LIVE: Kennedy Announces Milestone in Make Hospitals Healthier Initiative in Michigan

leadership role from the beginning and has helped us bring in so many other hospital systems so quickly to this pledge and we're very gratified. Our objective is to change the dietary culture in this country and it seems obvious that one of the first places where we ought to change the way that people that food is purchased that that health is put as a priority is in our nation's hospitals and so one of our announcements today is that we have created a badge now um that these that hospital systems that have taken the pledge can display on their website and i'm gonna should i unveil that now I'm gonna start by I have not seen it so that's the 2026 uh badge for the healthy hospital pledge and as I said hospitals that take the pledge can uh can display that on their websites. And I'm very, very grateful to be here. And I guess, Tina, do you have something to say? All right. I'm going to introduce you to Tina Fries-Decker, who is the CEO of Carwell Health. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And we're so honored that when we got the call from HHS and Secretary Kennedy to come and highlight our healthy food program, it's wonderful to be able welcome you here and have a conversation. Healthy food really matters and so it was important to us to sign on early to the Make Hospital Food Healthier Pledge and to be part of the development of that as we go forward. It's embedded in our organization, in our cafeterias, in our nutrition programs, but also in our lifestyle and medicine programs. And it's a badge of honor that we know that if you do come to one of our hospitals, you should be leaving saying that was really good food. We hope you don't come back to the hospital. You stay out of the hospital, but we hope that you enjoyed it. You got healthier. And we have a program that helps you be healthier when you're out of the hospital. Right now, we have a lifestyle medicine and culinary medicine program that has served more than 4,000 people this year to understand how best to cook, how best to shop for your food, and how to eat as healthy as possible. We're training over 100 residents every year to ensure that they know how to educate their patients about how to shop and how to cook food and how to eat healthy. So those are just some of the elements that we take pride in as we move forward. There is one patient in particular that really has significant success with our program. He came to us because he wanted change. He was on 12 different medications. He had diabetes and hypertension, and he said, I need to change. I need to make sure we're moving forward. In six months, he lost 70 pounds, and he is no longer on any medications. He said his knee pain is gone. He said that he can walk and do the things that he wished he could do before, and he said that a huge weight was off his chest. That's the impact that we make here at Corewell Health. That's the impact we have on our communities and our patients, and it's the partnership between culinary medicine, lifestyle medicine, and nutrition services with our physicians and clinicians to make that happen and to ensure that people can be as healthy as possible. So now I'd like to introduce Laura Apple. She is with the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, leading the government relations and is executive vice president. Laura, welcome. Thank you, Tina. This has been a wonderful afternoon to spend with the secretary and Corewell Health's longstanding commitment to healthy eating and healthy lifestyle shows how hospitals throughout Michigan and really across the country can help people stay healthy beyond their four walls. Michigan hospitals are anchor institutions helping lead the work to create more robust communities. We know health is shaped by what happens in our everyday lives and certainly food is part of that. That's why hospitals are working with community partners on prevention, nutrition, food access and other factors to help people achieve those healthier lives across Michigan hospitals are building on this work and finding ways to bring effective approaches to more and more people now just close by saying healthier communities require more than excellent health care which we are very lucky to have here in Michigan they require all of us working together to give every Michigander the opportunity to live a vibrant live vibrant healthier lives so thanks for including us here today and And thank you for your efforts, Mr. Secretary. I just also want to thank the people who've really driven this program through HHS. Sam Waters is up on stage with me. Olivia Paradise and Madison and Maya, who are part of our team and who have made this happen. I want to thank all of you guys for your leadership and your energy. Thank you. Should we open it? So we're going to go ahead and take a few questions from press. I want to remind you guys to please keep the questions on the topic of today's announcement and visit. And with that, we're going to take some questions. Justin? We have a microphone coming over to you. Thank you. Justin Hicks here in Michigan with MLive. How does the department plan to measure whether this initiative improves health outcomes? Are there specific metrics or timelines that you're looking at? and what specifically could