---
type: source
title: "Food Is Medicine, But Are Produce Prescriptions? — Diabetes Care Perspective"
author: "American Diabetes Association (Diabetes Care)"
url: https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/46/6/1140/148926/Food-Is-Medicine-but-Are-Produce-Prescriptions
date: 2025-01-01
domain: health
secondary_domains: []
format: perspective
status: processed
priority: medium
tags: [produce-prescriptions, food-is-medicine, diabetes, evidence-critique, causal-inference, intervention-design]
processed_by: vida
processed_date: 2026-03-18
enrichments_applied: ["medical care explains only 10-20 percent of health outcomes because behavioral social and genetic factors dominate as four independent methodologies confirm.md", "SDOH interventions show strong ROI but adoption stalls because Z-code documentation remains below 3 percent and no operational infrastructure connects screening to action.md"]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Perspective piece in Diabetes Care (American Diabetes Association) with the pointed title "Food Is Medicine, but Are Produce Prescriptions?" — asking whether produce prescriptions specifically meet the evidentiary bar implied by the "food is medicine" framing.

**The argument structure:**
- "Food Is Medicine" as a concept is correct: diet quality is causal for diabetes outcomes
- BUT: produce prescription programs (vouchers for F&V) are a specific intervention type
- The question is whether THAT specific intervention generates clinical benefit vs. "food is medicine" as a general principle
- The distinction: knowing that diet matters ≠ knowing that giving vouchers for produce improves outcomes

**Evidence context:**
- Observational evaluations (multisite 9-program, Recipe4Health) show improvements in food security and diet quality
- But these are not RCTs with controlled comparison groups
- The observational improvements may reflect self-selection (motivated patients), regression to the mean, or secular trends in diabetes care
- The programs that show HbA1c improvements tend to enroll patients with very poor baseline control (HbA1c >9%) where any intervention shows regression-to-mean effects

**The causal inference problem:**
- Food insecurity CORRELATES with worse diabetes outcomes
- Providing food security through produce vouchers tests whether resolving food insecurity CAUSES better outcomes
- The causal mechanism is unclear: food insecurity may be a PROXY for poverty/stress/social disadvantage that doesn't respond to food provision alone

**What this means for FIM interventions:**
- "Food is medicine" as a population-level nutritional principle: strong evidence
- Produce prescriptions as a diabetes management tool: insufficient controlled evidence
- The rebranding of produce voucher programs as "medicine" may be raising expectations the evidence doesn't support

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** The Diabetes Care piece directly questions the evidence standard being applied to produce prescriptions. The ADA's own journal is asking whether the "food is medicine" framing is epistemically accurate when applied to this specific intervention type. This is the same intellectual concern that drives this research session — and coming from inside the diabetes clinical community, it's more significant than external criticism.

**What surprised me:** The title is surprisingly sharp for a medical journal perspective — "but are produce prescriptions?" directly challenges the movement's framing without rejecting food quality as a health determinant. This is precision criticism: accepting the principle, questioning the operationalization.

**What I expected but didn't find:** The piece likely doesn't have a strong positive alternative — the question it raises (what does work?) is what drives the MTM vs. produce prescription comparison. The critique is clearer than the constructive alternative.

**KB connections:**
- Connects to the causal inference gap noted in Session 1 (food insecurity → disease ≠ food provision → health improvement)
- Provides a clinical community voice for skepticism that's not politically motivated
- Connects to the AHA systematic review finding — the same inconsistency noted by Diabetes Care is documented in the AHA review

**Extraction hints:**
- Extractable claim: "Produce prescriptions may improve food security and diet quality without producing clinical health outcomes, because food insecurity is a proxy for poverty and social disadvantage that food provision alone doesn't address"
- The "food is medicine, but are produce prescriptions?" framing is itself a KB contribution — it names the epistemological problem precisely

**Context:** Diabetes Care is the ADA's primary clinical journal. Publishing this perspective represents the clinical diabetes community signaling that the food-as-medicine framing has outrun its evidence base for this specific intervention type.

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: The food-as-medicine causal inference gap claim from Session 1
WHY ARCHIVED: ADA's own journal questioning produce prescription evidence — the clinical community's internal skepticism, not external debunking
EXTRACTION HINT: The distinction between "food matters for health" (proven) and "produce vouchers improve diabetes outcomes" (unproven) is the precise claim to extract


## Key Facts
- Diabetes Care published a perspective titled 'Food Is Medicine, but Are Produce Prescriptions?' in 2023
- Observational evaluations of produce prescriptions include multisite 9-program studies and Recipe4Health
- Produce prescription programs showing HbA1c improvements typically enroll patients with baseline HbA1c >9%
- The American Diabetes Association's journal is questioning the evidence standard for produce prescriptions
