The Health Curve

Food Is Medicine: Treating Chronic Disease Through Diet | Corby Kummer, Director of Food & Society at The Aspen Institute

• Dr. Jason Arora • Season 1

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“Food is Medicine” gets talked about a lot these days, but the core idea is straightforward: food can play a direct role in treating and managing chronic disease, not just guiding healthier choices. In practice, that means healthcare systems providing patients with meals and groceries tailored to their medical needs.

In this episode of The Health Curve, I sit down with Corby Kummer — Executive Director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute and longtime food writer at The Atlantic. Corby breaks down where this movement started, why it’s gaining momentum, and what it looks like when hospitals and health systems begin delivering food as part of care.

We talk about what’s working, what’s still messy, and the real-world barriers to scaling these programs — from fragmented data and uneven standards to funding gaps and policy hurdles. We also dig into questions of equity, politics, consumer protection, and how newer trends like GLP-1 medications might shift the future of food, weight, and chronic disease in the U.S.

If you’re curious about where food and healthcare are heading, this conversation offers a grounded, accessible look at how “Food is Medicine” is evolving — and what it could mean for the future of chronic disease care.

If this episode helped you, subscribe to The Health Curve and share it with someone who’d benefit.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. Let's dive right in. Can you tell us a bit about your work in the food and society space?

SPEAKER_01:

So I started a program at the Aspen Institute after spending decades writing about food and getting more and more interested in the food system and how food producers on a large scale could make healthier food available to people who could afford it. Then I started a program at Aspen to bring manufacturers together with healthcare people, with many people throughout the food system to work on just that. How do we make healthier food available to more people who can afford it, find it, cook it, prepare it? So we've done a ton of food as medicine work. And we also have a food leaders fellowship. We just welcomed our fourth cohort of 18 wonderful, emerging and kind of established leaders in the food business. Food systems from a woman in charge of sustainability at all McDonald's locations in the U.S. to a fellow from Bayer who does sustainable agriculture, to a wonderful woman who started the Freedman Ayers Foundation to get credit and capital available to black farmers, as it was to her family, but is to few black farmers. So they come together to work on making change, but we've done a lot of work since 2018 on food as medicine. So let's start at the beginning, Colby. So what is food as medicine? Food as medicine is a very broad term used in different ways. And we recently did a whole meeting just around what are the definitions and how to define it. But very broadly, it is the healthcare system coming together with food prepares and meals programs, especially to treat chronic illnesses and also to prevent them. So specific illnesses, especially diabetes, end stage renal disease, certain forms of cancer, it's thought of as a way both for the healthcare system to provide patients food that will improve their health levels, their blood levels, their blood sugar levels, help them recover from chronic illnesses faster, and even prevent them from developing diabetes if they have, if they're considered to be prediabetic. And also, most people in the movement are concerned with long-term prevention of these diet-related chronic illnesses, especially diabetes.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so what's going on here is that there is a baked-in acknowledgement of something we already know, that food and nutrition contributes to chronic disease. And what we're doing then, it seems, is we're we're integrating an improvement in diet into the treatment for patients with chronic diseases. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely right. But the way to do it is to provide actual food to patients. And that's where healthcare systems often choke and have a lot of problems thinking we're not in the nutrition assistance or food insecurity business. And in fact, I argue rather controversially, they're not in the food insecurity business. Other programs in the food insecurity business, they're in the healthcare business. And they're trying to save healthcare costs, save people from coming in from constant complications of food-related chronic illness, particularly diabetes, but also renal disease, other cardiometabolic diseases that you would have better names for and better ways of explaining. It's very much a health care strategy and a disease prevention strategy.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so can you give us some examples of food is medicine programs? Like what does this look like to the patient?

