In the 1960s, at a community health center in the Mississippi Delta, Dr. Jack Geiger prescribed healthy food to some of his patients—children suffering from infectious diarrhea and malnutrition. The idea was that his patients could buy the prescribed food at a local grocery store, and the clinic would be charged. It was a surprisingly radical idea, and Dr. Geiger received blowback from the state’s politicians and poverty program. His response would become somewhat famous: “The last time I looked at my textbooks, the most specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”
Food Is Medicine (FIM) is the programmatic embodiment of an elegant idea: because nutrition clearly links to health outcomes, it should be part of the healthcare system. Today, FIM programs provide medically tailored meals (MTM), medically tailored groceries (MTG), and produce prescriptions (Produce RX) to support disease management, along with nutrition counseling and culinary education. These simple, effective interventions have a large addressable patient population and involve several healthcare professions.
Food Is Medicine is moving from pilot programs towards standardized care delivery. The Food Is Medicine Coalition (FIMC) has brought together nearly 50 nonprofit organizations to advance access through policy change, research and evaluation, and best practices. In 2024, over 21 million meals or meal-equivalents were served across MTM, MTG, and Produce RX programs (FIMC 2026).
To learn more about how it works, who’s involved, and where it’s going, read on.
The Rise of Food Is Medicine
“Food has been medicine for thousands of years,” says Alissa Wassung, executive director of the Food Is Medicine Coalition. “It was probably the first medicine. And now we’re experiencing it in a new way, coming back full circle, to appreciate its profound impact on our health.”
The idea of the medically tailored meal got its start 40 years ago, at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. At that time, there was no treatment, and many people died isolated in their homes. Community volunteers who provided groceries to the sick often found the food wasn’t being eaten.
“The epiphany was that someone in that state of illness actually needs prepared meals that are right for what they’re experiencing,” Wassung says. “Providing that unique combination of correct nutrients, alongside supportive nutrition care from a dietitian, came to be known as the medically tailored meal intervention.”
The idea expanded to serve people living with all forms of serious, complex, and chronic illness. But the right type of food for someone living with HIV/AIDS might be different from the right food for someone with cancer or Parkinson’s. Today, many people live with multiple illnesses at once, and proper nutrition is extraordinarily complex.
FIM and nutrition counseling are distinct, but complementary. There’s science in tailoring nutrient requirements with appetizing meals that fulfill dietary prescriptions. For much of the modern era, food has belonged to one system, and healthcare another. But now they’re talking to each other again.
“The current moment has been profoundly influenced by research in the field,” Wassung says. “Food Is Medicine interventions, when delivered with quality, not only produce profound health outcome improvements—they also positively affect healthcare’s bottom line.”
Approximately 85 percent of all healthcare spending is related to the management of diet-related chronic diseases. Nearly $24 billion could be saved every year if all eligible Americans received MTM interventions (Tufts 2025).
Real-world data from a major healthcare institution found that providing high-risk patients with 14 MTMs per week for three months significantly reduced ED visits and hospitalizations, with an average cost savings of over $12,000 per person; another program that provided 10 MTMs for an average of nine months a year (to adults with serious medical conditions) resulted in a 16 percent reduction in healthcare costs, even after accounting for the cost of the program (Tufts 2025).
“These remarkable, durable results make healthcare systems very interested,” Wassung says. “It was a really big realization, the extent that nutrition has an impact on health.”
How Food Is Medicine Works
Anyone with a severe, chronic, or complex condition can benefit from Food Is Medicine. That includes people with diabetes, heart failure, obesity, hypertension, kidney disease, cancer, high-risk pregnancy, and/or any number of social stressors (low income, food insecurity, housing instability, etc.). An MD, PA, RN, NP, or, in some state waiver programs, a community health worker (CHW) often identifies a patient as needing an MTM.
There’s a healthcare professional at each step of the journey. Once a patient is referred to a community-based organization or an MTM provider, their diagnosis is confirmed, and they’re put into a continuum of care. They’ll go through an in-depth nutrition assessment with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN), who will identify any issues — trouble chewing or swallowing, malnutrition risk — in addition to their illnesses, to produce food that’s both palatable and tailored to individual preferences. After a diet plan is created, fresh-made meals are often blast-chilled and flash-frozen and delivered to the person’s home. Ongoing and supportive follow-up with the patient’s clinical team and the RDN is essential.
The FIMC’s MTM Sustainability Blueprint outlines a path to standardize FIM interventions, informed by the rapidly growing body of research on Food Is Medicine. Because so much of the FIM innovation has occurred in Medicaid, the Blueprint starts with the legal framework that federal and state agencies use to define quality for all Medicaid covered benefits, then uses those concepts to envision guardrails for MTM program design. What is the medical necessity requirement for MTMs? What’s the difference between the need for intensive intervention versus the need for typical RDN counseling? Answering these questions definitively and formally has helped open the door to federal-level funding.
