National Resources

The following reports provide overviews of recent research in the impact of food interventions on health:

• Food Is Medicine Research Action Plan (2022 - Aspen Institute, provides both a summary of recent research activity and a proposed priority list for future research)

• Food Insecurity Interventions in Health Care Settings: A Review of the Evidence (S.I.R.E.N., 2020)

• Interventions Addressing Food Insecurity in Health Care Settings: A Systematic Review (Annals of Family Medicine, 2019)

• Review of Evidence for Health-Related Social Needs Interventions (Commonwealth Fund) - includes an ROI (Return on Investment) calculator.

• Key Drivers for Food Security and Health Outcomes (Feeding America, 2021)

• Massachusetts: Cost of Hunger Report - includes a literature review of studies connecting food insecurity to costs across different domains, predominately health care

• True Cost of Food - includes health along with environmental and workforce measures (Rockefeller Foundation, 2021)

• Food As Medicine Report and Food As Medicine Research Guides: Master List (Center for Food As Medicine, 2021)

Some useful databases for looking up individual peer-reviewed studies include:

• UC San Francisco - Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network / SIREN (U San Francisco) 

  • See also this 2021 tool from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) that provides visualization mapping of the evidence in the SIREN database.

• Links to Peer Reviewed Food is Medicine Research in the U.S. (CHLPI, 2020)

• American College of Lifestyle Medicine

• Food Is Medicine Coalition - Medically Tailored Meals interventions  (see also this brief bibliography from our own MTM literature review)

• This list is not focused on nutrition research, but some places to find nutrition research include:

• CDC - Nutrition Collection 

  • National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NAHNES)

• National Institutes for Health - Office of Nutrition Research

• Nutrition & Obesity Policy Research & Evaluation Network

• Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics

• Friedman School of Nutrition (Tufts)

For report collections geared towards both research and policy recommendations:

• Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation - Harvard Law

• Food is Medicine - MA - Collection of reports and white papers 

• Tufts Food Is Medicine - Collection focused on policy papers

• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - Healthy Food Access Research

• Children’s HealthWatch and Rudd Center - both focused on childhood nutrition

• Feeding America - Hunger and Health  

• CMS / CMMI Accountable Health Communities study & evaluations

For research focused on food insecurity - not necessarily with a health care connection - some key national resources are:

• US Department of Agriculture - National research on household food insecurity, with over 20 years of data and trends by state.

• Food Research and Action Center - Anti-hunger advocacy, focused on participation in federal food programs

• Map the Meal Gap - An interactive data tool from Feeding America