From Kitchen to Clinic: Study protocol for a family-centered, food-as-medicine approach using medically tailored meals and caregiver coaching in pediatric oncology care

Top Things to Know

This study will test whether a combined MTM-plus-coaching model can be delivered successfully and accepted by families during active pediatric cancer treatment.

Researchers anticipate that pairing food support with caregiver coaching may help address both treatment-related nutrition challenges and household-level barriers to healthy eating.

The study could provide the foundation for a larger trial evaluating impacts on nutrition, treatment tolerance, caregiver outcomes, and survivorship-related cardiometabolic risk.

Summary of Conclusion/Findings

This paper describes From Kitchen to Clinic, a 12-week feasibility study that will evaluate a family-centered food is medicine intervention combining medically tailored meals (MTMs) with registered dietitian nutritionist coaching for 60 caregiver-child dyads undergoing active pediatric cancer treatment. The investigators anticipate that the intervention will be feasible and acceptable for families, with predefined targets for recruitment, retention, assessment completion, coaching participation, and meal utilization serving as benchmarks for determining whether a larger trial is warranted. The intervention is designed to address nutrition-related challenges during treatment by providing weekly MTMs and caregiver support, with the expectation that reducing barriers to healthy eating may improve dietary quality, household nutrition security, and caregiver confidence in managing treatment-related nutrition concerns. Researchers will also collect exploratory data to assess whether the program shows potential signals of benefit for child dietary intake, weight and body composition trajectories, treatment tolerance, household food and nutrition security, and caregiver burden and distress, although the study is not powered to test effectiveness. The authors suggest that early nutrition support during active treatment could represent an important opportunity to influence long-term cardiometabolic health risks among childhood cancer survivors, but note that the current study is intended primarily to establish feasibility rather than demonstrate clinical outcomes. If feasibility benchmarks are achieved, the findings are expected to inform the design of a future randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness and scalability of this pediatric oncology Food Is Medicine model.