77 Kansas hospitals to offer healthier eating options

The very places that people sometimes end up because of poor eating have decided to get healthier themselves.

Seventy-seven hospitals around the state plan to practice what their doctors preach and start serving healthier options to their patients, employees and visitors.

The push toward healthier meals came from a project called Healthy Kansas Hospitals by the Kansas Hospital Association. The association held a symposium Friday to share resources and strategies for healthy eating options.

So far, 12 hospitals made policy changes for the project. In total, 77 hospitals, including Via Christ Hospital St. Francis in Wichita and Newton Medical Center, signed a pledge to look at the food and drinks offered in each hospital and incorporate healthier options.

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us,” was the keynote speaker of the event. He talked about his research, influence of big businesses on food and how people can reduce addiction to salt, fats and sugar.

Hospitals, Moss said, have an opportunity to influence the public’s knowledge about nutrition through waiting room videos and nutritional resources.

To improve food options for consumers, Moss said, hospitals could look toward the evolution of airport food as an example.

“More and more airports are getting really great quick-food stores,” he said. “You’ll walk in and there will be some junky food, but they’ll also be fruits, vegetables, nuts. Some of those commercial vending operations setting up in airports could do the same in hospitals.”

He said changes to patient food could present larger obstacles, but said hospitals could look toward cash-strapped school systems that have made changes and kept costs low.

The hospital association drafted 11 policy suggestions for hospitals to use.

The suggestions vary. Some are broad: Offer healthy entree options every day, post nutritional facts for cafeteria items and incentivize healthy products with placement and price. Some are more specific: Spend 10 percent of the food budget on fresh fruits and vegetables and limit one gram of sugar per fluid ounce for 70 percent of beverages. And some are strict: Ban deep-fried foods and energy drinks.

But hospitals can adjust the policies and incorporate as many or as few as they choose.

For example, Cindy Samuelson, spokesperson for the Kansas Hospital Association, said a hospital could choose to start small and vow not to offer deep-fried foods on Fridays, rather than ban those foods entirely.

Samuelson compared the incorporation of healthy policies to the hospital industry’s shift to smoke-free campuses.

“First, you don’t have it anywhere in the hospital,” she said. “Then you don’t have it anywhere outside the hospital, then you don’t have it on the campus.”

This was the first year for the Healthy Hospital Symposium. The Kansas Health Foundation funded the initiative as part of a statewide partnership grant to promote healthy eating. It’s a three-year, $150,000 grant started in 2013. The foundation chose the hospital association as a recipient because of the reach hospitals have in communities as both large employers and health providers.

Samuelson said although doctors, dietitians and other medical providers who work in hospitals know how to eat healthy, they’re often not involved in administrative decisions about food.

“It’s not that the knowledge isn’t there, but we can collaborate together and look at all these best practices to make change,” she said.

Newton Medical Center and Wilson Medical Center are two of the 12 hospitals that started to implement policy suggestions from the Healthy Kansas Hospitals project. The two hospitals plan to change room-service food to patients, but so far have just made changes to employee and visitor foods.

Newton, for example, eliminated trans fat foods and reduced fried foods from 40 percent of its overall food options to nearly 20 percent. Wilson eliminated soda from its cafeteria and now offers only water, tea and coffee.

Janice Reese, marketing and community relations and foundation director for Wilson Medical Center, said the changes have been important for the community. She said she’s noticed some people visit Wilson Medical Center specifically to eat at the cafeteria.

Robert Smith, director of food and nutrition services for Newton Medical Center, said he’s happy with the changes thus far, but said there’s still more work ahead.

“The culture change is the hardest because we do like our comfort foods,” he said. “So it’s a challenge to market the healthy foods more than the comfort foods.”

This story was originally published October 23, 2015 at 7:33 PM with the headline "77 Kansas hospitals to offer healthier eating options."