It's a trifecta of agriculture, health care and public policy, plus efforts to ensure every Kentuckian has access to nutritious food and how to prepare it.

That conversation was held Wednesday with the Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force in Frankfort, our Laura Rogers explains.

And tonight's legislative update.

Eat your medicine or you'll take medicine.

And I think that goes really to the heart of what we're talking about.

The Kentucky Hospital Association and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture have partnered for the Food as Medicine campaign for me.

Senator, it is selfish in what we're doing because we want to increase real prosperity and profitability on the farm.

And in nearly every community in which there is a hospital, they're the largest food consumers in that community.

They're also often the largest employer.

Health care typically has a very unhealthy workforce.

And so that's where this initiative started getting healthy local produce and proteins from Kentucky farms and the hospital cafeterias.

It's a win win for our employees.

It's a win win for improving the health, and it's a win win for our local ag.

Community hospitals are also hosting farmers markets and their parking lot.

We're finding that now patients are scheduling their procedures, their intake, their checkups on the days that the farmers markets are there so that they can not only get their health care taken care of, but also participate in the farmers market to get their food brought back to the house.

The task force had questions about how to measure the program's success, like hospital workers taking fewer sick days or faster recovery times for patients.

We'll be able to see numbers like that that are saving costs for y'all, that will be able to to see and analyze.

One of the powerful statistics that Jim mentioned are a readmission rate.

Appalachian Regional Health Care says those readmission rates are way down.

They also see it as an investment and their workforce.

If we have healthy employees, they're going to be productive employees who are happy to come to work every day.

And they have the we're about to work a 12 hour shift and care for very, very sick patients all day long.

Commissioner Schell says they do need a more robust system to track total outcomes.

And then there's the funding issue from both private insurance and state and federal programs.

If we're subsidizing $1 trillion pharmaceutical companies through reimbursable Medicaid and Medicare opportunities, why are we not doing the same thing on proven metrics that we know we'll get outcomes for healthy food and healthy living on the front end?

Some of those efforts are also offered through the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service, who discussed the impact of nutrition education for those individuals who attended seven or more sessions.

We saw 98% of those participants showed improvement in one or more diet quality indicators.

That's huge.

They also offer programs for children, say they're getting results.

And then when we looked at the older kids, their fifth grade, we really saw some impressive gains, especially with, almost two thirds of them reducing the amount of sports drinks that they were drinking.

72% drinking fewer sodas.

They were asked about a recent loss of federal funding and congressional budget cuts.

With that, the big, beautiful bill that was signed into law on July 4th, it eliminated funding for the supplemental nutrition education program, which we call snap ed.

As a result, 85 positions were eliminated as of September 30th.

We need to change the concept that the government isn't going to make you healthy.

You're going to make yourself healthy.

So you continue to share great resources of how people can invest in themselves.

You've got wonderful programing and we're very appreciative for Kentucky Edition.

I'm Laura Rogers.