Green and Lean: Nutritious Food Also Helps the Planet
More hospitals are implementing ways to provide healthy, nutritious food for healthcare workers while reducing their carbon footprint and enhancing sustainability as climate change becomes the next great challenge for the future.
Sister companies called Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth are market leaders in this emerging area, offering “Plant-Forward Future” food programs to hospitals and a “Coolfood Pledge” to set goals to reduce greenhouse gases in the production and waste disposal of food service. About 1,600 hospitals in the United States have joined the programs, which ultimately link healthy food to a healthy planet.
Plant-Forward
“‘Plant-forward’ is a term that the Culinary Institute of America uses, and it’s really about celebrating plants,” says John Stoddard, associate director for climate and food strategy at the two companies. “It does not eliminate animal proteins, but really has plants and plant proteins in the forefront, with animal proteins used more sparingly.”
The program includes a challenge variation called Plant Powered 30, wherein participating healthcare workers eat a plant-forward meal a day for 30 days.
“We have instructions online for how the hospitals can run the program, different suggestions, and then we have 30 days of content,” Stoddard explains. “If they want to send out recipes or fun facts about plant proteins or ‘Here’s a variety of ways that the hospitals can engage their employees throughout the 30-day challenge.’ Some hospitals are doing prizes, based on the level of engagement. For example, if they stay engaged over the whole 30 days, they can be entered into a raffle.”
While Stoddard emphasized the plant-forward diets are flexible, the Practice Greenhealth website puts the choices in more stark, urgent terms:
“The production of animal proteins consumes 83% of the available agricultural land2 and generates only 18% of the total calories consumed by humans, and 37% of the protein consumed. … Plant proteins require significantly less water and land to produce, and the production of plant proteins, such as legumes, enrich our soils — mitigating topsoil loss, which the Food and Agriculture Organization [of the United Nations] has warned about. Further, with the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, reducing meat in high-income countries is imperative to ensure we can feed the world without clearing additional natural lands which, as a practice, also contributes to climate change.”1
Healthcare Without Harm deals with hospital sustainability and environmental impact beyond food services.
“That was over 20 years ago, and its guiding philosophy is that healthcare is the only industry with a mission to promote health,” Stoddard says. “For example, if you are buying flooring for a hospital, where is that flooring coming from? Were there certain chemicals that were released in the production of it? Then, in the use of it, is it off-gassing all sorts of chemicals that can affect health within the hospital? When they’re disposing of it, is that also leeching chemicals? You think about sorts of different products that hospitals might use, [realizing that] they could promote health — or actually detract from it.”
Q&A with a Dietician
To get a hospital perspective on the issue, Hospital Employee Health interviewed Amy Mihm, MS, RD, LAT, a registered dietician and clinical nutrition specialist at University of Wisconsin (UW) Health. The UW Health system and hospital have been offering plant-forward meals for a decade and has joined the Coolfood Pledge. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
HEH: What will the Coolfood Pledge help your health system accomplish?
Mihm: The broader picture is related to practicing green health standards to enhance nutrition operations, which in a healthcare system most notably makes those systems much more sustainable. One component of that is the Coolfood Pledge. Participating hospitals identify sources of their food products — for example, produce, and animal and plant proteins. We are really trying to focus on how we are sourcing these food items, and how we can build our menus to mitigate some of the harmful climate impacts that are associated with food. It’s throughout the life cycle of food — everything from where that food is produced, grown, or raised, all the way through to how the waste is handled within our waste management system.
We became involved with Coolfood Pledge in 2019, when we signed on as one of the healthcare systems adopting this pledge, with the goal to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the year 2030.
HEH: As a dietician, what is your primary role in these efforts?
Mihm: I help complement the clinical nutrition and culinary teams in the development of the food that we source for all of those nutrition operations. Within UW Health, we have three primary hospital systems, including a children’s hospital. We also have a multitude of retail menus operating within our buildings. When we are planning menus and purchasing food, establishing partnerships with local growers and producers — all of that is to enable these nutrition operations that prepare and serve food to our patients, families, visitors, and employees.
HEH: How do you look at the role of providing these healthy meals to healthcare workers?
Mihm: It is imperative that we offer nourishing food to our employees. We also feed our patients, though the focus is toward healing and recovering. When we are feeding our employees, we also have an obligation to serve them nourishing, wholesome foods that really reflect what we envision: Nutritious food should be available for all.
HEH: This plant-forward effort began about a decade ago?
Mihm: Yes, this is a journey we have been on for 10 years. In 2013, we were able to establish nutrition sustainability standards for UW Health as a whole. We developed that with a cross-functional group within our clinical and culinary settings, establishing what we wanted as our standards for how we purchase foods, what types will we serve, and how we will really focus on a “preventive health” mindset for our employees. We have received favorable responses from our employees.
Healthcare is really interesting, specifically when you talk about working in a hospital. We are often at a very high census of patients, so the ability of our caregivers to leave the premises to go and get food is really limited. It is important for them to be available to care for the patients who need them. We feel like we have an obligation to them, and we hold ourselves to a really high standard. We want to serve them really healthy, nourishing food that is affordable.
HEH: Do plant-forward dishes include a percentage or proportion of animal protein?
Mihm: We want to educate our healthcare workers, patients, and visitors that we do not need to exclude animal proteins. We offer meals that are plant-forward, meaning there is an emphasis on plants, and then we have our proteins as a complement to that. For example, a Mediterranean salad bar will include a variety of plant-based proteins — chickpeas, lentils — alongside some greens and other vegetables. But you are also going to be able to purchase antibiotic-free chicken. When we serve animal proteins, they are of a very high quality. People can make their independent choices. They can have any combination that they feel comfortable with.
REFERENCES
- Practice Greenhealth. Why plant-forward. 2023.
- Poore J, Nemecek T. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science 2018;360:987-992.
More hospitals are implementing ways to provide healthy, nutritious food for healthcare workers while reducing their carbon footprint and enhancing sustainability as climate change becomes the next great challenge for the future.
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