SPEAKER_01:

What it looks like to the patient at its most at the tippy top of what's called a food is medicine pyramid. There are medically tailored meals. What does the tailoring mean? It means that the meal provider will take into account all your blood sugar level, your organ functioning, your cholesterol level, the complications, because often people have so-called comorbidities. They've got a couple of illnesses at the same time. Sometimes the suggested treatment for them can be contradictory. How do you put it all together for the best diet tailored to this specific patient and that person's various syndromes and illnesses and healthcare markers? They might need low sodium, they might not need low sodium, they might particularly need low cholesterol, they might not. They all need fresher food that's been freshly prepared. The origins of the food is medicine are in HIV care. They started off as AIDS care to help ameliorate the terrible side effects, meaning wasting, people getting too thin from HIV and AIDS-related illnesses. Then it grew. It grew a great deal, starting in the late 90s, especially when the drug cocktail began to keep HIV and AIDS in check. And so what the findings of all of these great improvements in health by giving people meals, so they started off as hot, wonderful, home-delivered meals right to your door, which was a wonderful way of initiating contact when HIV patients were shunned and they were incredibly isolated. So this was a way of bringing them into contact with people and also improving their health. But these insights led to what could we do about diabetes? What could we be doing to these chronic food-related illnesses? And the fact is that by giving people meals, they became usually one delivery a week of seven days of food, frozen. Often the meals programs would give them microwaves. So there are many different ways of delivering these meals. The meals are the most expensive form. What's gaining a lot of popularity are so-called medically tailored groceries. Those are food boxes that have both fresh and dried food. So rice and beans, which are terrific forms of long-lasting carbohydrates and also protein, especially in beans, and ways to cook them. They're more cost-effective. They're much less expensive than delivering people's meals. And then at the lowest end of the scale are produce subscriptions, which are wonderful for getting more people fresh food, but have their own challenges, especially do the people who need them have time to prepare these fresh vegetables? And do they have the knowledge of how to prepare them? So that's rather more controversial. But medically tailored meals and medically tailored groceries are very cost-effective.

SPEAKER_00:

That's fascinating. So who prescribes these meals and who designs the programs? Like how do we know what a specific patient needs in terms of healthy food?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the standard definition of food is medicine is it has a nexus to the healthcare system. And so generally these meals programs have had referrals from hospitals, from big healthcare providers, of people who come in with presenting illnesses of terrible diabetes or end stage renal disease. But it's becoming more and more, and my program, Food and Society Aspen Institute, is now doing a best practices guide for what smaller federally qualified health centers, what church food pantries, what much smaller programs can do to connect their clients and patients with healthier food and help them understand the basics of healthier food. So there's many different ways it can happen. But the classic way has been through a hospital or healthcare system that knows okay, community servings in Boston, Project Open Hand in San Francisco, Project Mana, or the Alameda County Healthcare System, which is doing a great Stephen Chen has been wonderful about trying to connect food systems and organic food and the way produce is raised, introduced at level, which hasn't been traditionally a part of this. But generally it's been a connection to the healthcare system. But there are many inventive programs. For example, there's something called Rethink Food in New York, which contracts with restaurants that serve communities, often the Latino community or the black community. And it says, we're going to give you money to buy ingredients, and using our nutrition criteria, you prepare meals that we will help you deliver within the community. Rethink goes out and gets the big contracts. They pay local small restaurants that are run by and for the community to get out this food. So it started off with big hospital systems and now it's going to a much smaller providers. And I can get into what payment is allowing them to do that once you're interested.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, let's definitely come back to that in a second because I have a lot of questions about that. But why is this getting a lot of attention now? I know in the last couple of years it's become its own sort of mini-industry in itself. There are startups bringing up in this space. What's the state of play today as far as progress goes? And why is this becoming really important?

