From the archive
11 Aug 2026
In the rural Navajo Nation, people living with heart failure face a familiar pattern: repeated hospitalisations and emergency department visits that punctuate life with the illness. A new randomised clinical trial has now tested whether food - specifically, food these patients grew up with - could break that pattern. The intervention was a meal programme rooted in traditional Diné ingredients and recipes, delivered to heart failure patients being cared for at two Indian Health Service sites.
The trial, called MUTTON-HF, was led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania and Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico. It enrolled 206 adults. Half received usual care; the other half received eight weeks of medically tailored meals built around traditional Diné cooking. The patients eating the traditional meals ended up in hospital and the emergency department significantly less often than those on usual care.
The authors believe this is the first Indigenous 'Food Is Medicine' intervention shown to improve cardiovascular health outcomes. They note that earlier medically tailored meal trials for heart failure concentrated on urban patients in the period just after hospital discharge - a different population from the rural communities this trial served. The published summary gives no further detail on the meals themselves, the exact size of the reduction, or what the programme cost to run.
A meal programme earns trust through recognition, not novelty: build the menu from foods patients already know by name, with recipes that could come from their own kitchens. This trial ran eight weeks of tailored meals per patient - long enough to change what people ate, short enough to fund.
Regeneration International · Read the source