Healthy food is the missing piece in health savings and flexible spending accounts

Our country is facing a chronic disease epidemic. Sixty percent of American adults have at least one chronic disease and we spend $5.3 trillion a year on healthcare.  

In a political climate where it’s hard to agree on anything, the positive in this case is that there has been a decades-long, widespread alignment that diet and exercise are critical to reversing this trend. As CEO of an organic food provider, I am glad to see things are changing in the right direction. 

So why haven’t we made more progress? As it relates to the food side of the equation, the release of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s updated dietary guidelines has received a lot of attention, but every version of those guidelines for decades has lifted up the benefit of whole fruits and vegetables and for good reason. 

PLOS Medicine found in a 2019 study that if Americans met their daily fruit and vegetable guidelines, they could prevent 1.93 million cardiovascular events and save $40 billion in U.S. healthcare costs. An apple a day really could keep the emergency room away. Yet only 10 percent of Americans eat the recommended amount of vegetables and only 12 percent eat the recommended amount of fruit. 

This is not a consumer education problem. It’s an access problem. Tightening budgets and rising food costs shift hungry consumers to cheaper and more heavily processed foods.  

On the exercise front, in June, Harvard released a new study that found that long-term resistance training increased your chances of living longer, in fact it represented a 13 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality, 19 percent lower risk of cardiovascular........

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