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The Food Is Health Revolution: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Carter Williams, Ellen Brown, Katie Stebbins, and guests talk through the biggest issues in integrating the food and health systems for the benefit of all.
The US spends $1.7t on food and $1.9t on healthcare due to poor nutrition annually. We need to come together to find the answers, so here we are, connecting food, health, and the economy. Your hosts Carter Williams (CEO iSelect Fund), Katie Stebbins (Exec Director of the Tufts Food and Nutrition Innovation Institute) and Ellen Brown (Co-Founder BP2 Health) combine decades of relevant and innovative cross-sector experience to cultivate conversation that will drive not just solutions but disruption. In each episode, the hosts and their guests dig into time-sensitive hot topics in food and health, talk with experts, and connect the dots between disruptors, ideas, and solutions. foodishealth.substack.com
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- 1 weeks ago1h 19m
Food Is Health Revolution Live with Ultrahuman
I still showed up for the livestream. If that sounds diabolical, you should know this: after three years of dementia, my mother’s peaceful passing was a release. Our family played Neil Diamond and celebrated the woman she was before her body and brain stopped letting her be that person.And then I did what I always do - I strengthened my why for fixing food so fewer families have to live through it.My mother's vascular dementia is a big part of my why. It is why I keep pulling food, sleep, blood, hormones, movement, environment and healthcare into the same conversation. The body does not experience those things in separate departments. We are the ones who separated them.This week's guest was Hussain Ahamed, who leads global strategy and partnerships for Ultrahuman and its work in the Americas. We started with the obvious object: the ring. We ended somewhere much more interesting.Ultrahuman does not describe itself as a smart-ring company. Hussein called it a “biointelligent computing platform.” The distinction matters. A ring can give you a score. A platform can begin connecting continuous wearable data with glucose, blood markers, cycle data, environment and — eventually — the human support needed to act on all of it.That is the real promise. Not more dashboards. Not another gadget congratulating you for sleeping well. Context.Hussein walked us through Ultrahuman's new Ring Pro, its Blood Vision testing, its continuous glucose monitor integration and its Home environmental monitor. The Home device was the part I kept coming back to. It can place signals such as air quality, light, temperature and carbon dioxide alongside sleep staging. A person may know they woke up at 2:00 a.m. The more useful question is why.That sounds simple. It is not how most health data works today.We collect snapshots. A blood draw on one day. A score from one night. A visit with a clinician who may never see the raw signal underneath either one. Women feel this failure acutely. I talked about trying to understand seven years of hormone panels when the lab had not captured where I was in my cycle on the day each sample was taken. The numbers existed. The context that made them meaningful did not.That is not a data shortage. It is an architecture problem.Ultrahuman is trying to close part of that gap by combining longitudinal wearable signals with blood data. Hussein said people can upload bloodwork from other providers into its platform, not only tests ordered through Ultrahuman. He also described the company's recent strategic investment from Qualcomm and Labcorp as a way to go deeper on computing and blood testing.Carter pulled the conversation up a level: what happens when this much personal data meets a healthcare system still designed for the average of millions rather than the reality of one human being?The old system waits until enough things go wrong to name a disease. The emerging system can see patterns earlier, personalize the response and potentially connect a person to a better standard of care before the downstream machinery takes over.But a warning belongs here. More measurement is not automatically better health. A beautiful ring sitting on top of the same broken incentives is still System B+. The question is not whether the device can tell you that dinner changed your glucose or your sleep. The question is whether the information changes what food gets produced, what clinicians recommend, what employers and health plans support, and what people can actually afford to do next.That is where this gets interesting for Food Is Health.Ultrahuman began with glucose monitoring and showing users how different foods affected their bodies. Near the end of the conversation, Hussein mentioned an open glucose database built from users' responses to foods. Carter and I immediately went to the next design question: could tools like this accelerate the adoption of real food?Could a wearable become an on-ramp to a lifestyle-medicine clinician? Could it help a food producer prove what its product does in actual humans? Could continuous data make nutrient density legible to a health plan, a retailer or an investor? Could the person receiving the signal be connected to a real-food option they can buy tonight — not merely told they have a problem?That is the difference between tracking health and building an economy that produces it.We do not have the final architecture. Good. Premature certainty is how old systems harden. What we have is a growing set of capabilities: sensors, laboratories, clinicians, food producers, retailers, consumers and capital. Most of the pieces already exist. They are simply not organized around the same outcome.Our job now is to put the people h