“Nutrition services in our country should be better integrated into, and funded through, healthcare,” Wassung says. “Medical nutrition therapy is still not reimbursable for all who need it. If we fund and sustainably power the system, you’ll have more providers stepping into the field. But right now, nonprofits are bridging the gap, and we’re dealing with patchwork access, while people still need to be nourished.”
The Future of Food Is Medicine
To fulfill the potential of Food Is Medicine, medical training has some catching up to do. Poor diets are a leading cause of death and disability in the US (JAMA 2018). Most Americans have dietary patterns that do not align with recommendations for good health (HHS 2024). Yet, despite nutrition’s strong link to health outcomes, most medical schools offer less than 25 hours of nutrition education throughout their four-programs, and over two thirds of medical schools don’t offer a standalone nutrition course (BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2024).
“The facts of nutrition and nutrition education make up a small part of any medical training,” Wassung says. “There’s a national movement to change that, and we’re supportive of it. The idea of food as medicine needs to make its way into how we train clinical professionals.”
Even when clinicians are exposed to FIM programs, they may not have access to, or knowledge of, the resources that they need to enact them. It can be challenging for clinicians to know where to refer patients; access to RDNs can be an issue. Clinicians need standards of care and patients need consistent access.
“One of the risks we face is that while we have a lot of new energy and actors in the system who are excited about food as medicine, they may be using the terminology, but not necessarily delivering the service,” Wassung says. “We really have to adhere to quality requirements and standards. We offered our public standard for MTMs several years ago. We’re creating one for MTGs. To the extent that we can incorporate standards—like ours—into requirements, I think patients and the healthcare system will be better off in the end.”
Organizational support exists through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute, and the Food Is Medicine Coalition. Some of FIMC’s providers are running residency programs at their local universities that give practitioners hands-on experience. In 2026, Tufts University’s Food Is Medicine Institute released a Food Is Medicine Toolkit aimed at helping clinicians integrate Food Is Medicine programs into clinical workflow and healthcare systems.
“Resources abound right now,” Wassung says. “The core knowledge is that food truly is medicine. The next layer is determining how it is medicine, and for which patients. It begins with incorporating some of those questions into a healthcare provider’s practice, in a trusting environment. And there’s no more trusting environment than the relationship between a patient and a healthcare provider.”
Another key hurdle is achieving wider, standardized reimbursement. Current flexibilities that help fund FIM programs through Medicare and Medicaid have yielded strong results in states like Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Maryland. But those flexibilities are temporary, and once a state waiver program ends, its innovation goes with it. Permanent funding mechanisms are needed.
“There are many things we’re doing to make that a reality at the national level,” Wassung says. “It’s going to take relentless advocacy from the community to keep this issue front and center.”
A bipartisan group of members of Congress has come together over the last several years to support the MTM Demonstration Program Pilot Act. If passed, it would ensure that medically vulnerable individuals covered by Original Medicare get access to lifesaving MTMs in their home. It would also track outcomes in 40 hospitals across the country, yielding federal-level data that could be used to build a more resilient, equitable, and cost-effective healthcare system.
“Last year in Congress, it made intense progress,” Wassung says. “It was voted on the House side out of the Ways and Means Committee, as part of a larger bill, but as a cost-neutral bill, and the vote was unanimous. We see this excitement and momentum around Food is Medicine, and now we just need to get this bill over the finish line, accomplish the pilot, and hopefully lay to rest this question of whether MTMs work.”
Beyond funding and policy, the future of FIM depends on building vocabulary, values, and practice within the healthcare community. Food as medicine is an ancient truth; implementing it in the American healthcare system is new. More research, advocacy, and implementation will help move food and nutrition back to the center of health and wellness conversations.
“One of my colleagues said that if Food Is Medicine were a drug, it’d be reimbursed tomorrow,” Wassung says. “I think that’s just acknowledging the incredible outcomes that happen for humans when we add this to healthcare.”
Matt Zbrog
WriterMatt Zbrog is a writer and researcher from Southern California. Since 2018, he’s written extensively about trends within the healthcare workforce, with a particular focus on the power of interdisciplinary teams. He’s also covered the crises faced by healthcare professionals working at assisted living and long-term care facilities, both in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the demographic shift brought on by the aging of the Baby Boomers. His work has included detailed interviews and consultations with leaders and subject matter experts from the American Nurses Association (ASCA), the American College of Health Care Administrators (ACHCA), and the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA).