Where food-is-medicine programs are heading

Modern Healthcare – Wednesday, August 20, 2025
By Hayley DeSilva

Some call it food is medicine. Others say food as medicine. Either way, the efforts to keep people healthier through better nutrition are garnering more attention as need and interest from healthcare leaders grows.

Health and Human Services Department Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has targeted processed foods and food additives, has called out food-is-medicine programs as a way to improve health and mental health.

With cuts to Medicaid funding totaling $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years and 11.8 million people losing health insurance coverage as a result of the new tax law, more individuals may be in need of programs offering such help to maintaining nutrition and other dietary needs.

Here’s what’s trending in food-is-medicine programs.

More organizations are joining forces

Elevance Health this week announced it is partnering with the National Association of Community Health Centers to boost food-is-medicine initiatives among primary care providers at the health centers.

Elevance also has partnered with Tufts Medicine. The academic medical center has launched multiple research initiatives aimed at evaluating health outcomes based on different efforts, and is part of Kaiser Permanente’s food is medicine provider network. Similar research is being conducted with other partners, including Feeding America.

Tuft’s Food is Medicine Institute and Kaiser Permanente earlier this year formed a national network designed to, among other things, share best practices. The network’s other founding members include Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, CVS Health, Devoted Health, Elevance, Geisinger and Highmark Health.

Last year, HHS launched various public-private initiatives with Instacart, The Rockefeller Foundation and Feeding America.

Programs are falling under the value-based care umbrella

The return on investment in food-is-medicine efforts, much like value-based care programs, takes time — which can make the initiatives slow to grow from an investment standpoint, according to Dr. Kyu Rhee, president and CEO of the National Association of Community Health Centers.

“Part of our challenge is to highlight the values we have and try to get the system that pays for it to value it,” Rhee said.

Using nutrition and healthier food can be an instrumental form of primary and preventative care, curbing patients from developing dietary-related diseases and helping mental health, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

“When you look at the top four populations where the most money is saved, the top one is dense disease, that’s the highest savings per patient,” Mozaffarian said while in Chicago this week at a conference of community health center leaders. “Patients with depression — the second most cost savings per patient. And then cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”

Investment remains a challenge

Broad public and private support for the efforts has been inconsistent, making it difficult for many organizations to expand their programs.

“There’s opportunities here for us as a movement to advance the food is medicine movement together,” Rhee said. “To me, it’s not just the public sector, it’s the private sector. In my opinion, you need both, and you might not get it always with both the same intensity.”

Rhee said if food-is-medicine programs continue to showcase success, the investments will come to fruition.

“The data shows that we’re delivering these programs, we’re capable, and there’s a return on that, on impacting [uniform data system] measures, reducing costs,” Rhee said. “If we show that, payers, policymakers will say, ‘That makes sense. Let’s invest in more of that.’”

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