How can policymakers, healthcare systems, and patients themselves work to make food and nutrition the center of healthcare? That was the question nonprofit, government, and private sector leaders sought to answer at the Food is Medicine National Summit: Transforming Healthcare, held at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy recently.
“We are at a tipping point to characterize and catalyze the most promising solutions to reduce the crushing and inequitable health and economic burdens of diet-related diseases – an opportunity we must not let go to waste,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and dean for policy at the Friedman School.
Following the summit, four community organizations and four individual leaders were honored for their work advancing nutrition security with the 2022 Jean Mayer Prize for Excellence in Nutrition Science and Policy. Supported through a gift to the Friedman School from John Hancock, the shared $100,000 prize is named after Tufts University’s tenth president, pioneering nutrition scientist Jean Mayer,
The winners were Robert Bertram (USAID), Sara Bleich (Harvard University), Ismahane Elouafi (Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.), and Oran Hesterman (Food Fair Network). The nonprofit groups About Fresh, Community Servings, Concern Worldwide, and Valid Nutrition also received honors for their groundbreaking efforts to ensure equitable access to healthy food, around Boston and beyond.
In announcing the winners, Lindsay Hanson, head of behavioral insurance, global strategy, and delivery at John Hancock, said she was “proud of the work that we’ve done together to advocate for the sensible solutions to the systemic challenges that face society today, including the need for greater federal nutrition research, coordination, and investments.”
Summit on Solutions
Throughout the Food is Medicine summit, stakeholders from across the country favored approaches ranging from medically tailored meals and produce prescriptions, to professional education for doctors and added medical coverage for dietitian counseling.
“We are so sick as a nation,” said Mozaffarian. “One in two adults in the U.S. have diabetes or prediabetes. Three in four are overweight or obese. And if you put that together with blood pressure and cholesterol levels, only one in 15 adults in the U.S. are metabolically healthy.”
During a panel on current healthcare challenges, Shantanu Agrawal, chief health officer at Elevance Health, pointed to the connection between diet-related disease and anxiety and depression. “There’s an incredible correlation between social needs and healthcare behavior,” Agrawal said. “It paints a really critical picture that this is an area that we must address if we are going to address disease burden, generally both mental as well as physical health.”
Daphne Miller, director of integrative and community medicine at the Lifelong Family Medicine Residency Program, highlighted the main driver of food insecurity: poverty and lack of capital. “So healthcare needs to go deep and address that. We need to harness the power of food, but in a way that is not just in a regular sick, screen-and-provide model,” Miller said.
Solutions aimed at informing consumers of the contents of packaged foods arose often. In a keynote speech, U.S. Commissioner of Food and Drugs Robert Califf reminded the audience that the FDA can nix food ingredients that don’t meet their safety standards-as it did with trans fats, which have largely disappeared from ingredient lists. “Food labeling can be a powerful tool for change,” Califf said. “We hope and expect that manufacturers may reformulate and produce new foods in order to bear the ‘healthy’ claim.”
