Food as Medicine

At WhyHunger, we believe that everyone has the right to healthy and nutritious food. Food plays a key role in an individual's physical, mental and social health and well-being. The ways in which food can be used as a tool for health are vast and various. In upcoming issues of the newsletter, we'd like to showcase the many ways emergency food and food access organizations are working to improve the health of people who face food insecurity and the growing body of research that is supporting this work.

Last month, WhyHunger staff attended the 2nd Annual Food as Medicine Symposium in Boston. Hosted by Harvard Law School's Center for Health Law and Policy, the panel discussion presented opportunities for collaboration with the health care industry to address hunger. The symposium was organized by Community Servings, a not-for-profit food and nutrition program that provides nutritious meals and nutritional counseling to individuals and their families who are dealing with critical and chronic illnesses throughout Massachusetts.  Panelists included Robert Greenwald, director of the Center for Health Law and innovation at Harvard Law School, who spoke about the drastically reduced costs of nutrition meal programs versus the costs of hospital stays and how these types of programs need to tap into entitlement programs like Medicaid for funding. David Waters, CEO of Community Servings,  highlighted how the people they serve fall through the safety net because they are too ill to go to a food pantry or soup kitchen let alone have the energy to cook a meal for themselves and their families. Kim Prendergast, consultant from Feeding America, spoke about their Diabetes Prevention Initiative that was piloted in three food banks, and Deborah Wexler, MD, co-director of the Massachusetts General Diabetes Center, discussed the connection between food insecurity, hospital admission and poor health outcomes and the need for health care providers to be connected to resources that can be alternative to medication, like prescriptions for fruits and vegetables.

Community Servings is part of the Food is Medicine coalition, a network of food and nutrition organizations around the US whose goal is to ensure that access to medically tailored home delivered meals are integrated into various health care reimbursement models. There is a growing body of research that is showing that this model of delivering medically tailored home -delivered meals to people with chronic illnesses reduces health care costs, improves health outcomes and improves patient satisfaction and quality of life.

Here is a study of one of the Food is Medicine members MANNA (Metropolitan Area Neighborhood Nutrition Alliance) in Pennsylvania, that showed how the nutrition based intervention of medically tailored meals helps to reduced health care costs and improve health outcomes for their clients:  Examining Health Care Costs Among MANNA clients and a Comparison Group.

We'd like to hear from you! Tell us what your organization is doing to help improve the health of your clients and/or community. Email us at NHC@whyhunger.org.