The trend: More medical schools are training students how to use food as a therapeutic tool for patient care, per the NYT.

Unpacking the trend: The medical school at Tulane University established the first “teaching kitchen” over a decade ago to train future physicians to apply practical nutrition principles in patient care. More than 60 medical, residency, and nursing programs have implemented a version of Tulane’s curriculum adapted by the American College of Culinary Medicine, per the New York Times.

The food-as-medicine movement has also gained support from both recent gov’t administrations.

• Food-as-medicine refers to the practice of treating nutritious food as prescriptions integrated into care plans to prevent, manage, and treat chronic disease.
• The Biden administration formally adopted food-as-medicine as a key health strategy, driving companies like Kroger and associations to invest hundreds of millions of dollars toward research.
• Last month, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that about one-third of US medical schools would require at least 40 hours of nutrition education starting this fall.
• Previous research has shown that most medical students typically receive no formal nutrition education during their schooling, and those who did averaged just 3 hours per year.

Why it matters: If scaled, food-as-medicine could significantly improve health outcomes while lowering healthcare costs.

• For instance, a nationwide medically tailored meals program for people with chronic conditions like heart failure and diabetes could prevent 1.6 million hospitalizations and save $13.6 billion in healthcare costs in the first year alone, per Tufts research.
• Similar deployment of produce prescription programs for patients with both diabetes and food insecurity could avert 292,000 cardiovascular events, the study found.

A key caveat: Most projections of food-as-medicine’s impact assume program funding will come from health insurers or the government. So far, efforts have been scattershot—only about a quarter of US states use Medicaid to fund medically tailored meals, and budget cuts now threaten some of those programs, per the NYT.

Implications for healthcare providers and marketers: Integrating nutrition training into medical school will close physicians’ knowledge gaps and help them incorporate diet and nutrition guidance into more patient visits. It will improve access to doctors’ advice, while equipping marketers with resources to create patient-focused content on healthy eating and cooking.

However, a doctor prescribing medically tailored meals or using food as treatment broadly doesn’t guarantee better health outcomes. That depends largely on who pays—without coverage, patients may forgo these prescriptions just as they do medications they can’t afford.

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