The Food as Health Opportunity

Businesses, consumers, and government all wield different definitions of nutrition, all of which fall short of capturing the scope of how food can enhance human health. It can be fashioned into a tool to combat diet-related disease or as a medical food to manage a distinct nutritional deficiency. It can be utilized under the guidance of a dietitian to solicit a specific response or simply the provision of food can engage individuals in their health journeys to achieve improved outcomes. 

Rather than imposing a limiting definition, S2G proposes that ​“Food as Health” encompasses all solutions that leverage food or food-derived products to prevent, manage, treat, or improve either population or individual health outcomes. 

Today, food and healthcare operate independently. The food sector has been engineered to deliver low-cost, high-calorie foods at industrial scale, while the healthcare sector has been designed to treat illness after diagnosis. Public policy has reinforced this separation, with the U.S. effectively subsidizing both cheap calories through agricultural and food system incentives and rising healthcare costs through public and employer-based spending. While each sector has advanced in its own right, the lack of a meaningful conductor between the two has produced unchecked interplay. Poor nutrition is a leading contributor to preventable disease, yet nutrition is minimally incorporated into healthcare. The metabolic health of America is bleak with one in two adults having either diabetes or prediabetes, while 14 in 15 have suboptimal cardiometabolic health. 

This system appears to be as effective as it is cheap as U.S. healthcare spending hit $5.3 trillion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $8.6 trillion by 2033. In terms of U.S. GDP, this represents growth from 18% to 20.3%. The rapid adoption of GLP‑1 therapies underscores both the scale of metabolic dysfunction and the willingness of payers, employers, and consumers to invest in interventions that address diet-related disease, however, these drugs also highlight the absence of a complementary nutrition layer needed to sustain long-term outcomes. As diet continues to fuel epidemics of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, the question is whether upstream nutrition solutions can bend the healthcare cost curve or whether the U.S. economy will remain locked into financing downstream treatment.

Bridging the food and healthcare sectors represents a powerful lever for systemic change and allows entrepreneurs and operators to build investable business by integrating food and nutrition to drive measurable health outcomes. Notably, the foods most consistently linked to improved health outcomes tend to carry the lowest environmental impact, revealing an opportunity to align better nutrition with lower system-wide strain. Reframing nutrition through a health lens has the potential to address three interconnected challenges at once: rising healthcare costs, deteriorating public health, and mounting environmental pressure.

For more than a decade, S2G has invested at the seams where food and health converge, and we see a growing opportunity for Food as Health to generate substantial economic value and measurable impact. Our portfolio of 24 pioneering companies illustrates how innovation and targeted capital can translate nutrition into improved health outcomes at scale. 

In our view, Food as Health represents a generational opportunity to realign incentives, reduce costs, and extend healthy years of life through scalable nutritional interventions. We believe the next decade will determine whether the U.S. continues to treat chronic disease downstream or redesigns its healthcare system around prevention. 

If you are an operator, entrepreneur, provider, retailer, or researcher working to make Food as Health a standard of care, we invite you to connect with us.