Food is Medicine Interventions to Improve Health

Barriers to healthy eating lead to substantial health harms, but clinicians have historically had few tools to help patients address them. To fill this gap, food is medicine (FIM) interventions seek to improve the prevention or management of specific clinical conditions through the provision of healthy food resources and other strategies to address barriers to healthy eating. This article describes the rationale for and major types of FIM and reviews key studies and developments in the field. We note that the evidence to date shows promising benefits for FIM, including for both clinical outcomes and health care utilization, but it also has meaningful limitations and unexpected findings. We discuss results from evaluations of large-scale FIM implementation, particularly in Medicaid, and why FIM studies may have been more or less effective in different contexts. We conclude with several implementation learnings that can guide researchers going forward.