SPEAKER_01:

The whole mechanism of payment. The reason that food is medicine has become so widely used and widely talked about is mostly that these HIV meals programs that I was talking about began seeing that there was a way of getting Medicaid and combined Medicare and Medicaid services to allow money for traditional health care to be extended to other so-called social drivers or determinants of health, chiefly food. So the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation over 10 years ago began pilot programs of so-called 1115 waivers. What do the waivers allow? Instead of just reimbursing hospitals and doctors, these waivers allowed health care providers to bill for meals, food. In fact, at the same time, they also allowed housing. So Minnesota was a great innovator. But the widest use of these waivers for Medicaid has been for food. So Medicaid is by far the biggest pot of money available to healthcare and healthcare providing. And so more and more companies saw the opportunity of cashing in on this. And so the startups you're talking about, which are often software platforms that connect patients to places that can accept this sort of payment for the more healthy food and these federal and these meal programs themselves, a number of for-profits are springing up to provide these medically tailored meals and medically tailored groceries. And it's very controversial because I was talking about the HIV programs. They were nonprofits. And so the nonprofits have been saying we take into account the entire family, every part of the patient's needs. And so these small startups, they're just going to be interested in a meal or two here and there. Who do these upstarts think they are? And I would say there's room for everybody. And that the for-profits are going to be able to scale this in a way that, for example, your California, there's a woman in Catherine Crouch at the Ceres Project, which is in Northern California. Just hundreds of different community programs in Northern California and understanding that there's room for everybody. You've got to scale this up if Medicaid does what we all hope they will, which is get out of the waivers and exceptions business to provide money for food and make it a covered benefit.

SPEAKER_00:

So when I think about human health and healthcare, I think we have to acknowledge that you can't separate health and social care because the social determinants of health are principally responsible for health outcomes, much more than healthcare. So you can't really divide the two. That's a separate conversation, of course. And I come from the UK system where there was this acknowledgement a long time ago. So I think this is good that we're starting to think about the two together. But when we start to break down the flow of dollars, which is really interesting, I think, here, in this model, is the healthcare system essentially paying the food system? Is that the direction of where the money is flowing, or is it more complicated than that?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the money isn't going to large consumer packaged goods companies. It isn't. It's going to community agencies, smaller agencies, and big non big for-profits. I'll mention nourished RX because they've taken a lead role nationally in understanding the needs of a community, but being able to provide these meals on a large scale and working at the same time for sustainably raised and community-benefiting health food farmers and meal makers, much better than other brand X, large companies that often underprice others and are themselves controversial. But it's not going to Nestle, it's not going to Mars, it's not going to these big companies directly. I don't really care if it does. This is a very controversial thing for me to say. If it's fresh food and if it gets fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats into the mouths of people who have to buy ultra-processed food or sugar-sweetened beverages because that's all they can afford and that's all they have time for. I'm all for it.

SPEAKER_00:

And this takes us nicely onto how do we ensure that this is done in the right way? So I often look at regulation as an enabler rather than a disabler. That's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to protect consumers and protect people. And so, how do we ensure food as medicine providers are truly providing nutritious food? Like how do we measure this? How do we regulate it?

SPEAKER_01:

You've asked an enormous difficult question that is there's no fixed answers to right now. I was part of a working group at Health and Human Services, the 17 agencies within HHS that are doing different forms of food as medicine, and they tried to come up with a whole bunch of ways of measuring nutritional quality and impact on the food systems and local food systems. There isn't an agreed upon way. So I talked about these waivers and 1115 waivers, this technical term for combined Medicare Medicaid services, the big U.S. payer. Each waiver within a state has a required evaluation, but there's a big problem. There's no national standards of what this evaluation should measure. So some states, including California, want to measure impact on sustainable growing on local food systems, the nutritional quality of food. Others are just saying how many pounds of food are provided by these healthcare systems. Others try to think in terms of the impact on community until the Medicaid system develops a uniform set of national standards and an enormous bingoon, I'm sure you know about, which is data interoperability, a way of just making one state being able to talk to the other as far as healthcare data and healthcare systems being shareable. It's not shareable now. So there's lots of things in the way of the kind of proof that those of us who want to see food as medicine become a covered benefit, they get in the way of the argument we want to make. Because until we have big, compelling national scale data, it's going to be very hard to get more payers outside of Medicare and Medicaid. And themselves, it, you know, there's like 20 states max. There's 13 that have it now, eight that have applied. So it's still not every place. And we're trying to build the case for it to beat every place. So when you ask, how do we make sure right now it's kind of a patchwork of different metrics and different evaluation criteria?

