The integration of nutrition and health through "food is medicine" strategies is of rapidly growing interest to healthcare system, payers, patients and policymakers. Medically tailored meals are fully prepared, nutritionally customized, and generally home-delivered healthy meals for individuals living with advanced and costly diet-sensitive conditions, such as diabetes, heart failure, end-stage renal disease, HIV and cancer.

In recent years, growing evidence has supported the benefits of medically tailored meals on reducing hospitalizations and emergency department admissions and lowering healthcare costs. Medically tailored meal interventions represent promising new strategies for improving the outcomes of patients with diet-related chronic disease.

We are at a critical time to make policy advancements to fully integrate food and nutrition into healthcare and the policy opportunities are unprecedented. This session reviews the evidence of medically tailored meals on improving patients' health outcomes, especially for patients with cancer and discuss the policy implications and opportunities for integrating food and nutrition into healthcare.