Nourish Reviews

Nutritional guidelines have changed a lot over time. It’s such that a 40-year-old would have grown up thinking that bread and rice ought to make up the majority of their daily food intake, only to be told today that such foods should constitute no more than a quarter of any meal.1 2 That’s if they even know about any changes. As of 2020, only one-third of Americans were aware that the USDA had updated its dietary guidance, and only one-tenth had tried to implement the new recommendations.3

At the same time, there’s an urgent need to change how we generally eat, given the high rates of nutrient deficiency, high cholesterol, and overweight/obesity.2 4 5 But for the average person, changing one’s food habits is no easy feat. For one thing, much of the nutritional information available online is inaccurate, full of misguidance.6 For another, as much as food is a cultural and social gathering point, it’s also deeply personal, so to change what and how we eat can feel as unnatural as wearing someone else’s personality.

That’s a lot to overcome, and some help would be nice.

So enter Nourish, an insurance-backed telehealth platform that connects you with a registered dietitian to help you hurdle the educational, infrastructural, and psychological barriers to healthy nutrition. In this review, we explain everything you need to decide whether Nourish is worth it, including its protocols and potential costs. Along the way, we recount our tester’s experience so that you get a ground-level peek at what it’s like to be a Nourish patient.

Nourish connects users with a regional dietitian of their choice to help address a wide range of dietary and nutritional concerns. For many, the patient-dietitian interface adds a layer of accountability that’s absent from ordinary calorie-tracking and dieting platforms. Plus, because Nourish is insurance-backed, insured users often pay $0 for their appointments. Individual outcomes will vary, though, so the platform’s effectiveness will depend on a user’s willingness to be honest about their needs, both to themselves and with their dietitian. Also, the app, while handsome enough, is functionally minimal, with a food-logging system that not only leaves a lot to be desired but also has the potential to affect the user’s health outcomes.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

This review of Nourish is the culmination of the more than 60 hours we spent researching related medical and scientific topics, as well as using the Nourish platform. Gathering the broadest possible range of salient information required that we do more than study the literature on dietetics and nutrition-related diseases. We also approached the user experience earnestly, reflecting honestly on our nutritional needs and fully engaging in our regular appointments. Throughout, we kept comprehensive notes about our health progress, perspectives, and relationship with our dietitian, along with our opinions on Nourish’s desktop and mobile features.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

We evaluated Nourish based on the four criteria that are likely to influence your decision to try Nourish and stick with it:

• Effectiveness: Objectively, what’s the science on dietetics? And subjectively, did we find it helpful for us?
• User experience: What’s it like using the desktop website and mobile app? Is there anything notably positive or glaringly frustrating?
• Data safety: This is a healthcare platform, after all, so what does Nourish do to protect our personal information?
• Cost: How accessible is Nourish from a financial standpoint — not just broadly, but also with respect to specific user populations?

Here’s how we rated Nourish in each category:

Effectiveness

Our hands-on testing has shown us that a Nourish appointment goes exactly like an in-person visit with a dietitian, just without the “in-person part”: individualized nutrition planning and goal-setting based on history and needs, with follow-ups focused on improvements, setbacks, and support.7 With that being the case, we were able to assess Nourish’s efficacy in terms of the scientific literature on dietetics broadly and how research findings measure against our subjective experience.

Take, for example, a 2019 systematic review on the effects that dietitians have on weight management, in which the researchers found that patients with dietitian intervention lost 1.03kg (2.27lbs) more weight, on average, than those without.8 Or consider a 2022 review that saw “improved glycemic control, weight management, [and] cardiovascular outcomes” when registered dietitians were involved in the care of older adults with type 2 diabetes.9

Such findings are consistent with the experiences of our tester, someone who has recently seen elevated cholesterol levels, whose weight has fluctuated in middle age, and who feels they could stand to lose a few pounds. Whereas in past efforts they experimented with various restrictive diets and still struggled to maintain calorie deficits, they felt that their Nourish dietitian’s guidance has carved a comparably easy path to eating habits that support their health goals. They cited multiple reasons for this:

• Expertise: Our tester can trust that they’re receiving research-informed recommendations with their best interests in mind.10
• Accountability: Because their dietitian is a trustworthy authority, our tester feels more accountable to their expectations than they’d normally feel with, say, a vague self-imposed commitment to weight loss or the numbers on a calorie-tracking app (with Nourish, if they fudged their food-logging, how would they explain any consequent weight gain?).
• Personalized and holistic treatment: One of the pillars of dietetics, as with all proper medical care, is to be personalized and holistic, so treatment strives to address all of the factors (physiological, psychological, emotional, social, cultural) that could hinder a patient’s progress.11

The result, then, has been a realistic, sustainable approach to weight loss and cholesterol reduction that hasn’t left our tester feeling deprived or doubtful. They’ve also lost weight since starting with Nourish and are continuing their treatment beyond our testing period.

Dietetics isn’t a guaranteed solution, however, and that inevitable shortcoming accounts for a small part of the deduction in score here. The rest of the 1.5 points subtracted from our rating actually relates to the next criterion.

User experience

Cutting to the chase, we’ll say right now that the one major issue we had with Nourish is its food-logging. It’s an AI-powered system whereby you photograph and/or describe the food you ate and it automatically populates the macros. We suppose that would be fine if it were accurate, but it’s often not accurate. Even with something like prepackaged salad kits, it would insist that the calories were much lower or higher than what the label conveys, or else it would incorrectly calculate one or more of the other macronutrients (fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber). Understand, these data points are one of the foundations on which your dietitian can personalize their recommendations and support; if they’re significantly off, then so may be your treatment plan. You can switch off the AI feature, but then you’d have to laboriously look up and input each data point yourself. We’d have preferred it to have been linked to a reliable nutritional database instead.

Also, food-logging can be done in the mobile app only, which tends to slow down an already tedious activity.

Food-logging aside, we had two lesser gripes

• Lack of third-party synchronization: It would be nice if the Nourish app could communicate with a pedometer and calorie counter, for example.
• Recipes: While you can access free healthy recipes in-app and on desktop, you get only 1-5 recipes per day. A few more would be appreciated.

So there are technical limitations with the Nourish platform, and for the best possible outcomes, you may have to put time into adjusting data points where you see fit. From there, as long as you have a reliable internet connection, you should have no trouble scheduling and fulfilling your appointments and communicating with your dietitian.

Data safety

Nourish gets a near-perfect score for data safety since its privacy and data collection policy aligns with the HIPAA Privacy Rule. That is, the use or disclosure of your protected health information (PHI) is kept to a minimum and always kept confidential except in permitted instances (e.g., preventing fraud or abuse, or relaying salient information to insurance providers).12 Even in the event that your dietitian needs to share PHI with another medical provider, such as in consultation to improve your care, your identity is kept confidential. In most other cases, your dietitian must request your authorization to disclose any PHI, or you have the opportunity to object to disclosure.

The single point we deducted from Nourish’s rating here relates to the risks that are inherent to telehealth services in general. In a 2023 systematic review published in Perspectives in Health Information Management, the authors highlighted three specific risk categories:13

• Environmental: “lack of private space for vulnerable populations, difficulty sharing sensitive health information remotely”
• Technological: “data security issues, limited access to the internet”
• Operational: “reimbursement, payer denials, technology accessibility, training, and education”

We can’t ding Nourish too much for these concerns since the burden of responsibility is shared by the end user. That’s to say that prospective Nourish patients should be comfortable shouldering these risks before signing up and using the platform.

Cost

Nourish is very affordable for some. Specifically, if you have health insurance coverage with the platform’s in-network entities — Blue Cross Blue Shield/Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, Medical Mutual of Ohio, or Medicare — then you’ll probably pay $0 out of pocket, at least for your first few appointments. And if your coverage is broad enough, you may never pay a cent.