SPEAKER_00:

And people should know that this is definitely not just in the food industry. There's an historical challenge of doing this in healthcare itself, right? And I've spent most of my career trying to change how we measure success in healthcare from the patient perspective. And we should be designing healthcare for better health outcomes. That should be the measure of whether healthcare is good or not. And there are lots of people who've been trying to do this for years or decades of their careers as well. And we're still not there, right? So food is not behind. But I think it's great that we're trying to think about it in the same way, especially when we're now starting to integrate food and nutrition as part of a patient or a person's health journey, right? That's beautifully said.

SPEAKER_01:

Patient's health journey. But also, I need to add that there are very few insurers and large care health systems that are paying for this or are even interested in it so far. The national leader is Kaiser in your state of California. And that's because they're much similar to your native United Kingdom in that they have a vertically integrated system where the small community center you go to, to the hospital, to the clinics, they're all part of the same provider and the same system. They and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, the two most innovative, best established healthcare payers that have incorporated food as medicine, can count as a win retaining patients. And that's very different from saying the win is I can show the reduced level of emergency room visits. The big safety net hospitals wind up footing the bill for a lot of the effects of food-related and chronic illnesses. But teasing it out and proving it and getting an enormous national health care payer to be interested in it is entirely another matter. Also because they'll often say, why should I invest in prevention if 10, 12, 15 years from now the benefits become apparent? I won't have that client. It's not going to save me money. So what do I care? It's very hard, as you know well, to build the case for prevention. And so the leaders so far, Kaiser and Blue Cross, Blue Shield, have been relatively vertically integrated. So they have many forms of healthcare within their system, and they can count patient retention as a win.

SPEAKER_00:

And this has been the issue with value-based care, or one of the issues, right? In that, you know, if you are transacting across these different stakeholders for a volume, you know, how do you, you know, where patients can change insurer, and they probably will, because insurer goes with employer in most cases, and people change jobs? It's the same issue, right? So does the food is medicine movement need to move in step with the healthcare industry? Like, do these iterative changes in the two, let's call them in the two different spaces that are overlapping need to go together? Or how do we go from here? How do we navigate this so that we can make progress in the food is medicine space?

SPEAKER_01:

No one has the answer to that question. So it's more that the healthcare payer industry should be much more in step with the food is medicine movement, which is showing that people are healthier. At Food and Society at the Aston Institute, we did something called the Food is Medicine Research Action Plan. And it's not just an action plan of how to conduct better research that will better make the case for national reimbursement. It's the only place that gathers together the results of all the peer-reviewed research into food is medicine. We've already done one update so far. We're due for another update if we can find support for it. But that's the place where the data are. And these data that make the case for the kind of healthcare systems that you've been talking about, they've generally been rather small studies with very ill patients. Why very ill patients? Because that's where you can show the most dramatic short-term health improvements. So that's where you can start building the case. Okay, you big national insurer, you should be making this part of your healthcare benefits. The most exciting example that I know of is Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. It started as an initiative of the head of the foundation, John Lumpkin, but having had experience in both the commercial and nonprofit and foundation systems, he managed to convince the business, the statewide Blue Cross Blue Shield, to incorporate into its suite of offerings to large-scale employers throughout the state of North Carolina a no-cost benefit. What does no cost mean? It would help do nutritional evaluations and provide a limited amount of actual food to patients without an additional cost. So the big commercial system that said we use Blue Cross Blue Shield. When you come work for us in North Carolina, it's going to be BCBS, North Carolina. Here's the things that we're going to offer you as an option for your annual sign-up period. And one of them was food as medicine, especially nutrition evaluation, which is huge to be able to do nutrition evaluation. That's what helps an individual patient know what I should be eating? What's going to be better for my health and improve my health and even my family's health? So they were able in North Carolina to offer it as a no-cost benefit. And I wish that other large care uh health systems would adopt that.

