Food & Friends recently had the opportunity to demonstrate our newest medically tailored meal, the Sunshine Bowl, for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Healthy Eating Rx: Improving Nutrition Through Health Care event.
Watch the video to see Food & Friends colleagues Becca Kahn, MA, RD, LD, nutrition services director, Rasheed Abdurrahman, executive chef, and Trevor Mullings, associate executive chef, demonstrating how we design and prepare this nourishing meal tailored for people with life-challenging illnesses.
The official definition of Medically Tailored Meals (MTM’s) from the Food Is Medicine Coalition is as follows:
Medically tailored meals are delivered to individuals living with severe illness through a referral from a medical professional or healthcare plan. Meal plans are tailored to the medical needs of the recipient by a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN), and are designed to improve health outcomes, lower cost of care, and increase patient satisfaction.
At Food & Friends, we design, prepare, and home-deliver 12 different medically tailored meal plans. Each plan includes a variety of delicious, freshly prepared, medically tailored meals. We also provide one-on-one nutrition counseling with our team of registered dietitians, and connect our neighbors to a compassionate community of caring volunteers who home-deliver the meals. The goal is to make sure our neighbors with life-challenging illnesses have the specific nutrition they need, and are supported by a caring community.
The results are clear: improved physical and mental health for patients, fewer emergency room visits, and system-wide healthcare cost savings for all. While Food & Friends has no income requirement for our services, the people we serve are most often socially, culturally, and economically diverse. The provision of medically tailored meals, combined with a compassionate community of staff and volunteers, is a direct intervention that helps address nutrition inequities. 93% of the neighbors Food & Friends served in 2023 said they would recommend our meals and services to family and friends.
The Healthy Eating Rx: Improving Nutrition Through Health Care event covered policies that address increasing nutrition education and access to Food is Medicine interventions for those with diet-related diseases. Speakers included; Bill Frist, MD, former majority leader, U.S. Senate, Dan Glickman, former secretary of agriculture, Donna E. Shalala, former secretary of HHS, Ann Veneman, former secretary of agriculture, Kofi Essel, MD, FIM director, Elevance Health and Lauri Wright, Ph.D., president, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND).