Food as Medicine Is a Tricky Business That Doesn’t Always Work

Slogans are great. They serve as a tool for selling products, ideas, and, yes, even policies, because they stick with people and can attract support. But they don’t always hold up well under scrutiny and over time. As slogans go, Food as Medicine is having a good run. But it is wearing a little thin because food as medicine is such a broad concept that it doesn’t always work everywhere it pops up.

A case in point arose in JAMA Internal Medicine this week. Nav Persaud and colleagues tested a voucher program for healthy foods in persons with diabetes and food insecurity. This is a classic food as medicine intervention. But they found that it has no effect on diabetes control, even though it did lead to an increase in self-reported fruit and vegetable consumption.

Hazardous Generalizations

The finding of no effect in this study should not tell us that every intervention under the big umbrella of food as medicine doesn’t work. Merely that this one did not. It’s a tricky business to try to make a food program have the kind of effect that medicines have on a chronic disease.

But nonetheless, well-designed programs to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition can have great value. But perhaps comparing them to medicine – as the food as medicine slogan does – is fundamentally unwise. Food and nutrition do not have to be a substitute for medicine to be important for health. They can stand on their own.

Variable Effectiveness

On top of that, the broad slogan of Food as Medicine lumps together an incoherent collection of programs with wildly different effectiveness. Perhaps sweeping generalization about food as medicine can only detract from the idea that food and nutrition are important for health. Not all programs that carry the banner of food as medicine have a demonstrable benefit for health.

Click here for the article in JAMA Internal Medicine. For a new review of food voucher programs, click here. For a more enthusiastic view, click here.

Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tablets, photograph by Magicpiano, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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October 26, 2025