Health Care by Food Focus


For decades, the American Heart Association has been a leader in nutrition research as well as expanding access to health care: two components critical to the adoption of food is medicine.

In a joint statement from Dr. Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Nancy Brown, Chief Executive Officer of the American Heart Association, they shared, “This Initiative will generate evidence and tools to help the health sector design and scale programs that increase access to nutritious food, improve both health and health equity, and reduce overall health care costs.”


Health Care by Food research focal points:


  • Effectiveness of food is medicine interventions: for example, the ability to positively influence health outcomes
  • Comparative effectiveness: tests of the relative effectiveness of interventions of different designs, duration and dose versus one another
  • Delineation of what type of programs work for which patients
  • Cost effectiveness of food is medicine interventions
  • Resolution of barriers to successful implementation of food is medicine programs

The initiative’s research agenda will proceed in stages:


  1. A research planning group convened by the AHA reviewed the literature to identify gaps and will be supporting secondary analyses of existing data and small trials that lay the groundwork for the initiative.

  2. The low rates of engagement, adherence and behavior change identified in much of the literature are driving an initial focus on using rapid-cycle short-term studies to test ways of identifying those gaps before moving to tests of longer-term behavior change and clinical outcomes.

  3. Funded projects will be supported using a Cooperative Studies Model, where task forces are in place to offer teams support in human-centered design, behavioral science, implementation science, community engagement, statistics and cost-effectiveness evaluations.

  4. Human centered design will be used to incorporate the lived experience of patients and practitioners in developing and testing ways of increasing program enrollment and engagement rates across diverse populations.

  5. The next phase of studies will be intermediate-length studies that build on the initial pilots and focus on increasing short-term and longer-term behavior change. By carefully testing likely components of longer-term interventions, these will help “de-risk” subsequent larger-scale trials.