- 2 weeks ago35 min
The Consumer Moved the Mac-and-Cheese Aisle
It was the Friday before Labor Day. A storm was rolling through Florida. My dog had decided the rain was unacceptable. And one of my favorite food peeps Ellis McCue jumping with excitement through the phone about the fact that Barilla was acquiring GOODLES.That sounds like a food-industry transaction. It is. But it is also a consumer story.GOODLES did not ask people to abandon comfort food or pass a nutrition exam before dinner. It took something familiar and made it a little better. More protein. More fiber. Bright packaging. A sense of humor. Food that still feels like mac and cheese.That distinction matters.Too much of the health conversation asks people to leap from the food they know to somebody else’s definition of perfect. Organic. Regenerative. Low carb. Plant based. High protein. No additives. No seed oils. No joy, apparently.Most people are not going to rebuild their entire food life on Tuesday night. They are trying to feed themselves or their children. They need better choices that fit inside the life they already have.GOODLES understood that.Founded in 2020 and launched into retail in late 2021, the company entered an aisle controlled by much larger brands. It did not begin with their distribution, manufacturing scale or shelf power. It built consumer pull. People wanted the product, retailers made room for it, and an incumbent that has been making pasta since 1877 paid attention.That is the part I care about.The agreement has not closed yet. It remains subject to regulatory approval, and the financial terms were not disclosed. GOODLES says that after closing it will remain headquartered in Santa Cruz, operate as a standalone brand and continue under co-founder and CEO Jen Zeszut.We will see what independence looks like in practice. Acquisitions can give a challenger access to distribution and scale. They can also flatten the very thing that made the challenger matter. The promise is not the outcome.But Barilla’s interest is still a signal.Large companies do not move because we lecture them. They move when demand becomes visible enough that ignoring it costs more than responding to it.This is what the transition to a Food Is Health market can look like. Not a clean break with everything that came before. Not a boardroom conversion. A challenger makes a better option. Consumers pull it onto the shelf. The incumbent sees the movement and decides it wants to participate.Then the next question arrives: can scale make the better option easier to find and afford without making it worse?That question leads directly to trust.Walk into a grocery store and look at what we ask a person to do. Read the label. Understand the ingredients. Interpret the health claims. Compare protein, fiber, sugar, sodium and price. Decide whether “natural” means anything. Work out which tradeoff matters most for your body and your family.We have turned buying dinner into unpaid research.And “healthy” is not one thing. A product can have more protein and still not be organic. It can have more fiber and still be processed. It can be affordable but not ideal. It can be a meaningful step forward without being the final answer.That is why I resist the purity test.A better food system cannot depend on every consumer becoming a nutrition scientist. Four hundred people should not need to walk through Costco carrying spectrometers. The retailer, the brand and the people making claims about health have to do more of the work.Show us what changed.Measure whether the product does what you say it does.Make the evidence understandable.Give people a place where they can trust that somebody has already asked the harder questions.That trust used to be part of the promise of places like Whole Foods. Costco has built its own version of it. A paid membership is partly a bet that the choices inside those four walls have already been narrowed in a useful way.The opportunity is not to tell consumers to care more. Many already care. They are overwhelmed by having to perform due diligence in every aisle.The opportunity is to make the healthier decision easier.GOODLES is not the whole answer. It is one move in the system. A young company made a familiar product a little better and a lot more compelling. Consumers responded. A global food company followed.That is how markets begin to reveal what people actually want.Now we get to watch what happens next: whether Barilla helps GOODLES travel farther without sanding off its edges, whether the product becomes more accessible, and whether the rest of the aisle notices that demand has moved.Because the real story is not that a big company bought a small one.The real story is that consumers made the small
- 2 weeks ago1h 27m
Costco Is Totally Different Than Retail Grocery - Food Is Health Revolution Live
