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I was not planning to livestream on Monday.I was standing in a room at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in South Florida, amongst a small invite-only gathering centered around an announcement coming from HHS & CMS by the leaders making it themselves, in-person.

The lead-up antics had me confused about the entire thing. Added to the constant reminder I have to provide to many that I’m not in the room for the messenger but the message. Restoring human health. That I’m not looking to add to the ongoing thread of whether more harm than good has been done.

My objective is to understand all of the tailwinds that could accelerate the creation of System C and a parallel Human Outcome-based economy. A $9T economy.

But as the unexpected announcement began, I decided to simply go live on Substack. I’ve never done that before.

Within about 3 minutes, more people joined from the outside via Substack than were physically in the room. When I saw the names pop up - many of them leaders of the Food Is Medicine movement across this country - I knew I had made the right decision.

It should come as no surprise that the media in attendance completely missed what the announcement actually represented.

And so, as Carter Williams and I debriefed with Maura Plante who was one of the leaders/hosts of the event, yesterday, it became clear we owed it to our (now) 18,000 strong subscriber base to dive in properly. Today we will go live at 1pm ET with Maura, founder of Living Hungry and the Florida Health and Nutrition Coalition. Maura has been doing the unglamorous, essential, deeply human work of building food-as-health infrastructure in communities that the policy conversation references constantly but rarely actually involves.

She is the real thing. And she is part of why Monday even happened.

She and a few others got it across the finish line despite all of the attempted blocking and tackling.We are going to do what we always do: riff about what we think the announcements actually mean. Too bad I didn’t get a chance to chat with Sayer Ji at the event, would be fun to have him join the conversation as well.

The headline in case you missed it

Monday morning, HHS & CMS announced two things:

* CMS sent a memo to every hospital in the country. Not a suggestion. A memo reminding hospitals that under existing conditions of participation - the mechanism that determines Medicare and Medicaid eligibility - they must ensure patient menus align with the updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs). That is a federal mandate in everything but name. Whether it can be enforced or how isn’t what we will focus upon, but instead on the opportunity this presents as it relates to Food Is Health and System C.

* Secretary Kennedy announced a pledge he is asking hospitals to make to source 5% of food from local farmers, increasing every year. At the event, Nicklaus Children's Hospital committed to sourcing 5% of food from local Florida farmers, increasing by 1% every year.

Oz went on to remind everyone:

“Starting April 1st, for the first time in history, CMS will pay for app developers and digital technologies that support personalized nutrition services.”

In the span of 10 minutes 4 major tailwinds were shared in rapid succession that accelerate the need for measurement infrastructure, the need for infrastructure to scale local farm supply and distribution, the need for the coordination layer that connects food