Health Care by Food Initiative is sponsored by American Heart Association. This opportunity supports mission-aligned projects and measurable outcomes.

Home | Health Care by Food American Heart Association Health Care by Food ™ Accelerating the Integration of Food Is Medicine in Health Care The American Heart Association’s Health Care by Food ™ initiative is coordinating scientific research, public policy advocacy and stakeholder education to advance food is medicine interventions that incorporate healthy food into health care to treat, manage and prevent diet-related diseases.

The need is great: An estimated 90% of the $4. 3 trillion annual cost of health care in the U.S. is spent on medical care for chronic diseases, and for many of these diseases, diet is a major risk factor. Millions of people in the U.S. have low diet quality—a major driver of chronic disease and health inequities, especially among communities of color and those with low income.

Health Care by Food is keenly focused on removing barriers to nutritious food through research and community solutions. In 2024, Health Care by Food awarded research grants to fund 23 small-scale clinical trials focused on rapid cycle innovation, adaptive designs and attention to lived experiences. Results of these studies will enable testing of the scalability and sustainability of large comparative effectiveness trials.

Invest in research to strengthen the evidence base of healthy food interventions so that millions of patients can receive a more holistic approach to diet and health, health care professionals have tools to prescribe food is medicine programs and payors have sufficient evidence for reimbursing food is medicine interventions.

United by a common vision for food is medicine within health care Health Care by Food curated a systems mapping workshop to solicit input from stakeholders in academia, social services, public policy and the health care sector to generate collective insights about the work required to ensure food is medicine’s systemic success.

The initiative’s research efforts were announced in January 2024, with funds awarded to foundational research projects across the country led by experts in the food and nutrition, behavioral science, epidemiology and cardiovascular research fields.

These research projects focus on feasibility and implementation science in pilot testing different ways of increasing enrollment and engagement in food is medicine interventions and examining ways to accomplish significant short-term changes in healthy eating behavior. Developing ways to increase engagement now, and incorporating those insights in subsequent tests of efficacy, will facilitate the testing of more potent interventions.

The AHA’s Health Care by Food™ Initiative is supported by anchor funding from The Rockefeller Foundation and contributions from inaugural collaborator Kroger, with additional support from Builders Vision; Elevance Health; Instacart; Kaiser Permanente; Lyda Hill Philanthropies; United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey; and the Walmart Foundation.

The Health Care by Food initiative was first announced as the Food Is Medicine Initiative at the September 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health by the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation. *All health/medical information on this website has been reviewed and approved by the American Heart Association, based on scientific research and American Heart Association guidelines.

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