Meals That Heal

Top hospitals are swapping pills for produce to improve chronic conditions—but it's unclear who pays for “food as medicine”

- BY ALEXIS KAYSER

CLAIRE BENOIST/TRUNKARCHIVE; JUSTIN METZ

THE UNITED STATES IS DOING something wrong when it comes to health care.

True, the country is home to hundreds of the world's best hospitals (including three of the top five, according to Newsweek and Statista's recent ranking). Yet while the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other developed nation, its residents suffer from a higher burden of chronic disease.

Ask the people inside the system why that is, and the answer comes quickly.

“Our health care system is very much a sick care system,” Dr. Lydia Alexander, immediate past president of the Obesity Medicine Association and chief medical officer at the obesity treatment platform Enara Health, told Newsweek.

“It’s a treatment system, not a prevention system,” echoed Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

These are variations of a common critique that most health care stakeholders actually agree on. Hospital CEOs, doctors, patients and the U.S. health secretary have all expressed discontent with current infrastructure. Enormous resources are devoted to consequences of largely preventable conditions.

It would be more practical, many argue, to focus on stopping disease before it starts. There’s one proven preventative that health care organizations are zeroing in on: food.