But not everyone has health insurance, and even insured people may have only conditional or limited coverage for nutrition therapy.14 15 For them, the out-of-pocket cost of Nourish is $145 per appointment, which is on the high end.16 On top of it all, you incur a $75 fee every time you miss an appointment or fail to reschedule with your dietitian within 24 hours.

So our rating here reflects the duality of Nourish’s pricing structure. As long as your insurance covers your treatment, you have nothing to worry about in terms of cost. Otherwise, the financial burden is high and can quickly build, in which case you might be better off with a local dietitian or an online alternative like Top Nutrition Coaching, which costs as low as $59 per week out of pocket.

Nourish is a telemedicine platform that connects users with their own registered dietitian (a.k.a. RD, registered dietitian nutritionist, or RDN) — think BetterHelp but for nutritional and dietary health. It’s part of a larger trend of making key but often underutilized health services more accessible to the general public. Availability extends to all 50 states.

Dietitians (a.k.a. RDs or RDNs) aren’t the same thing as nutritionists, as this table lays out:

The distinction between medical and non-medical means that dietitian services are often covered by health insurance, whereas the same can’t be said of nutritionists. Indeed, Nourish is backed by six major insurance entities, the same ones as competitor Top Nutrition Coaching:

• Blue Cross Blue Shield/Anthem
• UnitedHealthcare
• Aetna
• Cigna
• Medical Mutual of Ohio
• Medicare

Furthermore, given the medical nature of dietetics, it’s usually dietitians, not nutritionists, who are integral members of larger, holistic health teams that include other specialists and general practitioners. Accordingly, although many of a dietitian’s patients are interested in losing excess weight, dietitian-led treatment doesn’t necessarily center around weight loss. It has to do with any diet- or nutrition-related health matter, including but not limited to malnutrition, disordered eating, diabetes, prediabetes, high cholesterol, and pregnancy. The idea is to help people prevent or treat associated complications through food and their relationships to it.

Nourish generally operates like any other telemed service: the user onboards and then fulfills appointments via video call. But the services are spread across both a desktop and a mobile interface, and the functionality isn’t always identical. In the following sections, we break down each step of the Nourish process so that you know what to expect.

During sign-up, the first thing you do is identify your health insurance provider. We’ve mentioned that Nourish is backed by six major national providers — Blue Cross Blue Shield/Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, Medical Mutual of Ohio, and Medicare — but here you can alternatively select any of the following:

• Medicaid
• Cigna Open Access Plus
• United Medical Resources
• Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicare
• Aetna Medicare
• UHC Medicare
• Cigna Medicare
• Meritain
• Oxford
• Cigna Local Plus
• All Savers
• Devoted Health
• Wellmed
• Independence Keystone Health
• Self-pay
• Other

Apart from the self-pay option, the next step is to input the details of your insurance membership, including member ID, birth sex, date of birth, and name. The system then verifies your coverage for you.

From there, it’s about your health goals. This section comprises many options — not just weight loss but also chronic issues like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, prediabetes, emotional eating, and eating disorders, as well as broader concerns like weight loss, heart health, gut health, women’s health, and general health. Then you start narrowing down your concerns (e.g., do you need help with elimination dieting, meal-planning, personalized macros, or lab testing?) so that your dietitian has a fuller baseline understanding of what you’re aiming to achieve.

With all that finished, you choose a regional dietitian from Nourish’s large roster. Each name is accompanied by a photo, a star rating, and a list of specializations to help you determine whether a particular dietitian is equipped to address your concerns. After selecting a dietitian, you choose a date and time for your first appointment.

In the end, you’re invited to write an introductory message to your chosen dietitian. Here, you should also get an estimate of how much your appointment will cost. This is part of the Nourish Guarantee — essentially a compliance measure with the No Surprises Act, by which providers must notify you of expected costs before the costs are finalized.17 If you’re insured, the estimate is likely to read $0, at least for the first appointment.

