Show 1459: Food Is Medicine: Should Your Doctor Be Prescribing Produce? from the archives

One of the most basic pillars of health is good nutrition. A range of eating patterns might all be considered balanced diets, but in general people do better when they eat less processed foods and more whole foods. Vegetables and fruits play a starring role in at least two diets that have been studied extensively, the DASH diet and the Mediterranean diet. Americans might be healthier if we followed these eating plans, but fresh veggies can be pricey. If your doctor were prescribing produce, would your insurance plan cover it? Might this make healthful eating more of a practical possibility?

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Food Is Medicine

Increasingly, healthcare providers are recognizing the critical role of diet in the development of chronic disease. An entire movement is organizing around the concept of Food Is Medicine, both for prevention and for treatment of conditions like diabetes, obesity and heart failure. Scientists have shown that diet makes a difference. Studies have confirmed what many of our grandparents or great-grandparents intuited. On the other hand, translating that knowledge into action that benefits patients has been difficult. One important barrier is the cost of groceries. Our interview with Peter Skillern and Dr. Seth Berkowitz focused on access to fresh fruits and vegetables for lower-income people in North Carolina. Since we spoke with them, we read about an intriguing effort to provide culturally and medically appropriate food for heart failure patients in Navajo Nation.

Traditional Foods for Better Heart Health

Food insecurity goes hand in hand with medical complications, as the authors of a new study note (JAMA Internal Medicine, July 27, 2026). The results demonstrate that making sure people with heart failure have the food they need can cut hospitalizations. The Diné (Navajo) community helped design the intervention, named Medically Utilized Tailored Traditional Foods to Optimize Nutrition in Heart Failure (MUTTON-HF, probably a reference to a favored food among the sheep-raising Navajo).

According to the investigators,

“We partnered with local Navajo farmers and ranchers to source meat and produce and with Tocabe, a Native-run kitchen, to produce the medically tailored frozen meals, practicing whole animal utilization and Native first supply chain when possible.”

The study provided intensive support, including refrigerators and microwaves to families that did not have them. The researchers  recruited 206 heart failure patients at two Indian Health Service sites in Navajo Nation to participate. A total of 206 patients were randomly assigned to receive culturally and medically tailored meals along with their healthcare or to get usual care without meals. The meals were designed to follow DASH (Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension) sodium-restricted guidelines. For example, one breakfast provided consisted of blue corn meal, blueberries, bison sausage, potatoes and butternut squash. A sample lunch included mutton, steamed corn, blue corn meal and wild rice. People in the control group, who got no me