Kaiser Permanente and Tufts University’s Food is Medicine Institute have established a new network dedicated to moving food as medicine forward.
The institute is housed at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. The network’s other founding members comprise Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, CVS Health, Devoted Health, Elevance Health, Geisinger and Highmark Health.
The Food is Medicine National Network of Excellence will focus on integrating nutritional interventions with existing treatment models and use research and training to enhance patient care and education. It will also aim to raise the rates of patient buy-in and participation. Members will develop frameworks to assess the impact of food as medicine interventions, and they will advocate for the movement with policymakers and the public.
“Each year, suboptimal diets and food insecurity cause more than 500,000 deaths and cost the U.S. economy $1.1 trillion in health care and lost productivity,” Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute, said in a press release. “By working together, we can scale evidence-based nutritional interventions that are driving change, improving health, and reducing disparities.”
Food as medicine is a rapidly expanding movement that typically involves medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions and nutrition education. From nonprofits to VC-backed startups to retailer heavyweights to health systems, organizations of all types have expanded their nutrition programming and made multimillion-dollar commitments in recent years, recognizing that diet drives many health conditions—particularly chronic disease.
“Kaiser Permanente has been testing Food is Medicine programs for several years,” Pamela Schwartz, executive director for community health at Kaiser Permanente, said in the announcement. “We’re excited by their potential to improve health. That’s why we’re expanding these efforts and using our findings to help other health care organizations do the same.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, has pledged to prioritize healthy food to combat chronic disease among Americans. While his philosophy is a positive thing to players in food as medicine, some are skeptical of his promise to achieve meaningful change. The Trump-Vance agenda is fiercely focused on deregulation and spending cuts, and programs like Medicaid are where many food as medicine companies operate.