Our tester’s experience

During the dietitian selection, our tester appreciated the accompanying ratings and lists of specializations. In their opinion, each accessory detail led them to choose the ideal provider for them. Even the photos helped, as they provided at least cursory information about potential cultural understandings and sympathies that could help inform the provider’s medical guidance (i.e., while it’s no guarantee, a provider of X descent might be presumed to be more attuned and sensitive to the nuances surrounding the food habits of a patient with a similar background — an important factor when it comes to delivering competent dietetic care).18

Between onboarding and your first appointment, you’ll be asked to upload intake forms in the Documents tab of your Nourish dashboard:

• Nutrition and Lifestyle Assessment: a self-report of your current weight, goal weight, activity level, and related details
• Nourish Info, Consent, HIPAA and Release Agreement: a terms-of-service agreement that indicates you understand Nourish’s privacy policy (more on that later)
• Release of Information Consent: so you can connect your electronic health record to your Nourish account
• Credit Card Information: how you pay for your appointments, in case your insurance provider ceases coverage
• Insurance Cards: documentation of your insurance coverage

Appointments

Nourish is diligent about reminding you of your upcoming appointments. In the days leading up, expect at least one text message and a couple of emails about it. The appointments are conducted through Zoom. Your call link is accessible through the reminder emails, as well as the Appointments tab of your Nourish dashboard.

Appointments generally run 30-55 minutes long. The first one is a get-to-know-you phase, when you elaborate on the concerns you selected during onboarding, describe what you normally eat, and discuss related factors such as your most recent labs, as well as your emotions and thoughts surrounding food. Based on what you disclose, your dietitian will set a treatment plan and health goals (e.g., maximum macros, minimum activity levels, water intake recommendations, and things you should limit or increase in your diet). They may also offer you a personalized meal plan and recipes.

Follow-up appointments are generally about assessing how well you kept to your treatment plan and made progress toward your goals. Part of your follow-ups should be devoted to how you felt as you strove to stick to your plan — for example:

• Did you feel deprived?
• What drove you to overeat/undereat?
• What specific obstacles did you face?

Your dietitian may then adjust your treatment plan according to your responses.

After each appointment, your dietitian ought to write and share a summary of your discussion. It’s due diligence for any medical provider, and it prevents you from having to remember the myriad things you talked about across the span of nearly an hour.

Our tester’s experience

Our tester approached their first appointment with some trepidation. As with any doctor’s appointment, they were worried to discover they were doing everything wrong about their health. To their relief, they found their dietitian to be attentive, comprehensive, and judgment-free. Notably, one of the most valuable insights their dietitian gave was that our tester was already doing a lot of things right in their diet and lifestyle, like regularly eating cod and brussels sprouts. Although it’s common knowledge that fish and cruciferous vegetables are generally good fixtures in a diet, our tester felt heartened to be validated about the amounts they were consuming; it gave them a firm foundation on which to base the changes that the dietitian would recommend.

Because our tester was concerned about their cholesterol, much of their first appointment concerned restrictions and changes to help lower their numbers. Our tester was already familiar with some of the information they received (e.g., consume omega-3s and fiber), but other information was new to them (e.g., alcohol can raise triglycerides, and sourdough bread has a lower glycemic load than ordinary bread).19 20

Every day, Nourish patients can access a set of free recipes in the Recipes tab of their dashboard. Most days, it’s five new recipes, but it can be as few as one. The recipes are usually for simple fare (e.g., braised celery or a butter-bean side dish). The measurements are a combination of imperial and metric — imperial where it makes sense, as with teaspoons and tablespoons, but otherwise it’s grams and milliliters.