patients see changing in their health care visits well we have a cap program that mentions that measures uh patient satisfaction in the hospitals we expect we've already seen uh good results on that from the changes in the hospital food at tampa general which was one of the first hospitals to actually change its menu they are looking that hospital is looking on its own at measuring actual health outcomes. We're confident that that's going to happen. And, you know, one of the things that I mentioned during the roundtable is just in the change that we've made in the dietary guidelines and getting people to talk about this issue has already had measurable impacts on public health in this country. The obesity rate has dropped this year for the first time in 40 years. by 7%. The purchases of real food have gone up this year by 7%. Perhaps most importantly, in 2025, or most impressively, the age-adjusted deaths dropped for the first time in 40 years across every age group by 4.6%. That's the largest ever. So we're already... And then, you know, you can also look at the share values of the processed food industry, which since I shook hands with President Trump in August 24, the share values of the processed foods companies cumulatively have dropped 70% next to the S&P 500. And so I think those are all sort of measurable benefits that demonstrate the efficacy of these programs, but I think you're going to see them a lot in individual patients who, you know, who lose their diabetes diagnosis, who make measurable improvements, who have reversals of hypertension and diabetes, and we're going to see that starting immediately. Elise Weil with Native News Online. We know that access to nutrition is a huge driver of the terrible health disparities that we see in Native communities. So we're curious if this program is extended to IHS facilities, and if not currently, if there's a plan to bring this into Indian Country. Yeah, we're already aligning the IHS food programs with the dietary guidelines. That's been very important to me personally, And, you know, I've made a lot of visits to the tribal clinics and to the tribes and seen that that's already happening across the country. Thank you. Hi, Eli Newman, Bridge, Michigan. I guess I'm wondering what are the biggest challenges for hospitals to take this pledge and what is the department and the administration doing to ease some of those burdens? I think the biggest challenge, of course, is going to be cost and then access to the good food. um they uh the hospitals most of them make their purchases through procurement organizations or through um uh through group purchasing organizations group purchasing plans and in the past those organizations have not had a focus on this kind of meal but we've met with Cisco and uh some of the other you know the big actors in the field and they're very very anxious to um to open new lanes for these kind of products and you know i think what because we now have almost 300 hospitals that that's going to send a signal to the marketplace um where uh you're going to see more and more of that real food being accessible. I'll say this, that Tampa General is the, you know, the one kind of we're looking at because they're the most advanced, and they brought in a television chef called Jeff Zakarian, who's a Michelin-rated chef, to do all of their meals, and so you go to that hospital, and you get the same quality meals that you get in a, you know, four-star restaurant, and I spent a day there just eating their stuff, and it was fantastic food. Patient morale has gone up. It's too early to see actually health benefits. But in terms of staff morale, patient morale is through the roof. And those changes have cost them less than 5% of their food budget. They were able to manage that by reducing the items on the menu, by improving their quality enormously. And what Zecharian says, you don't really have to throw money at this problem. It's not going to cost money if we do this smart. And a lot of the food that hospitals serve is thrown away. At Tampa General, almost nothing is thrown away because the food is really delicious. And the patients like it. So the more and more demand there is, the lower the costs are going to be because you're going to have economies of scale. And, you know, we're going to see those. We're going to drive those changes in the marketplace now. Okay, we'll take last question from Julie in the back. Hi, Julie Dunmire from Vox 17 here. What can patients expect to see on a plate of food? What does the food look like in comparison for different hospitals? You know, the food varies by what you need to have. And so we really work with our physicians and nutritionists and clinicians to make sure that it's as healthy as possible. We serve thousands of people every day, three times a day, plus our team members. And each meal is organized by what they need, what is going on with their life, their chronic illness, why they may be in the hospital. And so we really work to customize it, but it's all focused on the healthy foods that will help them get to their health goals as we move forward. And we also try to make sure it looks very nice, especially for the kids, because we serve a lot of kids in our children's hospitals, and we want to make sure that they're eating as healthy as possible. Great. Thank you guys so much.