Doctors in New York City can now prescribe fruits and vegetables for their overweight patients. The city health commissioner Thomas Farley said that one in ten people in NYC don’t eat fruits or vegetables daily.
Doctors in New York City can now prescribe fruits and vegetables for their overweight patients.
The city health commissioner Thomas Farley said that one in ten people in NYC don’t eat fruits or vegetables daily.
In the Bronx area, that number goes up to five out of ten adults who reportedly don’t get a daily serving of fruits and vegetables.
Farley said that the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program “is probably going to prevent an awful lot of disease in the long term than the medicines we tend to write prescriptions for.”
The Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program or FVRx, gives coupons to struggling patients to help them with the cost of produce.
Already available in multiple states around the country, the New York program will start with patients at the Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, and at Harlem Hospital.
According to their website, the FVRx program helped over 55 percent of the participants increase how much fruit and vegetables they ate, and 53 percent of the families who participated shopped at the local farmer’s market 8 or more times over the course of the 4 to 6 month season.