I went to Costco for vegetables and came home with a systems thesis.This is, unfortunately, a fairly normal Thursday for me.I was walking the aisles doing what most of us have been trained to do: turn over the package, read the label, compare the protein, check the fiber, scan the ingredient list, try to decide whether “organic” means useful or merely expensive, and then wonder why grocery shopping suddenly feels like an oral exam I forgot to study for.I care about this more than the average person. I have lab data. I have a gut-health report. I think about food as part of my healthcare budget. I will order vegetables from a farm I trust and drive out of my way to fill the gaps.And I still cannot reliably tell what a food will do in my body.That is the problem.The label gives us facts about the product. It does not give us enough signal about the outcome. A cereal can advertise protein and fiber while delivering those numbers through a long assembly of isolates and added fibers. A chocolate-chip package can make one ingredient list look more “whole” than another while leaving a normal person with no practical way to judge what the distinction means. A carton of blueberries can say organic while telling you nothing about nutrient density, freshness, toxins, shelf life, or whether half the carton will spoil before you eat it.We keep treating this as a consumer-discipline problem. Read harder. Learn more. Resist the marketing. Meal prep on Sunday. Become your own nutrition scientist in aisle seven.That is not agency. That is unpaid systems administration.Carter kept returning to the friction. Maybe people are not simply choosing badly because they are hopelessly addicted to bad food. Maybe the work required to make the better choice is too high. You have to find it, understand it, afford it, cook it, use it before it spoils, and somehow do all of that while an industrial advertising machine is making the other option effortless.Once you see the problem that way, the solution changes. The job is not to scold people into making better choices inside a confusing market. The job is to remove the friction and build a better signal.Costco became an interesting case study because I realized I trust it. Its model is built around membership and a narrower selection. I pay for someone to do some of the sorting before I walk in. That does not make every item healthy, and it certainly does not solve the measurement problem. But it shows that curation itself has value. People will pay to enter a market where fewer bad decisions are waiting for them.Now take that logic further.What if the grocery aisle could show what matters to “you” not just calories and claims, but the information connected to your actual health? What if your health agent already understood your labs, your goals, your deficiencies, your microbiome, and the rest of the context that disappears at the shelf? What if the phone in your hand could help evaluate the food in front of you instead of asking you to decode another certification?The technology is moving in that direction. The harder problem is the architecture around it: reliable measurement, trusted data, incentives that reward better outcomes, and a supply chain that can respond when consumers finally see the difference.That is where this stops being a shopping story and becomes System C.The pieces already exist. Farmers know how to grow better food. Ingredient companies know how to improve products. Retailers know how to shape a market basket. Health plans understand risk. Consumers are already spending across food, healthcare, fitness, supplements, and data as if these were parts of one health economy- even though the institutions still treat them as separate lanes.The missing piece is coordination.So Carter and I are building working rooms around that problem. Not another conference where smart people describe the gap and fly home. We are bringing together people who each hold a different piece - food, agriculture, retail, healthcare, measurement, capital—and asking them to build the connective tissue while they are in the room. The output is not a panel. It is a build someone can activate.That is the thread running from my father’s blueberries to a redesigned health economy. He was willing to pay more for a better outcome. What he lacked was proof that the more expensive choice would actually produce one. Multiply that uncertainty across every household and every aisle, and you can see why “just choose better” has failed.We do not need 250 more badges on the package. We need the fog to lift.This week, pay attention to one decision you make in the grocery store. What information actually determines your choice? What are you assuming? What would you need to know to choose with confidence?That gap is not your failure.It is the market we
- 3 weeks ago1h 7m
We Are Not Promoting Drugs. We Are Promoting Agency.
A viewer accused us of promoting drugs.Carter answered before I could.“We’re promoting the use of agency.”That became the episode.The GLP-1 argument has become so moralized that we keep missing the market signal underneath it. We were not arguing that the drugs have no risks. We were not arguing that everyone should take them. We were arguing that millions of people have demonstrated a willingness to spend money to change their metabolic health.That matters because prevention did not have a visible price before.Now it does.Once consumers started changing what they ate, drank and bought, other companies had a reason to build for the person trying to stay well. Food companies. Diagnostics companies. Wearables. Life insurers. Fitness platforms. The drug did not finish the job. It revealed the customer.That is a very different claim from “take the magic pill.”The deeper conversation was about what happens after demand appears.I made it personal, as usual.I have an underactive thyroid. I have nodules that have been biopsied. I take medication and follow a monitoring schedule. The standard model says a primary care physician or endocrinologist “manages” this condition.But what part actually requires a clinician?I can see whether my thyroid-stimulating hormone is moving up or down. I can track symptoms. I can follow the established schedule for labs and imaging. I do not need to pay a specialist to read a trend line back to me.I do want clinical expertise for the hard question: What options exist if I want to change the underlying condition or reconsider the treatment? What is known? What is uncertain? What is worth trying safely?Those are not the same service.We have bundled them