Food is Medicine Convening

Grantee: Food & Society at the Aspen Institute

Year Funded: 2024

Amount: $130,000

Report Status: In Process

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Project Summary: Food & Society at The Aspen Institute proposes hosting a pilot convening workshop with American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) to elevate the Food is Medicine research and practice happening across the country and to simultaneously facilitate the entrance of new organizations and communities into the Food is Medicine movement. This pilot will be the start of a series of workshops built off the fully updated Food is Medicine Research Action Plan, released in the spring of 2024, which covers the full breadth of peer-reviewed food is medicine research, outlining its promise to address a broad swath of health issues. The forthcoming Food is Medicine Best Practices Guide will be informed by the Research Action Plan’s recommendations as well as a series of workshops to be held over the course of 2024 and early 2025.

The topic of the pilot workshop, the role of Food is Medicine in diabetes prevention and management, will take place in Tulsa, OK. The intersection of Food is Medicine patients and patients with Type 2 diabetes is well documented. This workshop is ripe for creating an action plan that those working on diabetes can use to understand and deploy Food is Medicine tools as part of a broader prevention and management strategy. Very robust research shows the efficacy of using food as medicine to both treat and reverse insulin resistance, attaining T2D remission.

Food & Society and ACLM will form a Workshop Series Planning Committee, focused first on the pilot event in Tulsa. Among the advisors we will invite include Marianna Wetherill, assistant professor of health promotion sciences at the College of Public Health, University of Oklahoma Tulsa and representatives of Blue Zones and Ardmore Institute of Health. This group will support efforts to identify subject matter experts, invitees, and compelling, relevant content.

Food & Society and ACLM workshop series, like the Food is Medicine Research Action Plan, will center equity, the role of communities, and the health care-community nexus that is central to the definition of Food is Medicine and lifestyle medicine.