Sandra Lindsay: 0:05
Hello, and welcome to “20-Minute Health Talk”. I’m Sandra Lindsay. Today, I’m excited to bring you Part Two of our three-part series on “Food as Health”.

In Part 1, we spoke with Northwell Health Executive Chef Bruno Tison and Chief Experience Officer Sven Gierlinger about their mission to transform hospital food from inedible to restaurant quality. While they’re making a big impact inside the hospital, our guest today is working hard to make an impact outside of the hospital and in the communities we serve.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 0:48
Food is a basic necessity to live, and to thrive, and to have the quality of life that we all want, deserve and need.

Sandra Lindsay: 0:58
Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez — who you just heard there — is Northwell’s Senior Vice President of Community and Population Health. She joined me recently to talk about a growing problem in our communities — food insecurity.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 1:15
So, food insecurity is the lack of consistent access to food at any point. It could be early in the month. It could be late in the month.

But it’s also lack of access to healthy food. So, it’s not just quantity. It’s also do you have access to quality healthy food. A food desert is a community or a place where you do not have access to either, where to get food, you have to get in a car or get major transportation. A food desert is where you do not have easy access to get food or to get healthy food.

Sandra Lindsay: 1:58
Thirty-four million Americans--or 10.2% of the population — are food insecure. Even more staggering, nine million of them are children.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 2:12
A kid can’t focus in school if they’re hungry. It’s that basic. Malnutrition, your body doesn’t develop as well as it should. Your brain doesn’t develop as well as it should.

I actually think that food is health, that there’s a link, that you can’t separate them. If you’re food insecure, or you don’t have access to healthy food, by definition you’re going to have a chronic condition.

Think about obesity and the pandemic of obesity in our children and in our adults. All of those are consequences of either not having food, or not having access to healthy food, or both.

Sandra Lindsay: 2:52
The connection to health is clear. Food insecurity is one of the primary social determinants of health which Dr. Salas-Lopez explained are the conditions in our environment that impact our health, well-being, and quality of life.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 3:10
Eighty percent of your wellness and health has to do with everything, but medical care including do you have access to healthy food. Imagine this, you’re diabetic. You have high blood pressure.

You go to the physician or the provider’s office. They give you a prescription, right? But it’s either food or the prescription, or the prescription or food. People are making those choices every day.

You can’t take good care of your diabetes. You can’t meal plan. You can’t meal plan because you can’t afford the stuff that’s “healthy”. You can’t take care of your hypertension, of your high blood pressure if you’re worried about, “Where am I going to get my next meal?”

Sandra Lindsay: 3:54
Also, alarming are the notable disparages in the populations it effects most.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 4:03
In particular are economically disadvantaged community members, underserved communities, in particular our communities of color where you have higher unemployment rates, lower income wage earners, lower levels of a high school education. Of all of those factors—people who don’t have transportation where transportation is an issue—when you look at food and security it will absolutely effect those community members first and within those groups, there’s a sociodemographic element.

Children? Very vulnerable to food insecurity believe it or not, particularly during weekends when they’re not in school getting a meal.

Sandra Lindsay: 4:47  
To fully address these issues, Dr. Salas-Lopez says healthcare has to jump in.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 4:55
Health systems have been awakened to the reality that we can’t delegate the responsibility of food insecurity and access to healthy food to others. We have to partner. We have to collaborate. We have to lead and Northwell has made food insecurity and access to healthy food a priority.

You just had our Superior Chef Bruno with you talking about healthy food within the hospital. We’ve made that a priority not only for our patients who come in for care, but those who live within the community in our service area.

Sandra Lindsay:  5:26  
To focus their efforts on those communities with the greatest need, she told us that her team screens patients at Northwell’s hospitals as well as during community events.

Sandra Lindsay: 6:22
From 2019-to-2022, Northwell has screened nearly 500,000 patients. Five percent of those—or 22,000—were found to be food insecure. All of that listening is paying off.

This team has developed and deployed 18 Food is Health programs to tackle various issues around food insecurity.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 6:51
We have hospitals in our system—talk about 21 hospitals—where we know that food insecurity’s high and we discharge patients with two-to-three days of food to help them stay health. Of course, we connect them to the pantry as well.

Sandra Lindsay: 7:08
Another food-is-health program offers 12 weeks of personalized nutrition counseling by a registered dietician at Northwell’s Dolan Family Health Center located in Huntington Hospital. Another brings people on educational supermarket tours.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 7:29
That’s a collaboration with actually one of our payers off of Dolan’s Care—Gala Foods, The Fiesta Radio, and a few others we got together with Sven Gierlinger and his department—Food and Nutrition Services—right here. They’re very engaged in the community. We went out to Gala Food in Freeport and we took people on supermarket shopping tours. How do you read a label? How much salt is in that can?

It’s a five-week program, very successful. People loved it and it was in bilingual, bicultural in terms of preparing foods and so on. It was well-received by the Freeport community. We’re now repeating that program in another community with another supermarket.

Sandra Lindsay: 8:14
They’re also partnering with food pantries and farms in the areas surrounding their hospitals. From Queens County Farm to Harlem Grown they’re even using the rooftops of their medical facilities to grow produce.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 8:31
We’re looking at our rooftops as innovation spaces to create rooftop farms. Whether it’s a fish farm or it’s a hydroponic farm and making it adjacent to teaching kitchens where we can convene the community. What spaces do we have that we can convert, and innovate, and make them into sustainable spaces because it checks a few boxes.