SPEAKER_00:

And so it seems there are lots of hotspots or bright spots of activity in this space nationally, but what's it going to take for this to become a nationwide effort? Like what bars do we need to meet in evidence, providers, regulation, proving the point, you know, proving the case for us to be able to say this is this is ready to be scaled across the country now?

SPEAKER_01:

To make food as medicine have the kind of scale and national impact we all hope for, there are a couple of barriers that would be very helpful to overcome. This wonky-sounding data interoperability is crucial. If more states were required to adopt the same software platform, it would make it much easier for various researchers to say, here's the case across the country. Instead of here's the case in California, doesn't it look great? Here's the case in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Those are kind of the three leading states that have done the most work in food as medicine. We need for one software system to be adopted, probably required by the government to make the case broader. American Heart Association is leading a new research initiative. They've already funded two dozen small-scale initiatives to say, here's how A1C levels with this amount of medically tailored meals. When I say this amount, it's sort of the dose, we don't know how long this intervention has to last, and therefore how expensive is it to begin to create lasting behavior change, because lasting behavior change is what we all want. No healthcare system wants to be in the business of giving food for years and years at a time. And so most of the studies so far are three months, six months, a year. But we need better data to show what's going to be the most cost-effective dose, a number of times you're going to allow, you're going to give these meal boxes, you're going to ship them once a week or once a month. Where are you going to have the best effects? So there's much more data that needs to be accumulated and the case built for this to be a covered benefit. But also, hangers want to see reduced healthcare costs. They don't just want to see sort of vague prevention statistics. They want two-year reduced office visits, reduced hospital visits, reduced medication. So all of this is what they're after. And so more research, better funded studies, and again this data interoperability.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll get back to this conversation in just a moment. But if you're finding this episode helpful, here's a quick ask. Take a second to follow or subscribe to the Healthcare podcast wherever you're listening. And if someone else in your life would benefit from this episode or any of the others you've heard, please send it their way. All right, let's get back to it. Just to shift gears a bit and talk about prevention again. And I know, you know, we are where we are today and we've got to move forward from here somehow. But this can get a bit tricky when we start to think about prevention and treatment in its truest set. So just as a case in point, if I'm a uh you know a healthy individual who has health insurance and I don't want to pay for healthy food, it's either inconvenient or I don't like the taste or whatever, and I'm gonna wait for my health insurance to kick in to pay for that for me. Does that present a problem?

SPEAKER_01:

I wish that was the case that we could worry about that being a problem. Because there are a couple premises of your interesting question, which are that people could afford healthier food, but choose not to because they can lean on the crush of knowing it's going to be covered. And I'm not convinced that people can afford it in the first place. Second, it's that they could just say willy-nilly, give me some food, as opposed to here are the health indices that like I'm overweight or I have pre-diabetes, I need some help with food, which is generally all the provisions, everything that's covered by healthcare is to people who demonstrably need it and can use it. You know, children, the obesity rate among children is horrifying. And so it's so crucial to provide better school food, better meals. So I don't see it as being that much of a danger. But the but the main premise of the question is that people could afford better food, have access to it, and say, oh, the heck with it, I'm going to go out and get a more expensive phone plan because I can get it from insurance. But you know, there's another corollarity or argument, which is let's say diabetes management drugs. Those are pretty universally covered. First, we would prefer that a tiny fraction of the people who have diabetes get it because they knew more about healthy food and they were able to afford it and have it. But often I know people, friends of mine, who can afford whatever they want who say, well, because I'm on a lot of anti-cholesterol and diabetes controlling drugs, I just eat whatever I want. I mean, this is like there's lots of counterincentives to healthy behavior from what insurance covers. So I would love to see insurance covering a fresh, healthier food as a more general premise. The idea being people can learn to like it and use it because just leading people to fresh food doesn't mean they're going to eat it or prepare it. You have to make it culturally appropriate. You have to make it something they will like, they will use, and they will seek out.

