The Critical Need to Integrate “Food as Medicine” into Clinical Practice

Abstract

Charles Platkin, PhD, JD, MPH, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Food as Medicine & Longevity, is an expert in the fields of public health, nutrition and food policy. With his extensive experience in these areas, Dr. Platkin is passionate about bridging the gap between conventional medicine and the use of food as medicine in the prevention, treatment and management of disease. In this column, he shares the evolution of food as medicine from a concept to an essentiality and describes the many applications that health care professionals should be aware of and educated about for optimizing clinical practice.

The phrase “Food as Medicine” has been used for many years. How far have we come today in our understanding of what that truly means for a person’s health?

Charles Platkin, PhD, JD, MPH: The concept of food as medicine traces back centuries; however, as sophisticated pharmaceutical treatments emerged, Western medicine gradually shifted away from food-based interventions. Laboratory reductionism and patent-driven therapeutics crowded nutrition out of medical curricula and clinical practice, while pharmaceutical research attracted greater funding and prestige. Today, that pendulum has swung decisively back. Modern tools—high-resolution metabolomics, nutrigenomics, and microbiome sequencing—now reveal how dietary components modulate inflammation, insulin signaling, endothelial function, and epigenetic aging.

The scientific foundation of food as medicine began in 1747 when Scottish surgeon James Lind conducted the first clinical trial aboard HMS Salisbury. His controlled experiment demonstrated that citrus fruits could reverse scurvy—a fatal deficiency affecting sailors—long before vitamin C was discovered. This early work established that dietary interventions could operate with pharmaceutical-like precision.

The early 20th century marked a pivotal era in nutrition science. In 1905, Cornelius Adrianus Pekelharing found that animals required an unknown substance in milk for survival, suggesting the existence of essential but unidentified nutrients. In 1906, Frederick Gowland Hopkins proposed that diseases like scurvy and rickets were caused by “unsuspected dietetic factors.” In 1911, Casimir Funk isolated a compound from rice polishings that cured polyneuritis in pigeons and named it “vitamine,” later shortened to “vitamin.” By 1913, researchers had identified vitamin A (to prevent xerophthalmia) and vitamin D—which would prove crucial for preventing rickets and was isolated in 1922–1923. The anti-scurvy compound, later known as vitamin C or ascorbic acid, was isolated in 1928. The first commercially marketed multivitamin—multimineral in the United States—Nutrilite’s Vita-6—debuted in 1934. Clinicians soon recognized scurvy, beriberi, rickets, pellagra, and xerophthalmia as specific vitamin deficiencies, rather than diseases due to infections or toxins.¹ This period also ushered in widespread food fortification—vitamin D in milk, B-vitamins in flour, and iodine in salt—quietly embedding nutrient pharmacology into everyday meals.

The Rise of Medically Tailored Meal Programs

Perhaps no development better exemplifies food as medicine’s evolution than medically tailored meal (MTM) programs. While initially developed as critical support for people living with HIV, MTM programs have expanded to serve individuals with congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, uncontrolled diabetes, and cancer. These programs provide fully prepared, home-delivered meals designed by registered dietitians for individuals with complex health conditions.

The economic case is compelling. Deng et al. estimate that nationwide implementation of medically tailored meals could prevent more than 3.5 million hospitalizations and generate about $32.1 billion in health care savings in the first year after accounting for program costs.² A 2025 state-by-state analysis found that MTMs were net cost-saving in the first year in 49 states, with the largest savings seen in Connecticut ($6,299 per patient).²

Clinical studies show impressive outcomes: a 1020-participant study found MTM was associated with a 49% reduction in inpatient admissions, 72% fewer skilled nursing facility admissions, and 16% lower health care costs.³ A Medicare Advantage study of nearly 12,000 members found that receiving home-delivered meals after hospitalization reduced rates of 30-day rehospitalization and mortality.⁴

The integration of MTM programs into health care delivery systems demonstrates that food can indeed serve as medicine when properly researched, designed, targeted, and implemented within clinical care models—particularly crucial as conditions from anxiety to heart disease increasingly outstrip conventional medicine’s healing capacities.

While there are many organizations working to get the word out about food as medicine, there still seems to be a big gap in understanding of this concept in conventional medicine. What is the main goal of the Center for Food as Medicine and Longevity and what are some specific ways you are getting the word out?

