Food as Medicine: Can What You Eat Replace the Medicine Bottle? - Adam Devito, Monj, and Maggie Biscarr, Food-as-Medicine SME

Food as medicine is not a new idea. Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda have long treated diet as central to both prevention and healing. What is relatively new is the scale of interest from employers, health systems, retailers, and technology platforms, all converging on the premise that what people eat is a clinical lever worth pulling. On a recent episode of "I Don't Care" with Dr. Kevin Stevenson, Adam DeVito, founder of Monj, and Maggie Biscarr, a food-as-medicine subject matter expert, traced how this movement developed, why it is gaining momentum now, and what it will take to make lasting behavioral change stick.

Biscarr, whose background spans social work, SNAP enrollment, and nearly seven years at PepsiCo, offered a historical framework for why food and healthcare became so disconnected in the first place. Post-industrialization, scale, shelf life, and cost drove food production decisions, while healthcare pivoted toward pharmaceutical and acute-care models. The result was two siloed systems that rarely spoke to each other, even as rates of obesity, diabetes, and diet-related chronic disease climbed alongside the cost burden on payers and consumers. Public health efforts like the food pyramid acknowledged a connection between diet and health in the 1970s, but without meaningful clinical guidance attached.

Early fruit and vegetable incentive programs, championed by organizations like Wholesome Wave and Fair Food Network, began building an evidence base by doubling SNAP benefits at farmers markets and grocery retailers. Biscarr herself helped develop and launch one of the first large-scale versions of these programs, a public-private partnership involving AARP Foundation, UnitedHealthcare, Kroger, and state departments of health and agriculture across Tennessee and Mississippi, with Vanderbilt University as the evaluation partner. That demonstration project became a forerunner of what is now the federally funded GusNIP program. Around the same time, medically tailored meal providers began generating research that convinced some payers, including Medicaid waiver programs and Medicare, to cover food-based interventions for high-risk patients.

Technology and employer entry points are accelerating the field

Biscarr noted that recent advances in technology have materially changed the pace of progress. The ability to reach patients and consumers at the grocery store, at home, online, and at work, and then track outcomes and integrate data across systems, has opened new channels for behavior change that simply did not exist a decade ago. Employers and retailers, she observed, now have real opportunity to influence the people they serve at the moments that matter most. That expanding aperture, from emergency food access to nutrition security to metabolic health at scale, is what drew her into an advisory role with Monj and several other organizations operating at the intersection of food, health, and workforce well-being.

DeVito's path to founding Monj ran through classical French culinary training, a decade-long role as Kraft's first executive chef and head of new concept development, and a subsequent stint as managing partner at innovation consultancy Sterling Rice Group, where he led health and wellness strategy for major food and beverage companies. Depth research he conducted with people carrying significant excess weight changed his perspective on what the real problem was. "I don't think that we really have a weight or weight loss problem in this country," he said. "It's really about a behavioral operating system problem." The insight that followed, informed by behavioral science he encountered while building a play-research company, was that extrinsic motivation produces only short bursts of change, while intrinsic inspiration, rooted in autonomy, confidence, and genuine enjoyment, can compound over time.

Monj's case: joy and whole foods as the mechanism, not a side effect

Monj was built on the premise that healthy eating does not require sacrificing taste or satisfaction. DeVito described the platform's aim as creating lasting metabolic health through cooking, community, and food, deliberately shifting the framing away from compliance-driven nutrition programs. He pointed to whole foods as inherently "presence of positives," dense with prebiotic fiber, anti-inflammatory compounds, and flavor, without requiring reformulation or label engineering. Cooking itself, he argued, carries therapeutic value: "When we put our hands on whole foods, it regulates our nervous system. It literally reduces inflammation from the inside out. It improves cognitive performance and reduces mental fog." The field has even developed a formal name for this, culinary therapy, recognizing that the act of preparing food is itself a healing practice.

The conversation also addressed GLP-1 medications, which both guests framed as a significant but incomplete solution. DeVito acknowledged their power as metabolic interventions, noting they are moving beyond weight loss toward reducing systemic inflammation, but he argued that drugs alone cannot sustain the change they initiate. Behavior determines whether biological shifts last, and without rewiring those behaviors in ways that feel joyful rather than punitive, dependency loops form. That gap, between pharmaceutical intervention and durable lifestyle change, is precisely where Biscarr sees food-as-medicine platforms like Monj becoming most relevant to employers trying to manage long-term workforce health costs. The two connected through a mutual contact at a conference, and both described the synergy as a natural fit given the overlapping arcs of their careers.

What emerges from this conversation is a picture of a field that has been decades in the making and is now reaching an inflection point. The evidence base for specific food-as-medicine interventions, medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, nutrition incentive programs, is established enough to attract payer support. Technology has made behavior tracking and personalized nudging scalable. And the cultural conversation around food, health, and chronic disease is loud enough that employers and health systems are actively looking for partners. The remaining challenge is less about proving that food matters and more about building the systems and platforms that translate that knowledge into daily habits people actually sustain.