SPEAKER_00:

And that takes us nicely onto GLP ones and how they fit into this whole picture around food and chronic disease. How do you see these two emerging fields progressing from here side by side? GLP ones and food is medicine.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm wildly confused about what to make of GLP ones for a number of reasons. First, the miraculous effect they have on quieting desires for demonstrably unhealthy food and making people actually want fresher food and protein and just want to go out and eat better food. I mean, it's just too good to be true. But what isn't too good to be true is how frequently those cravings and desires and so-called noise come back if they stop GOP1s. So, my main question about GOP ones is not the good effects they have while people are on them, but the fact that is it up to 40% stop within the first six months because they don't like the side effects. And very few patients go beyond 18 months, and there aren't enough long-term studies to know what effect it's going to have on people's lean muscle mass and actual uh fat levels. So I don't know what the long term levels are going to be and what it will do to food cravings. And so uh the best I can go with are you know the friends and researchers who say nutrition, education, better habits, and And exercise have to go hand in hand with GLP ones to try to foster new habits that can have a chance of surviving and lingering on after GLP 1s are discontinued.

SPEAKER_00:

And there is a whole episode or episode series we're going to do on GLP 1s because there's a lot more to it than people realize. So we'll come back to that maybe for another episode. But just to change gears again and address one of the other elephants in the room on this, chronic disease, especially those conditions that are related to poor eating, disproportionately impact the underserved communities. People who don't have access to these sorts of things cannot afford it, as you've said. When we introduce new things like this, it can sometimes widen inequality because it gets to the people who can get marginal benefit from it more than it gets to the people who can derive huge benefit from it because those barriers still exist in some form. How do we ensure that this gets to the people that need it most?

SPEAKER_01:

We might have to wait for a change of administration to see more equitable distribution of these solutions. Because SNAP benefits, the so-called farm to school program, which is a fabulous billion-dollar plus program that began during COVID and was extended and a way of getting fresher food to school children, which is fantastic. So that's been eliminated. There's a proposed 20% cut to SNAP benefits, food stamps, and nutrition assistance, rather cynically, not designed to go into effect until after the midterms, so it might not affect the vote. So the best case I could make is hoping that research increases, that the government right now is very concerned with rural health care. And rural places are often where people have to drive the longest to get to supermarkets. So if they made fresh food accessible and reduced the so-called food deserts, which are not just in cities, they are rural. And so if there's a big new focus on rural health and getting fresh food available to people in rural underserved areas, maybe that could begin providing data that will build a stronger national case for an administration that's more concerned with equitable distribution of benefits.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we live in strange times, as I've said a few times on this podcast. And of course, this also extends to health insurance coverage as well. If people are not covered in the first place, then they can't derive food as medicine benefits that are provided by their health insurers. So just moving along on to the bigger picture around how food as medicine could impact the food industry over the longer term, because you've got a really interesting dynamic going on here. We talked about GLP ones, but let's just put that to aside for a second and just talk about you have this emerging, let's call it a micro industry around providing healthier food that will need to meet a certain standard that can help reverse or improve disease. Can this have a ripple effect on the food industry at large, do you think?