Dr. Platkin: The gap between nutrition science and conventional medical practice represents one of the most significant missed opportunities in modern health care. While compelling evidence continues to mount—such as the Recipe4Health program’s demonstration that targeted produce prescriptions can reduce non-HDL cholesterol by 17 mg/dL and HbA1c by 0.37 percentage points in 2643 participants, or economic modeling showing that medically tailored meals could save a net $13.6 billion in the first year and $185 billion over 10 years²—the vast majority of physicians graduate from medical school with minimal training in nutrition. Less than one-third of U.S. medical schools provide even the recommended 25 hours of nutrition instruction, and approximately 18% require a dedicated nutrition course. This educational void leaves doctors ill-equipped to counsel patients on one of the most powerful therapeutic tools available.

The Center for Food as Medicine and Longevity (CFAM-L) was founded specifically to address this crisis. The disconnection between available science and clinical practice becomes even more urgent to address. Their main goal is elegantly simple yet profoundly ambitious: to bridge the gap between traditional medicine and the use of food as medicine in the prevention and treatment of disease.

More practically, CFAM-L aims to ensure that every clinician—and every patient they serve—has free, rapid access to the best available evidence on how foods, nutrients, and dietary supplements can prevent, manage, and even reverse chronic disease. This mission takes on greater urgency when considering that recent research shows food-as-medicine interventions remained effective even during the COVID-19 pandemic, proving their resilience in crisis conditions when health care systems were stretched to their breaking point.⁵

At the heart of CFAM-L’s mission lies their flagship project: the “Disease, Wellness, and Healthspan Evidence-Based Food as Medicine Research and Resource Guides.” This represents the world’s first comprehensive, continuously updated digital platform designed to provide rigorously researched, evidence-based guidance on the therapeutic use of food and dietary supplements. This groundbreaking initiative will create a freely accessible, mobile-responsive digital platform covering a comprehensive spectrum of health topics including:

Metabolic health: Diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease

Brain and mental health: Cognitive function, depression, anxiety, and neurodegeneration

Systemic health: Gut health, inflammation, immune resilience, and autoimmune conditions

Longevity and Healthspan: Cellular aging, muscle and bone strength, and skin health

What sets these guides apart is their commitment to scientific rigor and accessibility. Each guide will be meticulously curated and updated daily by PhD-level researchers and medical professionals, ensuring that health care providers and patients alike have access to the most current evidence. The platform will be translated into multiple languages and made freely available worldwide, democratizing access to evidence-based nutrition knowledge regardless of economic status or geographic location.

The guides will serve as living documents that evolve with the science, providing standardized clinical frameworks that health care teams can adapt for individual patients—including specific nutrient targets, therapeutic food lists with evidence ratings, supplement guidelines based on current research, and measurable outcome indicators. This infrastructure addresses the critical need for systematic, evidence-based nutrition interventions that can be delivered with the same confidence and precision as pharmaceutical treatments.

Transforming Clinical Practice through Evidence-Based Resources

CFAM-L’s approach is remarkably comprehensive. At the heart of their outreach strategy is their weekly research digest, which reaches over 170,000 subscribers with carefully curated, clinician-oriented content that distills the week’s most important nutrition studies into actionable clinical insights. This newsletter serves as a lifeline for busy practitioners who want to stay current with rapidly evolving nutrition science.

Beyond their newsletter, CFAM-L maintains an active speaking and events calendar that includes CME-accredited webinars, international summits, and specialized panels on critical topics such as ultra-processed foods, dietary supplements, and clinical culinary medicine. Most importantly for long-term impact, CFAM-L is working directly within the medical education system itself, embedding culinary-medicine modules and evidence-based nutrition guides directly into medical school curricula and advocating for mandatory nutrition competencies in medical training.

The organization recognizes that knowledge without accessibility is meaningless. They have committed to translating all their resources into major world languages and making everything freely available online, ensuring that their evidence-based guidance reaches health care providers and patients regardless of economic status or geographic location. Their comprehensive disease-specific guides represent a first-of-its-kind attempt to create a living repository of food-as-medicine knowledge that evolves as quickly as the science itself.

Through this multi-pronged approach—combining direct practitioner education, policy advocacy, media engagement, and systemic curriculum reform—CFAM-L is working to fundamentally reshape how the medical community views and utilizes nutrition.

Why did you start the center, and what are you hoping to achieve now and in the long run?

Dr. Platkin: My involvement in championing food policy at the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center, New York, NY, heightened my awareness of the food as medicine movement. I came to understand the intrinsic interconnectedness between food policy and the paradigm of food as medicine, and these realizations intertwined with the work I had been doing for two decades with Diet Detective.

A summit was organized around food as medicine at the Food Policy Center in 2017 and had over a thousand applicants for our 500 to 600 spots. It was a fantastic conference and sowed the seeds for the CFAM-L, a non-profit organization I started in 2019.