together because healthcare was designed around gatekeeping. The primary care physician was once openly called the gatekeeper. The theory was that somebody had to control the faucet or people would consume care the system considered unnecessary.Consumer diagnostics, wearables and AI are dismantling that arrangement from the outside. Not cleanly. Not without mistakes. But unmistakably.That does not erase the case for medical training. Carter drew the line clearly: acute and highly complex disease can require intense human expertise. The opportunity is to stop spending that scarce expertise on mechanical work a person and a tool can handle. If we remove friction from the routine layer, clinicians have more room for the decisions where judgment, examination and accountability actually matter.The next fight is over interpretation.An Oura score is an algorithm. A consumer lab company’s green, yellow and red ranges are an algorithm. A clinical reference range is also an interpretation built from assumptions and evidence. None of them is an agnostic source of truth.This is where people get nervous. If consumers can see all the data, what happens when they misunderstand it?The answer cannot be to keep them from seeing it.The answer is to make the feedback layer better.Carter and I started sketching what we mean by a System C stack for the consumer. First, collect the data you can reasonably use. The number matters more than the company’s score. Second, put it beside your own history. A trend across time is more useful than one color on one day. Third, connect the change to what you did. Did sleep improve after the intervention? Did ApoB move? Did the behavior change actually produce the outcome you wanted?Then decide where a human belongs.Sometimes the answer is nowhere. Sometimes it is a registered dietitian. Sometimes it is a primary care physician. Sometimes it is the most specialized clinician you can find. Agency is not pretending those people are interchangeable. It is refusing to pay the most expensive person in the system for every step.This is not a finished stack. We said that on air.We need to hear from the people already trying to build it around themselves. What data are you collecting? What can you not connect? Which score do you distrust? Where did you need a human? What did you learn only because you could see the trend?The old system asks whether you have permission.The new one starts with a different question: What are you trying to change?Then it gives you the data, the feedback and the right level of help to find out whether it worked.You have helped create a Food Is Health movement. We’re a handful of paid subscribers short of Substack’s Bestseller badge. It’s a trust signal that matters when we’re talking to food and health companies that need to change - it tells them people back this work. If this is useful to you, that’s the ask.If you are already a free subscriber, logout before clicking the link above Get full access
- Aug 16, 20261h 40m
Food Is Health Live Roundup
After a long hiatus of livestreams - Ellen was waiting for this one. This one opened with RFK Jr.’s Real Food Show $5 meals, celebrity chefs, salmon cakes - and immediately hit the structural tension underneath it: real food is great, but time poverty is the actual barrier, and a show about cooking doesn’t solve the distribution problem. Carter’s sharper frustration was the current fight crowding out the chronic disease conversation. 280 Americans die every day from type two diabetes. It’s a human-created event. We can reverse it. It gets essentially none of the attention.The second half went personal to Ellen’s hormone panel, the 30-day cycle mapping DUTCH test vs. what standard of care for a perimenopausal woman actually looks like (one blood draw on one day of a cycle, estrogen assumed low, progesterone the actual problem), and the health context library she’s been building inside Claude. 15+ years of health data, biomarkers, hormone results, all of it - as her argument that end-of-one personalized medicine is now entirely scalable if you’re willing to do the work. Carter asked Ellen’s self-built personal health agent Thomas on air what he’d charge as a health coach. Thomas came back with $500/month, a clear scope of work, and a note about avoiding anything that sounds clinician-like. Carter immediately asked what he’d spend it on and whether they’d need to issue a W-2. Ellen didn’t ask Thomas. Get full access to Food is Health at foodishealth.substack.com/subscribe
- Aug 16, 20261h 29m
The Prevention Chart That Went Viral - Food Is Health Live
We dove into the viral chart that started it all (and the corrected one). Clinicians warning about false positives, CEOs of the companies named in the chart correcting the numbers, and consumers who’d never heard of any of these services realizing a comprehensive biomarker panel is now a commodity. Carter’s read on all of it was immediate: the cost of running your own assays on your body is going to zero, and no amount of institutional resistance is going to stop it. The question isn’t whether people will do this. It’s about what happens next.Dr. Nupur Garg jumped in live - an MIT-trained ER physician who now runs a solo lifestyle primary care practice in North Haven, Connecticut with a whiteboard behind her desk and no staff. Her answer to the “what happens next” question was what made Ellen want to have her as her doctor. Labs are the feedback loop / outcomes data for the experiments people are already running on themselves. The problem isn’t the false positives. The problem is that nobody built the feedback layer between the result and the behavior. That’s the gap AND the whole opportunity. That’s Sytem C. Get full access to Food is Health at foodishealth.substack.com/subscribe
