Abbott and NACHC have announced the launch of a nationwide initiative to make nutritious food a more integrated part of healthcare, with the new NACHC and Abbott Food for Health Initiative aimed at helping Community Health Centers (CHCs) prevent and manage chronic diseases through nutrition.
The multi-year ‘food is medicine’ programme will provide CHCs with training, resources and a voluntary certification programme designed to build the infrastructure and expertise needed to incorporate nutrition into primary care.
The pair said that the initiative is expected to reach more than 1500 CHCs serving 52.3 million people, including one in seven Americans and one in three people living in rural America.
Building nutrition into primary care
The programme builds on work between Abbott and NACHC dating back to 2023.
In 2025, the organisations assessed CHCs across 37 states to understand how nutrition is currently being integrated into care and identify barriers to wider adoption.
The assessment found strong interest in Food for Health approaches, but highlighted fragmented funding, training, data collection and clinical implementation as challenges to scaling programmes nationally.
The new initiative comprises the following three elements:
- the Food for Health Learning Lab, which will provide structured education and implementation support
- a Food for Health Community of Practice for peer learning and knowledge sharing
- and Food for Health CORE (Certification of Readiness and Excellence), a voluntary certification programme recognising CHCs that develop the systems and capabilities required to advance nutrition-focused care.
The initiative forms part of NACHC’s newly established Center for Nutrition and Health, which aims to develop evidence, implementation models and policy approaches for integrating Food for Health into community-based healthcare.
Evidence and implementation remain key
Interest in Food is Medicine programmes is growing, although evidence for their effectiveness remains mixed.
A 2026 review in Annual Review of Medicine found promising evidence for improvements in clinical outcomes and healthcare utilisation, while highlighting limitations and differences between interventions and populations.
Food is Medicine approaches can include medically tailored meals, healthy-food prescriptions and produce prescriptions.
Research has suggested that some interventions may reduce healthcare utilisation and costs, particularly among people with complex, diet-sensitive chronic conditions.
For nutraceutical and nutrition companies, the initiative highlights a broader shift towards integrating nutrition into healthcare delivery, rather than treating dietary support as a separate consumer-health intervention.
Its emphasis on workforce training, clinical implementation and evidence generation could also provide a framework for evaluating how nutrition products and services can support preventive and chronic disease care.