CFAM-L is the manifestation of my commitment to this endeavor. Our mission is to forge an unbreakable link between conventional medicine and the extraordinary potential of food as a healing force, both in the treatment and prevention of diseases. Each day we delve into the ever-growing body of research dedicated to the potential of food as medicine. We translate and disseminate peer-reviewed, evidence-based research to academia, researchers, physicians, physician extenders, individuals, caregivers, and family members of those diagnosed, as well as to the general public. These free, online guides use evidence-based research to dispel myths and pseudoscience and bridge the gap between traditional medicine and the impact of food on disease.

Our work encompasses a wide range of subjects, from the intricate role of specific foods or nutrients on various diseases and conditions to the profound impact of tailored treatments to food policy and international approaches to food as medicine. We hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards of academic and scientific rigor. Each piece of information undergoes meticulous scrutiny, and only the most trustworthy sources earn their place in our repository.

How can clinicians become more involved in this area of medicine?

Dr. Platkin: The transformation of clinical practice toward food-first approaches requires a fundamental shift in how we think about health care delivery, moving far beyond casual conversations about diet toward systematic, evidence-based interventions that rival pharmaceutical protocols in their rigor and effectiveness.

The foundation of this transformation begins with recognizing that physicians should not try to become nutrition experts overnight. Instead, the most impactful step clinicians can take is building collaborative relationships with registered dietitians and licensed nutrition practitioners, either by having them on staff or developing strong referral networks. This creates a care model where physicians can focus on diagnosis and medical management while dietitians provide the specialized nutritional expertise that complex dietary interventions require.

But this collaboration needs to be built on solid data, not guesswork. Rather than asking patients casual questions such as “How’s your diet?”, clinicians should implement validated dietary screening tools as part of their standard intake protocols—treating nutritional assessment with the same systematic rigor they apply to other clinical evaluations.

The clinical confidence to implement these approaches effectively comes through proper training, specifically lifestyle medicine certification through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. This certification equips physicians with evidence-based knowledge in using nutrition, physical activity, stress management, and other lifestyle interventions as primary therapeutic tools, allowing them to prescribe dietary interventions with the same precision and confidence as pharmaceutical treatments.

This is precisely where our Center for Food as Medicine & Longevity Disease, Wellness, and Healthspan Evidence-Based Food as Medicine Research and Resource Guides become transformational for clinical practice. Rather than replacing professional nutrition counseling, our guides enhance this collaborative care model by providing the continuously updated evidence base that both physicians and dietitians need to deliver innovative interventions.

From a clinical standpoint, what do you hope for the future in terms of how food as medicine is truly integrated into clinicians’ visits with patients?

Dr. Platkin: When I envision the future of health care, I see a fundamental transformation in how clinical encounters unfold—but this transformation enhances rather than replaces our current medical toolkit. This is emphatically NOT an anti-pharmaceutical approach, which would be a tremendous mistake. Instead, it’s about creating a truly integrative model where food as medicine becomes as systematic and evidence-based as any other therapeutic intervention.

Imagine walking into a clinic where nutritional assessment is as routine as checking blood pressure. The patient arrives having already completed validated dietary screening tools. During the encounter, the physician—certified in lifestyle medicine—reviews this comprehensive nutritional data alongside traditional clinical indicators. For a patient with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes, the conversation might sound like: “Your hemoglobin A1c is 7.8%, and I can see from your dietary assessment that ultra-processed foods comprise a significant portion of your caloric intake. I’m prescribing metformin to help manage your blood sugar immediately, and I’m also prescribing a specific evidence-based nutrition protocol that we will implement alongside your medication.”

This is not either-or medicine—it is both-and medicine. The metformin addresses immediate glycemic control, while the nutrition intervention targets the underlying dietary patterns contributing to the condition. Neither intervention is positioned as superior; both are essential components of comprehensive care.

To Contact Dr. Charles Platkin

Charles Platkin, PhD, JD, MPH

Founder and Executive Director

Center for Food as Medicine & Longevity

New York, New York

Website: https://foodmedcenter.org/

Today’s food as medicine represents a convergence of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge research, offering treatment potential that complements conventional medical approaches. The medical world needs to embrace nutrition and keep up with the latest information. We currently have 170,000 global subscribers to our comprehensive news and research digest. Each week we research, accumulate, curate, and synthesize the latest scientific evidence regarding disease, lifespan, and longevity as it relates to food as medicine. There are no advertisements, no cost, and it’s free to read.▪

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