McGovern leads bipartisan effort to support, expand ‘food is medicine’ initiatives

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.”

In 2022, McGovern secured the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in over 50 years. That conference directly preceded the HHS creating the Food is Medicine initiative. “Out of that conference came a strategy to not only deal with food insecurity, hunger, but also how to better connect our health care systems with nutrition,” said McGovern.

McGovern is active at the local level, too; he has been a participant in Monte’s March, an annual charity walk in western Massachusetts, for 13 years. “Every year we walk 43 miles,” said McGovern. “Don’t ask me how, but I can still do it. And we raised nearly a million dollars in the last march, and that all goes to people in western Massachusetts.”

“I do that because I think it is unacceptable that anybody in the richest country in the history of the world is hungry or food insecure. We have 46 million Americans who don’t know where the next meal is going to come from,” said McGovern. “We all should be ashamed. And the government is not living up to the moment. This Trump administration has cut $200 billion in SNAP and other nutrition programs, and it’s god awful.”

McGovern is vocal about Republican inaction — or harmful action — when it comes to nutrition, food aid and health care.

“Investing in those programs does more to enhance our national security than all the bombs that we invest in … I’ve traveled all around the world, and I’ve seen some of the worst poverty you can imagine. I’ve never encountered a mother or father or a hungry child ever asking me for another bomb, but they’ve asked for food,” said McGovern.

James Noyes writes for the Gazette as part of the Boston University State House News program.