Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Urge Hospitals to Conform to New Dietary Guidelines
Hospital food is notoriously overprocessed, unappetizing, and unhealthy. But that may be changing if hospitals really follow through with the March 30, 2026 memo from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide meals in compliance with the new dietary guidelines.
The memo reminds hospitals that the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans includes “explicit recommendations to avoid highly processed foods,” refined carbohydrates, and sugar. It urges hospital nutrition services departments to limit ultra-processed food and eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grains, processed meats, and foods high in added sugars.
In addition to providing meal recommendations that comply with the new guidelines, the memo encourages hospitals to educate patients about how “whole-food dietary patterns may support both short-term recovery and long-term risk reduction.” Ideally, patients would be fed healthy, whole foods in the hospital, then encouraged to continue that habit after returning home.
With medical costs rising to $5.3 trillion ($15,474 per person) in 2024, 90 percent of those costs going to chronic health conditions, and strong evidence linking many of those chronic health conditions to poor diet and ultra-processed foods, this guidance is long overdue. Feeding people the same foods that put them in the hospital in the first place is not the best road to recovery, yet until recently it’s been all too common.
If there’s any pushback, it will likely be on the grounds that healthy food costs more. However, it’s not food that makes hospitalization expensive. The average cost of a hospital stay in the United States is $3,130 per day. Sixty percent of that money goes to pay labor, 18 percent for medical supplies, and 9 percent for drugs. The amount spent for food is so low that information on it is not publicly available, but it’s likely around $10, or 0.3 percent of the total cost of hospitalization.
There are already strong efforts to improve hospital food. Several university hospitals, sixty-three hospitals in Pennsylvania, and several New York City hospitals have hired skilled chefs and started preparing palatable meals from fresh, whole foods. Hopefully the new guidelines will encourage more hospitals to follow suit.
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics notes that the memo “does not change existing regulatory requirements,” serving instead as a guideline with the final decisions made by hospital dieticians. It is yet to be seen if all hospitals will really follow the guidelines and remove ultra-processed foods, white bread, sugary beverages, and sweetened cereals from their menus. If they do, that will be an enormous step toward improving patient health.
Like the Dietary Guidelines themselves, the memo says nothing about how food should be grown. Hopefully, hospitals will use the guidelines as an opportunity to expand the programs they’ve already started of sourcing fresh, local food for their patients—and hiring skilled chefs who can use those ingredients to make food that actually tastes good.