SPEAKER_01:

I do think there can be a ripple effect. So far, there has not been increasing regulation from the current administration, but what there have been are Republican states trying to place restrictions on SNAP benefits so they can't be used for sugar-sweetened beverages. And more important, Texas passed this unbelievably ambitious bill that said if the European Union doesn't recognize as safe ingredients in various foods, we can't, we won't use state money to buy them for schools, for the healthcare system, for any place state dollars are used, or for SNAP benefits. If that holds, that is going to force reformulation across the food industry. The Texas bill is by far the most significant development since the new administration was voted into office. So far, USDA has said that it will indeed support all of the new states that are putting restrictions on using SNAP dollars for uh sugar, for sugar sweet beverages, then in some cases candy, which is a tiny contributor to candy, it's not so important. It's it's sodas, but they haven't signed yet. And so until those things start being enforced and we begin seeing the data after a year, we don't know yet. But if Texas really enacts this and says if European Union doesn't recognize that it's safe, because it's up to 200 ingredients that are the so-called grass loophole, grass generally recognized as safe, which in the US can be self-assertion and can be disguised in any number of ways. You can just put it in and ask for forgiveness later. In the European Union, you have to submit years of rigorous data before you can put any of these ingredients in. You're guilty until proven innocent, as opposed to innocent until proven guilty for these substances and a lot of the ingredients of so-called alter-processed food, which your listeners will remember does not have an agreed-upon definition so far. But if the Texas law holds, this is going to have a big national impact on huge food manufacturers.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's it's really interesting. Having lived in both Europe and the US, I just find that there is this generally universal rule that as consumers you have more protection in Europe. In the US, as a business, you seem to have more protection, but consumers have less protection. And I have to say, when it comes to food and health, I would prefer to have more protection as a consumer in general. Just to move us along, so Corby, before I ask you about where we think this is going to go in the next few years, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about?

SPEAKER_01:

There's a number of things I'd like to talk about, like how fantastic my food leaders fellows are and the change they're making in the food system. But I do have things to say about where we might be going with the current attention on food. So ask away.

SPEAKER_00:

Sounds good. So where could this take us in the next few years? You know, food as medicine is still a burgeoning space that is gonna impact the food industry, probably, as we've discussed, it's gonna impact healthcare, of course. Where is this going in your view?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm very encouraged by the new attention on food as medicine, even if it's used in a bunch of loose, sloppy ways that don't always involve the healthcare system as we'd like, and the full needs of a patient, and what one of our supporters, Artmore Institute of Health, calls full plate living, which is the overall health picture, lifestyle medicine, uh, various forms of thinking in terms of the entire patient's and family's needs. I really like the idea that people think of food as being medicine. They might think of it in terms of what I consider to be ridiculous ways, which is fancy supplements that are overpriced and do nothing, or precision nutrition based on very bogus individual readings of your DNA. But if it gets people, the good thing that the whole Maha movement is doing is it's getting attention on labels and it's making people look at what is in their food. Those of us in the so-called food movement who have been very concerned about fresher, more simply raised and produced food, you know, we're thrilled by this new attention, food labels and ingredients of food. We're not so thrilled that, you know, riboflavin is just a vitamin on all of the big names that get vilified and attacked when they're perfectly innocent things. So, you know, more literacy about these labels and how to read them would be great. But even at Texas, with its blanket rule, it's going to be so hard for food producers to figure out how to comply with. If they do that, and there's simpler, fresher food with fewer ingredients, and my big wish is lower sodium and a government requirement of lower sodium, not the voluntary restrictions that have been so ineffective when lowering sodium is such an easy win for the government. And it doesn't, if the entire industry is made to lower sodium, especially in, for example, soups and tomato sauces, you don't notice. It takes you 10 days or something ridiculously laughably short to accustom yourself and not miss salt. Lowered salt, it's so much better for high blood pressure, for strokes, for heart disease. It's such an easy win and it's just not being addressed by the government. So there's lots of good ways that more healthy food can be made available to the larger public.

SPEAKER_00:

Lots of progress, lots of work to do. So thank you for all the amazing work you're doing in this space. You and your team, Corby. Thank you for joining me. I'm sure our listeners have learned a lot from this episode and uh look forward to further future conversations.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks so much for having me.