Hospital teams up with provider to go both local and healthful

PORTLAND, Maine — Local food isn’t automatically better for you. But better nutrition is a major reason Maine hospitals are trying to improve their food.

Sometimes the two goals – more healthful food and more local food – coincide, as they did recently at Maine Medical Center when the hospital teamed up with a local company to make a better pizza dough.

It’ll Be Pizza, the manufacturer that makes dough for Portland Pie Co., created a multigrain, low-sodium pizza dough for the Portland hospital. The dough contains less than half the sodium of the old version, cutting it from 475 milligrams to 218 milligrams per slice.

Hospitals in the MaineHealth system have joined the 700 hospitals nationwide that are participating in the Hospital Healthy Food Initiative, a program of the Partnership for a Healthy America. The program, begun in 2012, uses techniques such as nutrition labeling and creating “wellness meals” to give hospital food a healthy makeover.

Some hospitals are getting rid of their fryolators, or taking salt shakers off the tables in their cafeterias. Others are promoting water in place of sodas, or replacing the junk food by the cash register with fruit and other healthy snacks.

MaineHealth joined the program in part after learning that two-thirds of its 17,000 employees statewide are overweight or obese.

One of the hardest targets to reach in the program is sodium, which is where the pizza dough comes in. The partnership with MaineHealth means the pizza company can make the dough available to all 12 hospitals in the MaineHealth system. There’s plenty of dough, and it’s easy to purchase.