Maine Medical Center program looks to plants for preventative care

The Maine Medical Center in Portland is joining approximately 70 other hospitals across the country in its new plant-based preventative medicine residency program that hopes to educate communities in Maine about the power healthy eating and lifestyle changes can have upon disease prevention.

Program Director Christina Holt told the Associated Press that the two-year residency program will partner with organizations within communities that use nutrition strategies in their work. The preventative medicine program will also work with farms and other food growers on collaborative research projects that will be beneficial to the community as a whole, with the ultimate goal of training health professionals about how they can bring healthy eating to the most vulnerable communities, including rural Maine.

“Helping [doctors] be leaders in preventing and healing at a population level. Supporting our health and wellness and not just trying to treat the maladies as they occur,” Holt told the AP were the program’s goal.

The funds to launch the preventative program are from a federal Health Resources and Services Administration grant of up to $950,000 over three years, according to the AP.

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