Repeating the mantra that “food is medicine,” U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern is leading a bipartisan effort urging congressional appropriators to make healthy food and good nutrition a core pillar of the nation’s health care system.
“I believe that food is a human right. And I also believe that the United States has kind of lagged behind other countries in terms of making the connection between good nutrition and better health outcomes,” said McGovern in an interview with the Gazette.
He continued, “Bad diets result in heart disease, bad diets can result in diabetes, bad diets can result in high blood pressure and I can go right down the list. We have senior citizens who are in the emergency room because they’re taking their medication on an empty stomach, because they can’t afford their medicine and their food.”
That’s why McGovern recently drafted a letter, signed by 46 House members from both sides of the aisle, asking appropriators to “provide essential resources and timely guidance to better integrate nutrition into our health care system” as part of the fiscal year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies funding bill.
“Good nutrition is fundamental for restoring and maintaining health,” the legislators wrote. “The costs of treating diet-related disease are crushing healthcare systems, federal and state budgets, private employers, and our economy… The combined healthcare spending and lost productivity from suboptimal diets and food insecurity are estimated to exceed $1.1 trillion each year.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) developed a Food is Medicine (FiM) initiative in 2023 to create a strategy to “reduce nutrition-related chronic diseases and food insecurity to improve health in the United States,” including “diet-related research” and efforts that will increase access to Food is Medicine initiatives, according to the HHS.
In the March 26 letter, legislators called for around $3.5 billion in additional funding to be directed to various FiM programs, including medically-tailored meals, groceries and produce prescriptions, which are customized for people with severe, complex or chronic conditions, and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, which provides FiM programs and HIV primary care to people living with HIV/AIDS.
“What this letter is about is us putting some money on the table so we can move ahead on some of these initiatives,” said McGovern. “The bottom line is, we’ve got to put some money on the table here, and we have to make this a priority.”
In addition to providing potentially life-saving nutritional supplements, expanding and supporting FiM initiatives could save the country, and individual states, money on unnecessary health care spending.
“If we do this right, we’re going to save a boatload of money in avoidable health care costs,” McGovern said. “Health care costs are skyrocketing, and rather than going to people and telling them that ‘in order to get good health care, you got to pay more,’ how about we find ways to control costs through getting them access to better nutrition?”
Healthy food initiatives have been one of McGovern’s primary political focuses for more than two decades; in 2001, he introduced legislation creating the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which has “provided lifesaving food” for “over 31 million of the world’s most vulnerable children in 48 different countries,” according to McGovern’s office.
In 2008, McGovern launched the bipartisan House Hunger Caucus, and in 2018 he created the bipartisan Food is Medicine Working Group to “highlight the costs related to hunger and promote health-focused research into access to fresh fruits and vegetables.”