FOOD AS MEDICINE

Many people lack motivation and/or robust knowledge about the impact of food choices on their health. While it’s common sense that poor long-term dietary decisions negatively impact health, the desire for immediate fulfillment and satisfaction typically wins over making "the healthy choice” (especially because the downside isn’t nearly as tangible in the short-term).

Moreover, society creates an environment that capitalizes on the aspects of human nature; it's incredibly easy to make poor dietary choices. Take powerful constituents, for example: buy fresh produce and spend an hour chopping and steaming vegetables, or swing through the drive-thru on the way home? And often times we just don’t have the education (even when we search for it), so we make poor choices unknowingly.

As a result of our collective inability to address the massive number of diet-related conditions, healthcare costs may increase without bound over the next quarter century. National healthcare spending is estimated to increase annually by 5.8 percent over the next ten years. That’s a massive – but importantly, preventable – spike!

" Healthcare costs may increase without bound over the next quarter century. National healthcare spending is estimatedto increase annually by 5.8 percent over the next ten years"

A common question from those both inside and outside of the healthcare industry is why aren’t more physicians — and health systems, more broadly — helping drive better dietary choices? The bottom line is even if they did, we would still be swimming upstream in the journey to drive long lasting impact. Solving for ‘food as medicine’ requires a long-term, complex “battle royale” across a plethora of touchpoints – touchpoints that require the involvement of stakeholders well beyond healthcare. If someone sees her physician for twenty minutes twice a year, even the best-intentioned physician-patient discussion on adapting better nutrition habits will soon be forgotten.

To educate the masses on healthy diet-related behavior, and have it impact food decisions on a long-term basis, requires more frequent touchpoints. This, in turn, requires participation from a host of different constituents, many outside the traditional health industry. Consumers’ exposure to other influencers that play into the psyche and the subconscious, like consumer goods manufacturers and marketers, grocery stores, television and social media ads, makes those entities very influential.

How food can be important both in preventative health and as an aid in the management of certain chronic diseases today, in the past and in the future. What’s in food that gives it the potential to improve our health and how to recognise which types of foods are essential for health and well being, and how food can play an important role in treating/preventing disease.

The ‘Food as Medicine’ landscape is a complicated, intricate network of interlinked constituents across a range of traditional industry lines. Not only are many players involved, but many more discreet, yet critical, connections exist than are initially apparent.

While we can continue to “let a thousand flowers bloom” and optimize across numerous independent agendas, to accelerate progress and drive large scale change, we need a cross-industry approach that works in an integrated way within each individual consumer’s ecosystem.

While this is certainly a beast of an effort, we can start small and scale the successes to redefine the role of nutrition as a prominent part of the patient journeys of tomorrow.

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