The most affordable diet in America is processed junk food and it’s making people sick.

In fact, diabetes and other diet-related illnesses have all reached historic levels. To make matters worse, the health care system is unable to prevent it. It only treats the symptoms once people are already sick.

The only way to prevent diet-related illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and stroke, is a diet in healthy foods. But right now, healthy fresh fruits and vegetables are 3 times more expensive than processed food. Low income families need to make long term changes to their diets if there is any hope to curb the various health epidemics in America, but they are unable to afford it.

The Prescription Fruits and Vegetables Program takes a revolutionary new approach to treating diet-related diseases. Instead of treating the diseases with a pharmaceutical innovation, doctors can now prevent them altogether by writing real prescriptions for free fruits and vegetables.

At risk patients enroll in the program, they get a prescription from their doctor for healthy food, they redeem that prescription for FREE fruits and vegetables at a grocery store or market, get support videos online with cooking tips and recipe ideas, and come back to the doctor to refill their prescription and monitor their progress.

The program launched in twelve sites in nine states across the United States.

We created a campaign including radio, print and social videos to encourage families to enroll, as well as solicit potential donors to contribute and help grow the program.

We also partnered with famous chefs to create tutorials showing patients how to take/prepare their new Prescription Fruits and Vegetables.

Instead of waiting for people to get diabetes or heart disease, for the first time, doctors can actually prevent diseases in the first place.

Topped Fast Company’s list of World Changing Ideas for 2017.

$10.6 million dollars’ worth of fruits and vegetables purchased by low-income shoppers in a single year.

93% of participants met fruit/vegetable-consumption guidelines, with a 128% increase in the number of cups of fruits and vegetables consumed per person.

Every pilot program filled every spot available and the program in Los Angeles has already doubled to 5,000 people, and more grocery stores are signing on to participate.

The current American healthcare system only treats symptoms, but this program uses the power of the prescription system to help cure the root cause of diet-related illness before people get sick.

The program targeted low-income families who are at risk for diet-related diseases. The goal was to make fruits and vegetables more accessible to these families by making them more affordable and by providing families with information on how to turn these foods into appetizing meals.

Additionally, the program needed to attract donors to expand to additional states. The goal was to attract interest by showing people that adopting a healthy diet wasn’t just a helpful suggestion but a medical necessity.

The goal of the Prescription Fruits and Vegetables Program was to cure/improve the health of low income families at risk for diet-related diseases, for whom healthy food is not affordable. Americans needed to do more than understand the urgency and importance of a healthy diet, they needed to actually make a lifestyle change. So, the program had to take a completely unique and different approach to promoting healthy foods.