There are also ready-made meals provided by ModifyHealth, a health-focused meal-delivery company. Each dish costs $9.95, and you must select at least six to complete your purchase. The pricing is roughly in line with comparable brands, like Factor. The variety is generous, too, accommodating multiple health plans and dietary restrictions (e.g., low-FODMAP, diabetes-friendly, vegan/vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free). Plus, the meals ship for free and are estimated to arrive within five business days.

Mobile app and food-logging

Nourish has a mobile app that’s compatible with Android and iOS. Everything you can do in the desktop dashboard, you can do in the app. But not vice versa. The app is the only medium through which you can log the food and beverages you consume and track your daily macros — data points your dietitian needs to optimize your personalized treatment plan — so while using the app is technically optional, it isn’t realistically so.

Food-logging is the one Nourish feature that we consider to be a flagrant flaw. Rather than being connected to a nutrition database, it’s powered by AI. The idea is that for everything you consume, you upload a photo and/or write a description and the AI system automatically generates the macros. And it can sometimes be wildly inaccurate. Here’s an image to illustrate:

On the left is the nutrition label of a salad kit; on the right, the Nourish app’s AI-generated calculation of the same salad kit’s macros. According to the app, a serving of the salad kit has nearly twice the calories, 2.5 times the fat, and around three times the carbs and protein than it actually has. We’ve also seen miscalculations skew in the opposite direction: undercounting the macros considerably.

To be fair, the AI isn’t always so bad. Sometimes, it’s off by just a little (e.g, 395cal versus 405cal); other times, it’s spot on (it calculates Cheerios perfectly). But its potential for inaccuracy raises concerns. For one thing, how can we trust its calculation of restaurant food, for which nutrition information is often absent? And how can your dietitian provide optimal guidance and treatment if the counts are way off?

Fortunately, you can edit the macros of everything you log (tedious, but often necessary). You can also save commonly eaten food items for quicker logging down the line.

Our tester’s experience

Our tester saw one silver lining to the tedious macro-tracking and revising associated with Nourish’s food-logging: it revealed how they could make small adjustments to homemade food to better align it with their health goals. They’d regularly make buns, for example, and normally portion the dough into eight pieces. But they’d never calculated the buns’ macros until Nourish furnished them with a reason. Thus, they learned that by dividing the dough further into 12 pieces, they could decrease the per-serving calorie and carbohydrate counts enough to stay under their daily macro limits without compromising too much on food volume.

A proper telemed platform takes PHI seriously. It’s the law, after all.12 With that in mind, we’re happy to say that Nourish is a proper telemed platform, with a comprehensive privacy policy that prioritizes patient confidentiality.

In accordance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule, Nourish can disclose your PHI without your authorization only when it’s necessary to:

• Carry out your treatment plan
• Remind you of your appointments
• Facilitate payment
• Support healthcare, research, or government organizations
• Comply with a legal writ, workers’ compensation laws, or health oversight activities
• Prevent a serious health and safety threat

A good example of a permissible instance is when a dietitian needs to discuss a patient’s health condition with another medical provider who could provide assistance with diagnosis or treatment. In that case, they’d be within their authority to share certain forms of the patient’s PHI, which otherwise remains confidential outside of this provider-provider exchange.

Otherwise, your progress notes and other health records remain confidential. And even in instances that your PHI must be disclosed, your personally identifiable information may be obscured.

For most people with health insurance, Nourish should cost $0 out of pocket, at least at first. Thereafter, the cost depends on the extent of your coverage. Some insured patients may never pay a cent for their Nourish treatment, whereas others might have to start paying after a certain number of appointments.

The amount that insured patients pay depends on their insurance company. When they start using Nourish, their insurer might take several weeks to process the claim and make a decision about cost. During that time, the patient is protected by the Nourish Guarantee, which goes like this:

• Nourish doesn’t charge for appointments that you’ve already had, even if they’re eventually denied by your insurance provider.
• When your appointment has a copay, Nourish won’t charge you more than the initial estimate until the real cost has been determined.
• When an appointment goes toward your deductible, you can either (a) pay the deductible and continue with appointments covered by your insurance, or (b) not pay and not be charged anything for the appointments you’ve already had. Should you choose the second option, future appointments will be paid out of pocket.

