{"id":768507,"date":"2026-07-17T15:36:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T15:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/768507\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T15:36:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T15:36:26","slug":"food-really-is-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/768507\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Food Really Is Medicine’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was originally published by Stateline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

About a dozen states offer \u201cmedically tailored meals\u201d to people with conditions such as\u00a0diabetes and heart disease who get their insurance through Medicaid. Such programs significantly improve the health of the people in them, according to a new study.<\/p>\n

Medically tailored meals are fully prepared, home-delivered meals that are customized by a registered dietitian nutritionist for people with diet-linked conditions like diabetes, heart failure or chronic kidney disease. They\u2019re part of a broader category of \u201cfood is medicine\u201d interventions that use free, healthy food to improve people\u2019s health.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfood as medicine\u201d movement has picked up steam in recent years, propelled<\/a> by some in the \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d movement who share the philosophy of using nutrition to help prevent and manage chronic diseases.<\/p>\n

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has championed \u201cfood as medicine\u201d and praised the potential of such programs to improve health and lower health care costs. However, Kennedy attracted criticism last year after praising<\/a> one company that makes such meals for Medicaid and Medicare enrollees. The Associated Press reviewed<\/a> the company\u2019s offerings, finding the menu included the type of ultra processed foods high in sodium and sugar that Kennedy has often criticized.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts was the first state to broadly offer medically tailored meals to Medicaid recipients with diet-related diseases, so researchers with Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and other groups focused their research on that state.<\/p>\n

They found that enrollees in Massachusetts Medicaid who received medically tailored meals had 31 percent fewer hospitalizations<\/a> and 20 percent fewer emergency department visits.<\/p>\n

Per-person health costs declined by an average of $3,433 while participants were in the program, which offset nearly all of the program\u2019s cost to taxpayers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur results show that food really is medicine, with major clinical and policy implications for health insurance coverage of medically tailored meals to impact diet-related diseases and health care costs,\u201d said the report\u2019s senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of Tufts University\u2019s Food is Medicine Institute, in a June statement<\/a> announcing the findings.<\/p>\n

Medicaid, the federal-state public health insurance for people with low incomes, has increasingly given states flexibility to launch medical meal programs. Poor diet is a leading cause of death, disability and the use of emergency health services, researchers noted.<\/p>\n

States offering medically tailored meals include<\/a> California, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington.<\/p>\n

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Researchers in the Massachusetts study found that the program not only improved health outcomes, but also yielded significant cost savings for the state\u2019s Medicaid program, even when accounting for the cost of the meals, for people with certain conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and depression.<\/p>\n

While the research was limited to one state with meals delivered by one established nonprofit provider, the study\u2019s authors were hopeful the findings could help guide other states considering similar programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s rare to find anything in medicine that both improves health and saves money,\u201d Mozaffarian said in June. \u201cIt should be a no-brainer to extend similar programs to patients in other states and covered by other health insurance programs, such as Medicare and employer-based insurance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stateline<\/a> is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article was originally published by Stateline. About a dozen states offer \u201cmedically tailored meals\u201d to people with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[97,252,269,328181],"class_list":["post-768507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-nutrition","tag-whole-person-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}