with training and experience in clinical trials and living/lived experience research. He is also a person who lives with type 1 diabetes. His work concentrates primarily on type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. His research program includes some ongoing clinical trials looking at fruit and vegetable delivery interventions in chronic kidney disease, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Kidney Foundation of Canada. He has been a member of the Diabetes Canada Clinical Practice Guidelines Steering Committee since 2020, and co-led the development of the type 2 diabetes remission guideline chapter.