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. 2024 Aug 26;19(2):314-319.
doi: 10.1177/15598276241275613. eCollection 2025 Feb.

Food is Medicine Interventions and Climate Change

Adam Bernstein  1 , Dana E Hunnes  2
Affiliations

Food is Medicine Interventions and Climate Change

Adam Bernstein et al. Am J Lifestyle Med. .

Abstract

Food is Medicine (FiM), also known as Food as Medicine, integrates food and nutrition interventions into health care delivery with the primary goal to improve population health and address diet-related health conditions. To date, there has been little focus on the relation between FiM and climate change despite FiM's involvement with 2 key drivers of climate change: health care delivery and food systems. FiM may be able to advance lifestyle medicine and population health objectives, as well as mitigate some of the health care and food-related drivers of climate change, by focusing on 4 key areas: (1) Increasing the absolute number and proportion of patients who follow plant-based diets; (2) reducing food waste; (3) reducing unnecessary health care utilization; and (4) lowering transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions related to food procurement. Measuring the ecological impact of FiM alongside clinical, utilization, and financial measures will require a different analytical approach than that used traditionally in health care. Ultimately, thoughtful, data-driven, and urgent interventions that span the food and health care sectors are needed to sustainably support not only FiM, but human, environmental, and planetary health as well.

Keywords: climate change; food; food is medicine; healthcare delivery; nutrition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dr Bernstein is an advisor to HealthLeap and holds equity in Tangelo. Dr Hunnes receives royalties from Cambridge University Press for her book Recipe For Survival: What You Can Do to Live a Healthier and More Environmentally Friendly Life (2022). Dr Hunnes has met with both Practice Greenhealth and Better Food Foundation as part of a University of California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) Health Nutrition-Department Sustainability Committee and participated in Practice Greenhealth’s marketing activities.

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