Number one, we’re growing our own. We’re supporting our community. We’re also supporting our environment. That’s within line of sight for us in the years ahead.

The other thing we’re doing is we’re looking at programs like Harlem Grown. You’re going to be with Tony next week.

Sandra Lindsay: 9:18
Yes, I will be talking to Tony Hillery next week.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 9:19
He’s amazing! He’s in Harlem, right in the middle and the produce that him, and the kids, and the families are growing are being given right out to that community. They have community refrigerators right on the streets in Harlem. Partnering is supporting. How can we support that work and amplify that work in ways that make sense?

Sandra Lindsay: 9:39
All of these efforts align with a national push from the White House which set a goal of ending hunger by 2030. As part of that pledge, they identified five pillars—improving food access and affordability, integrating nutrition and health, empowering all consumers to make and have access to healthy choices, supporting physical activity for all, and enhancing nutrition, and food security research.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 10:14
The ones that we signed onto were to integrate nutrition and health. I described the program that we have at Huntington Station at the Dolan Center that does that. That’s just one example of how we integrate nutrition and health.

Of course, to enhance nutrition and food insecurity research, we’re working closely with our colleagues at the Feinstein to see what should we know about interventions that work or those that don’t work? You learn a lot about things that don’t work. But how do we do this in a methodical manner? Collect data and then look to see what worked and what didn’t work. What should we be doing more of?

One of the things that we’re very interested in going forward is how do we sustain these programs and how do we scale them? The only way to know that is to do the research on it, to get the data. That’s important.

Sandra Lindsay: 11:14
One program in particular that this dedicated team is working to scale is called Wellness on Wheels.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 11:23
The Wellness on Wheels Program is a mobile teaching kitchen so to speak. We bring it to the schoolyard and/or to the gym. This is an education for pre-K to fourth grade, to children and their families, economically disadvantaged communities, predominantly communities of color—or black, and brown, and Latinx communities.

We go there to the school. We teach them. It’s only 30 minutes. Our dietitians, our nutritionists—it’s led by our team of people and they teach them physical exercise, my USDA plate, then they go back in the spring. They go home with a healthy vegetable with recipes in multiple languages. That might seem small but believe it or not it’s impactful.

Sandra Lindsay: 12:12
To date, Wellness on Wheels has reached 29,000 children on Long Island and now it’s expanding to Staten Island.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 12:21
What they’re doing there is they’re partnering the Wellness on Wheels piece with their Healthy Corner Store Initiative. They have corner stores that are adjacent to schools and in those stores, they’re educating the store owners on what healthy foods they should have there, what produce. They’re supporting them by helping them source healthy food, and vegetables, and fruits for the kids when they get out of school. If you meet people where they are, the sky’s the limit.

Sandra Lindsay: 12:51
For each and every program, she said there’s a team of volunteers both from Northwell and in the community which makes them possible.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 13:02
Each area, each team, each unit, each department finds a way to make this priority their own whether they’re doing it to help each other, to get busy with your hands, relieve stress or you’re doing it to give back. We have so many volunteers. Our community events are all out in the community.

When we do things, but we’re not doing them at Northwell sites specifically, we’re actually doing it within a faith-based organization, within a community-based or a school. Just let us know when you want to come and we’ll be ready for you. We’ll let you know what you need to bring in addition to yourself and your optimistic spirit. We’ll be happy to have you and happy to meet you there.

Sandra Lindsay: 14:51
Thanks to its Community and Population Health Team, Northwell has distributed over 65,000 lbs. of food at various community events. Also at these events, the team helps families in need enroll for SNAP benefits which is a government program that provides income for food to low wage individuals.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 15:16
We’ve seen this across the board, right? As the pandemic has become endemic, right? We’re not talking about it. We’re seeing the devastation of that as much as we saw in 2020 is that there’s a lot of rollback in benefits has happened and the cost of living of other things has gone up—gasoline, the price per gallon. Those expenses all fall onto the consumer.

Sandra Lindsay: 15:43
Right.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 15:44
Depending on your life circumstances, that could take its toll.

Sandra Lindsay: 15:47
Looking ahead, Dr. Salas-Lopez and team are working hard to expand their efforts and improve the lives of people experiencing food insecurity.

And they’re not alone. Through their support of the White House’s pledge to end hunger by 2030, Northwell’s team is gaining insight into what others are doing across the country.

Dr. Debbie Salas-Lopez: 16:15
We’re now part of a collaborative. We meet every month to learn what other systems. Frankly, in this collaborative—this White House pledge—many that signed on were not necessarily food companies.

It’s wonderful to learn about other people’s work, what they’re doing across the country, their commitment because we’re not on this journey alone. The pandemic taught us that no one can solve for this alone. You have to solve for it in partnership with others.

By the way, there are countries across the globe that we can learn from. For us, this is going to be an opportunity to learn from others, and to commit, and double down on all the programs I just described to end hunger by 2030.

Sandra Lindsay: 17:08
That does it for Part Two in our series on, “Food is Health”. I want to thank Dr. Salas-Lopez again for joining us and for all the incredible work that she and her team is doing out in the community to address food insecurity. We talked about Northwell’s partnerships with farms like Harlem Grown and our next episode will feature my interview with Tony Hillery, the founder of Harlem Grown. It’s only appropriate that to end the series on Food is Health by visiting one of Harlem Grown’s farms.

I can’t wait to share that conversation with you. Until then, I’m Sandra Lindsay and this has been another episode of 20-Minute Health Talk.