Food and diet are leading contributors to death and disease in the United States. Americans are getting fatter, for example, and diabetes and other diet-related disease is epidemic. Experts warn this generation of children, more obese than ever, may be the first to live less long than their parents.

Especially for children, the cheapest, most available food seems to be of poor nutritional quality, and produced with a surfeit of pesticides, antibiotics and energy. These characteristics reflect not only prevailing farming practice, but also choices we have made and cemented in our agricultural policies, school funding decisions and zoning laws.

More and more, physicians and hospitals are urging the purchase of healthier food to nourish themselves, staff and patients and to combat disease, while supporting more sustainable agriculture. Fast food franchises haunt the campuses of 38% of the nation's top hospitals, according to one recent survey. In March 2004, physicians joined together to issue a nutrition Call to Action:

"We believe that the population of North America is in great nutritional peril…The food served in schools, hospitals, and senior facilities promotes obesity, chronic inflammation, and accelerated development of age-related diseases ... It must be a highest priority that our medical centers serve healthy food…How can the medical profession encourage people to make better dietary choices if it cannot itself exemplify healthy eating habits?"

By supporting sustainable agriculture and healthier food in healthcare, hospitals can address a major cause of disease. A new IATP report, Healthy Food, Healthy Hospitals, Healthy Communities, highlights hospitals doing this work.

Kaiser Permanente
In 2004, the nation's largest non-profit health system announced its intent to fashion an overarching food policy. At least eight Kaiser hospitals run farmers' markets on site. Writing about one of them in the Kaiser medical journal, Kaiser physician Preston Maring, MD notes, "The Oakland Medical Center's Farmers' Market supports the KP focus on healthier eating and weight management." He adds, "What could be more closely related to health than what we eat?"

Health Care Without Harm
As part of the global coalition, Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), we work hard to encourage the health care industry to become more sustainable, and to reduce its negative impacts on community health. HCWH does this, in part, by encouraging the purchase of healthier, more sustainably-produced food, including meat and dairy produced without routine antibiotics.

In their food purchases, hospitals and other healthcare facilities can play a critical role to help keep antibiotics effective. Science demonstrates that antibiotic overuse in food animals contributes to the global crisis of drug-resistant infections in humans, which drives up healthcare costs and kills people. HCWH passed a policy statement supporting healthcare efforts to "initially reduce and in the longer term eliminate the procurement of meat, fish, and dairy products produced with routine, non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics." HCWH also has developed a sample guideline for exactly how a hospital might implement meat and other food purchasing so as to reduce the unnecessary use of important antibiotics in agriculture.