By adopting healthy food purchasing policies, health care organizations are demonstrating a commitment to “first, do no harm” and treating food and its production and distribution as preventive medicine that protects the health of patients, staff, and communities.
Sign the Healthy Food Pledge!
Health care facilities can simply download the Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge (pdf) and follow the instructions. Visit the Health Care Without Harm website for other immediate actions and to join their Food Listserve.
http://www.noharm.org/us_canada/issues/food/
Take the Balanced Menus Challenge!
Commit to a 20 percent reduction in meat and poultry purchases over 12 months.
http://www.noharm.org/us_canada/issues/food/menus_challenge.php
Related Organizations
Health Care Without Harm
Assisting hospitals in developing and adopting healthier food policies, organizing farmers markets, procuring local and organic food as well as anti-biotic and hormone free agricultural products. They host an active listserve and issue quarterly newsletters. They also organize FoodMed, a conference dedicated to healthy food in healthcare.
http://www.noharm.org/us_canada/issues/food/
Prevention Institute
Working on several projects highlighting the different ways that the environment affects health, including the connection between sustainable agriculture and public health, improving community and school environments to encourage healthier eating and more physical activity, and how the built environment impacts health disparities in low-income neighborhoods.
http://www.preventioninstitute.org
Resources
Cultivating Common Ground: Linking Health and Sustainable Agriculture
The Prevention Institute
http://www.preventioninstitute.org/environment.html
Environmentally Preferable Purchasing: Food Service Credit Technical Briefing (2008)
16 pp. Health Care Without Harm. This technical brief covers the Food Service credits in the Green Guide, offering background, resources and case studies of hospitals engaged in transforming their food service programs. http://www.noharm.org/europe/reports/2009/jan/rep2009-01-23.php
Healthcare Design, June 2006
Healthy Food in Healthcare, by Stacy Malkin
http://www.healthcaredesignmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=9B6FFC446FF7486981EA3C0C3CCE4943
&nm=Articles&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791
&tier=4&id=D1FBA16722B248DEA1CF5E512564E5D3
Marketwatch.com, July 8, 2009
Health on the hospital menu: Forget bland and fattening; organic and nutritious are new food service staples, by Anya Martin
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hospitals-give-healthy-food-more-operating-room
Nutrition and Food Production Systems: A Role for Health Care Institutions
A policy brief from the Science and Environmental Health Network that outlines the case for health care organizations’ involvement in food production systems. Specific concerns addressed include antibiotic resistance, foodborne illness, and environmental health.
Download PDF NO LINK PROVIDED
Onearth, May, 2009
Hospitals Helping to Build a Healthy Food System and Global Health, by Jamie Harvie PE
http://www.onearth.org/node/1114
Redefining Healthy Food: An Ecological Approach to Food Production, Distribution, and Procurement (2006)
Jamie Harvie PE. 27 pp. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Center for Health Design and Health Care Without Harm.
NO LINK PROVIDED
Time Magazine, May 15, 2006
Healthier Hospital Food, by Margot Roosevelt
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1194018,00.html
