Food for Health Levers
Nourish’s Food For Health leverage points demonstrate how food, currently a relatively small part of health care spending, can have an outsize impact on what builds health.
Just as when you begin to pull on the edges of a tablecloth and the rest comes with it, pulling at one food for health lever tugs at the others.
Health care has a tremendous opportunity to practice anchor leadership: harnessing their mission, long-term presence, and many resources to “anchor” and amplify the connections between our food, health, social and ecological systems.
Levers are “the places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
~ Donella Meadows
Nourish Levers
Indigenous Foodways
Food is a pathway to Reconciliation. A powerful starting point is acknowledging and suspending the dominant, colonial Western bias and cultivating curiosity about Indigenous wisdom.
Policies and practices are needed, which address the history of systemic and institutional racism that continues to harm Indigenous communities.
This journey begins with understanding the history of the land we share, building relationships with local Elders or Knowledge Keepers, investing in cultural competency training for health care professionals and staff, and evolving toward greater Indigenous control over Indigenous health.
Bring Food into Healing
Delicious and nutritious meals go a long way to improve the patient experience. Research and practice tell us that patients care a lot about the food served to them and it significantly impacts their recovery and wellness. However, changing the patient tray and meal experience is not a simple task.
Patient menus need to be reimagined as an opportunity three-times daily to provide comfort and health. To do so, they need to better respond to cultural and other food preferences, ideally offering choice about when and what to eat to best support healing. Hospital cafeterias and food environments can be transformed to align with the health-promoting mission and offer staff and visitors healthy, sustainable options.
Values-Based Procurement
Health care procurement can powerfully shift from buying food based on lowest cost to instead assess best value by considering where food is sourced from and how it’s produced and prepared.
There are many facets of sustainability in bringing the healthiest food to patients, staff, families and communities. In addition to nutrients, these include local economic multipliers, sustainable production and regenerative agriculture, fair labour practices, and minimal processing, amongst others. Shifts to more plant-forward, cultural and sustainable menus will help to support a diversified and more resilient food system and value chains, for example by supporting businesses owned by women and by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).
Reduce Food-Related GHGs
The EAT-Lancet Commission report makes clear that a global shift towards sustainable diets is essential as our current trajectory takes us far beyond the bounds of our planetary systems.
We need to redefine healthy food beyond its nutritional qualities alone and consider sustainability, from field to plate to waste. Supporting Indigenous foodways that bring people into relationship with the land is an essential part of understanding sustainable diets.
Research in Quebec found that food-related GHGs contributed 11% of overall emissions; making plant-forward menu changes can have an outsize impact.
Building Health Upstream
Access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food is a fundamental determinant of health. Food insecurity is related to poorer health outcomes, and unhealthy diets–across all income brackets–continue to drive growing rates of chronic illness putting unsustainable pressure on our health care system.
Investing in food-based interventions, such as medically tailored meals and groceries and produce prescriptions, promote clinical outcomes and build health upstream.
The health sector has a pivotal role to tackle the urgent challenge of food insecurity, addressing an issue of systemic oppression. We don’t stint to provide heart medication when it’s needed, a bold investment in food would have an outsize impact.
Cultivate Leadership Across Systems
Health care organizations can be anchors of their community’s well-being when they harness their mission, budget, people, and reputational credibility to advance planetary health.
Food offers ways for health care institutions being the first-movers to use their influence and resources–leadership, community partnerships, clinical pathways, food environments and food purchasing–helping communities to take action on climate, equity and well-being.
Action on food will be a key strategy to meet the challenge of delivering net-zero, sustainable health care and sustaining human and planetary health.
