We have all heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.”

Eat your vegetables. Cut back on sugar. Watch your sodium. Eat more fiber.

Good advice. But that isn’t quite what people mean when they talk about Food Is Medicine.

Food Is Medicine takes the idea one step further: What if food were actually part of your medical treatment?

Imagine a doctor diagnosing you with diabetes, heart failure, kidney disease, or another condition in which your diet directly affects your health.

Instead of simply telling you to eat better, your healthcare provider could refer you to a nutrition professional who develops a food plan specifically for your medical condition. You could receive medically tailored meals, groceries selected to meet your nutritional needs, or even a prescription for healthy foods.

And in some programs, those meals or foods can actually be paid for through a health plan or government healthcare program.

That is very different from being told to make healthier choices.

It recognizes something that healthcare has historically struggled to address: telling someone what they should eat is not the same thing as making it possible for them to eat it.

A person with diabetes may know that they should eat differently. But can they afford the food? Can they get to the grocery store? Can they prepare it? Do they understand how their diet needs to change? And can they maintain those changes over time?

Food Is Medicine attempts to make nutrition part of the treatment itself.

The research is still developing, but studies have found associations between medically tailored meals and lower hospital and emergency department use, better medication adherence, and lower healthcare costs for some high-need populations.

And this raises an interesting question for those of us thinking about the future of healthcare:

If we are willing to pay for medication to manage a chronic disease, when should we also be willing to pay for the food that helps manage that disease?

That is the conversation behind Food Is Medicine. And it is a conversation worth listening to.