The Sentinel

Nonprofit links Illinois farmers with health care to advance "food as medicine"

A Colona-based nonprofit helps connect food, farming and health care to advance nutrition-based medical interventions.

Image by svklimkin from Pixabay

by Judith Ruiz-Branch
Illinois News Connection

CHICAGO - An Illinois nonprofit is working to connect farmers to health care systems as part of an effort to advance a "food as medicine" model for health care.

The nonprofit coalition Think Regeneration in Colona is helping more than 100 farmers in the organization build relationships with health care institutions, including hospitals and clinics.

Ryan Slabaugh, founder and executive director of Think Regeneration, said the farmers work with doctors to prevent chronic disease and support patients through nutrition-based interventions.

"If we can take some of that money and put it back into the local communities of farming and food, we see the ripple effects happen economically," Slabaugh explained. "As well as the positive health outcomes, which are obviously the big priority."

The organization's work is based on emerging science showing connections between soil health, plant nutrition, and human health. Slabaugh pointed out improved diet and nutrition has been shown to significantly improve health conditions like type 2 diabetes.

A lot of these ecosystems have been siloed and working on their own problems.

Think Regeneration supports farmers and ranchers who avoid pesticides, herbicides and minimize synthetic fertilizers. Slabaugh noted while Indigenous communities have understood food's medicinal purposes for thousands of years, modern medicine is only recently rediscovering the connections after decades of prioritizing efficiency over health.

"I think doctors are now starting to understand that their patients are asking them, 'Well, what should I be eating?’" Slabaugh underscored "And this comes from doctors that we work with. They are totally unprepared for that question."

Slabaugh argued doctors receive minimal nutrition education with much more time dedicated to pharmacology, creating an imbalance in how they approach health care. He stressed the initiative to promote food's medicinal uses requires partnerships across many sectors, including transportation, food storage, education, philanthropy and scientific research.

"A lot of these ecosystems have been siloed and working on their own problems," Slabaugh contended. "I think this is a real attempt to kind of break down those silos and bring people back into the idea that we're all kind of participating in health, whether we're directly in health care or not."