Senior Director, Feeding Change, Milken Institute Health
Holly Freishtat is the senior director of Feeding Change at the Milken Institute. She is an experienced director, transformative leader, and strategist with a 20-year track record developing and implementing food system policies and programs.
Associate Director, Public Health, Milken Institute Health
Athena Rae Roesler is an associate director on the public health team at Milken Institute Health. Her work champions and evaluates public health policies, solutions, and partnerships to build a more equitable world.
Diet-related chronic disease continues to rise throughout the US population and, with it, the cost of health care. Despite record spending, the US experiences the lowest life expectancy among high-income countries and demonstrates declining health outcomes year after year. Communities of color and people experiencing food insecurity bear a disproportionate burden of these impacts. With billions of dollars sunk in medical costs, lives lost from preventable diseases, and lagging productivity, medical and public health experts have increasingly turned to efforts that prioritize food as medicine.
Food Is Medicine (FIM) has been increasingly leveraged in health care to prevent, treat, and manage diet-related health needs as well as address food insecurity as a direct response to research showing the importance of nutrition in overall health.
However, FoodRx, or Food Is Medicine prescriptions, have been slow to scale and keep pace with the rising disease burden. This report, Market Solutions for Scaling Food Is Medicine Prescriptions, summarizes the research and key findings of a Milken Institute Financial Innovations Lab®, which brought together 40 health plans, policy experts, government representatives, FoodRx technology companies, food retailers, consultants, and community-based organizations, including members of the Feeding Change Food Is Medicine Task Force to determine areas of technology solutions, funding priority, and investment vehicles to help finance these efforts.
Countries undergoing population aging today are facing a much different experience than their historical counterparts. One only needs to look at the countries in Asia to see how these trends are unfolding. Demographic aging is happening...
The 26th annual Milken Institute Global Conference convened the best minds in the world to tackle its most urgent challenges and realize its most exciting opportunities. Throughout the four-day event, our health teams curated nearly three...
Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States was confronted with a number of significant policy concerns. Today, working together to solve those challenges is more imperative than ever. The Milken Institute is committed...
While some sounds can be annoying for most people, for a few, certain sounds like chewing, sniffling, or pen clicking can trigger an intense physical and emotional response. Those with this condition can experience increased heart rate...
The Financial Innovations Labs® and FasterCures teams have collaborated on a project to identify new models for financing the antimicrobial resistant antibiotic pipeline. These past 18 months have demonstrated how consequential public...
In this collection of essays from the Center for the Future of Aging, experts identify challenges and opportunities in realizing the potential of healthy, productive and purposeful aging.
Technical Update Dementia presents a pernicious gender-based health disparity in the United States, inflicting a disproportionate burden on women as both patients and caregivers. Given the rapid increase in the population of older Americans...
This year’s report, Building a Resilient America: The New Consensus for Action, is part of The Milken Institute-Harris Poll Listening Project, now in its fifth year, which surveys socioeconomic, institutional, and political barriers to...
Nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 sparked many of the largest US corporations to pledge more than $200 billion to advance racial equity and confront the nation’s history of systemic racism. Nonprofits, government agencies, and...