- Jul 2, 20264 min
Medicare Just Opened the GLP-1 Bridge
It’s July 2nd. As of yesterday Seniors who have a Part D plan (prescription drug plan) who want to lose weight can choose from three GLP-1s for $50/month for the next 18 months (as long as they meet the BMI/health condition gates which we will dive into below and aren’t excluded for specified reasons).Yesterday I went on national news again to make sure the information provided was accurate. Bianca de la Garza - Emmy nominated and award winning TV host, anchor of Bianca Across the Nation daily on Newsmax (12-2pm ET) has a fantastic new Living Longer segment that aligns with our Food Is Health work. And we’re excited to be collaborating when helpful to bring timely and relevant insights to her audience.I know, it is scary to jump off a cliff without a parachute when it comes to GLP-1 use aka without lifestyle (nutrition/strength and more) support. A $50 drug without a food system is not a health structure. It is a temporary discount on a downstream intervention.But when ~50% of Seniors have a metabolic condition the saying “desperate times call for desperate measures” comes to mind. Loudly.And the glaring Bridge program gap is what the BALANCE program is for. And I heard some reassuring news firsthand earlier this week. A few of the brilliant folks I’d want to be involved have indeed been summoned to work on the program design. The Bridge ProgramMedicare has never been allowed to cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. That changed yesterday by utilizing the Section 402 demonstration authority (42 U.S.C. \mathsection 1395b-1), which allows CMS to test temporary, short-term pilot programs outside of the standard Medicare Part D system.It’s important you remember that because knowing that authority exists for System C innovation should give EVERYONE hope. It’s not about asking for handouts, it’s about creative, innovative system design.This program does not cover Ozempic. Not Mounjaro. Not the drugs people casually name at dinner parties because the brand recognition got there before everything else did. The new Medicare GLP-1 Bridge covers a specific list of obesity medications, for eligible beneficiaries, at $50 a month, from July 1, 2026 through December 31, 2027.Obesity is not a character flaw. It is not a failure of discipline. It is biology, food environment, stress, medication history, sleep, poverty, trauma, hormones, marketing, and a thousand other things that get flattened into a before-and-after photo.So if a senior who has been metabolically stuck for years can finally access a medication that helps, should we shame them and/or scold them?What if instead we build something BEFORE the Balance program is up and running that ensures they don’t end up plagued by frailty, sarcopenia, etc. And that the success they might achieve on the drug is sustained. I am also interested in asking the question we overlook. What happens after the appetite signal changes?Because that is where the real story begins.Program Details* Eligible Medicare Part D beneficiaries can get these three specific GLP-1 weight-loss medications for a flat $50 monthly copay. * The approved drugs are Foundayo tablet, Wegovy injection or tablet, and Zepbound KwikPen only.* The $50 DOES NOT cover the cost of obtaining the prescription. * The program runs through the end of 2027. * It operates outside the normal Part D coverage and payment flow, with pharmacy eligibility confirmation and Medicare approval. * The prior authorization required from a prescriber will last the entire 18 months, but the scripts can only be filled for 30 days at a time.* Prescribers don’t need to be Medicare eligible or accept Medicare, seniors do not need to go to their current doctor, however they should ask whether the prescribing is going to be submitted to Medicare or Medicare Advantage plan (not their MA Part D plan) so they don’t end up stuck paying unexpectedly to get the prescription.* Current Part D health plans are completely separate from the program.* Those that believe they are eligible and still have questions should call 1-800-MEDICARE, NOT THEIR CURRENT PART D PLANS.The Human StoryKFF estimates that more than 13 million Medicare beneficiaries met the BMI thresholds for obesity or overweight in 2023, and about 3.8 million may meet the fuller Bridge eligibility criteria once the program’s exclusions are applied (and we KNOW that number has changed dramatically - when I ran some figures earlier this week I came back with the potential of 20-25 million qualifying). And someone who knows this space better than anyone I know said there isn’t anywhere close to enough supply of the drugs to meet the likely demand.The risk? Bridge
- Jun 8, 202636 min
Livestream from the 2026 Nourishing Change Conference: Holly Freishtat
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Food is Health at foodishealth.substack.com/subscribe
About The Food Is Health Revolution
The US spends $1.7t on food and $1.9t on healthcare due to poor nutrition annually. We need to come together to find the answers, so here we are, connecting food, health, and the economy. Your hosts Carter Williams (CEO iSelect Fund), Katie Stebbins (Exec Director of the Tufts Food and Nutrition Innovation Institute) and Ellen Brown (Co-Founder BP2 Health) combine decades of relevant and innovative cross-sector experience to cultivate conversation that will drive not just solutions but disruption. In each episode, the hosts and their guests dig into time-sensitive hot topics in food and health, talk with experts, and connect the dots between disruptors, ideas, and solutions. foodishealth.substack.com
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