Diet-sensitive diseases exact a profound human cost, leading to millions of premature deaths each year and diminishing quality of life through preventable conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Families bear the burden of chronic illness through lost productivity, caregiving strain, and financial hardship. Organizations with missions to serve communities and improve health struggle to meet overwhelming need while responding within regulatory environments and budgetary limits.
At a societal level, these diseases drive more than a trillion dollars annually in healthcare spending and lost economic output, making poor nutrition one of the nation’s most costly and preventable public health crises.
Every day, clinicians see how deeply food impacts their patients’ lives. Nutrition cannot be an afterthought; it is a fundamental driver of health, affecting everything from blood sugar control to mental health, the gut microbiome to general well-being, and wound healing to recovery after hospitalization. When patients lack access to nourishing food, drugs and devices can only go so far. Integrating FIM into clinical practice recognizes that food is a core part of treatment, prevention, management, and long-term health.
Health care payer and provider organizations can take action to address these challenges by reimagining healthy food as an integral part of the treatment of diet-sensitive conditions.
The State of Diet-Related Chronic Disease in the United States
Dariush Mozaffarian, Director, Food is Medicine Institute
Benefits of FIM for Payers, Providers, or Employers
The case for health care payers and providers to focus on nutrition is becoming increasingly compelling, both to improve patient outcomes and reduce health disparities.
Better Outcomes
Nutrition interventions work. From diabetes control to cardiovascular health, evidence shows that food-based approaches improve health, reduce hospitalizations and emergency department visits, and improve quality of life.
Patient-Centered Care
Clinicians know that food choices shape health journeys. Yet for too many patients, the path to healthy eating is blocked by multiple barriers they cannot overcome alone. A nationally representative survey of US adults has shown that barriers like cost, time, lack of access to grocery stores, and confusion about what “healthy” really means or how to cook healthy foods are common and systemic. Health care is positioned to help address these challenges by making access to affordable, nutritious food and education part of the standard of care for the right patients in the right circumstances.
Advancing Health Equity
Disparities in nutrition and diet-sensitive diseases are well documented by income, education, geography, race, ethnicity, and disability. Programs that expand the ability of individuals to eat a healthy diet in underserved communities can close these gaps and help achieve health equity. The health care system has a role to play in closing these gaps by integrating FIM programs into the care of such at-risk, historically marginalized patients.
Pride in Work
Clinicians want this change. In a 2024 study, most clinicians said that healthy food should be treated as part of medical care, and that they are eager for practical tools to help patients achieve it.
More Efficient Use of Health Care Resources
When patients eat well, they stay well. FIM programs consistently demonstrate cost effectiveness or even cost savings by preventing complications and reducing utilization for the highest risk and the highest cost patients.
What is FIM? ▶