The out-of-pocket cost (for uninsured users and denied claims) is high: $145 per appointment. For perspective, consider that in-person follow-up appointments with local dietitians typically cost $50-$150.16 Nourish, then, is toward the high end of cost there. A month’s worth of weekly appointments would cost $480, at minimum, which amounts to $5,760 per year. Even if you reduce appointment frequency by half, that’s still $2,880. Perhaps that’s not egregiously high in the context of U.S. medical care, but it’s still higher than the average American’s out-of-pocket cost of $1,425.21

On top of it all, Nourish charges a $75 no-show fee for every missed appointment or appointment that you fail to reschedule without at least 24 hours’ notice. If you’re prone to last-minute agenda changes, you might see the surcharges mount.

Practically anyone can stand to benefit from Nourish, especially if they have a food- or nutrition-related health concern such as:22

• Overweight or obesity: A registered dietitian can provide guidance and support to bring weight down and manage associated chronic diseases (e.g., high cholesterol, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes).
• Digestive issues: With a dietitian’s knowledge and expertise, a patient can better identify the causes of their digestive issues and modify their diet to improve their gastrointestinal health.
• Pregnancy: People who are pregnant or trying to conceive need specific nutrients. A dietitian can explain those needs and demystify the ordeal.
• Food intolerances, sensitivities, and allergies: Having a food intolerance, sensitivity, or allergy means having to avoid specific foods without sacrificing key nutrients.
• Disordered eating: Part of a dietitian’s work is helping patients develop healthier relationships with food.
• Aging: A person’s dietary needs, preferences, and intolerances can change as they grow older, particularly when they begin taking medications that may interact with foods they could previously enjoy.

In addition, dietitians can be valuable stewards to people with specific dietary needs without any serious dietary concerns. Athletes, for example, need to consume more calories and meet specific goals to optimize their performance,23 and parents may need professional assistance in understanding their children’s nutritional requirements and planning meals.

For any such person, even just a couple of appointments could be worth the time (and money, should that be the case). At minimum, they might learn something about eating and nutrition that empowers them to start toward their ultimate health goals, which may be enough to propel them toward long-term health.24

Even people who don’t fall under any of these categories could do with a session or two with a Nourish dietitian, if only to wade through the morass of misinformation about food, dieting, and nutrition found online.6

Who is it not for?

Although Nourish can benefit anyone, it’s not for everyone.

One population we might advise against Nourish is the uninsured, only because the cost is steep. For them, it might be better to see a local dietitian in person, presuming that the cost is lower. Or we’d at least suggest limiting their Nourish appointments so as to minimize the out-of-pocket expenditure.

Another would be people without food-related comorbidities. As long as you’re in perfect health and have a healthy relationship with food, there’s simply no reason to seek a dietitian’s expertise.

And the final population that we’d steer away from Nourish: people who aren’t committed to making lifestyle changes. Long-term health outcomes don’t start with a medical provider; they start with the patient deciding that they need and want to make a change. So Nourish, or any telemed platform, isn’t the solution for someone who’s only passively interested in their health, and especially not for anyone who’s resistant to input from medical authority. It wouldn’t be a fruitful use of their time, much less that of a dietitian.

There are few direct alternatives to Nourish (i.e., other dietitian telemed platforms), but we’ve identified two that could be worth your time — although, compared to Nourish, they offer less geographical availability or less transparency about protocols and pricing:

A couple of indirect competitors may be worth considering, as well. For people principally interested in losing weight, there’s Noom, a weight-loss app that also now offers weight-loss prescriptions such as GLP-1 RAs. There’s also Reverse Health, which caters to pre-, peri-, and postmenopausal women. With these apps, though, you don’t have the additional layer of accountability baked into the protocol, the way a dietitian-interfacing platform does.