For decades, American healthcare has repeated a tidy phrase - food is medicine - while doing very little to make the person who prescribes that medicine, a registered dietitian, something an ordinary patient can afford. Culina Health was built to close that gap. Founded in 2020 by registered dietitians Vanessa Rissetto and Tamar Samuels, the Hoboken, New Jersey company delivers one-on-one nutrition therapy over telehealth, and it does something most of its peers have struggled to do at scale: it gets the visits covered by insurance.
The numbers tell the story. Culina Health reports that 93% of its patients receive insurance coverage for their sessions - a figure that reframes nutrition counseling from a wellness luxury into a covered medical service. The company is in-network with major insurers including Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare, and works within Medicare and Medicaid coverage pathways. By its own account, that reach makes credentialed dietitian care available to roughly 70% of the U.S. population.
The founders were, in an earlier chapter, competitors. Rissetto and Samuels each ran a private practice in the New York area before they concluded that they could make a larger dent in the problem together than apart. They merged their practices, and the combined clinic became Culina Health. Both are clinicians first: Samuels earned her master's in clinical nutrition from New York University and trained at Mount Sinai, and Rissetto has become one of the most visible dietitians in the country.
The premise is not a new science. Registered dietitians have always been able to help patients manage diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and digestive disorders. What Culina Health changed was the plumbing - the credentialing, the billing, the matching, and the delivery - so that a person managing type 2 diabetes can meet a dietitian who takes their plan, speaks their language, and shows up on a screen rather than across town.
