U.S. House passed a bipartisan resolution calling on medical schools and other health professional training programs to incorporate nutrition education into their curricula, advance nutrition research, and raise awareness of the role that nutrition plays in health.

Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) provides Congress with an opportunity to reduce hunger and improve the diet and health of millions of children throughout the United States by strengthening the child nutrition programs.

Americans who suffer from diet-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity are 12 times as likely to die after a covid infection.

Early on, researchers began to realize that obesity was a major risk factor for being admitted to the hospital with COVID-19.

We are facing a national nutrition crisis that cuts lives short, costs us trillions of dollars and holds us back from achieving our goals as individuals and a nation.

Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) have introduced legislation calling for a second White House Conference on Nutrition. They are correct; it is time.

The same week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care for Covid-19, two studies came out identifying obesity as a significant risk factor for serious illness and death.

The states that have suffered the most cases of COVID-19 (mostly in the Southeast and Southwest) also have the highest rates of food insecurity, meaning that people can’t always afford sufficient food, according to data recently released by USDA. These same states also have the highest rates of obesity.

Nutrition security emphasizes access, availability and affordability of foods that promote well-being and prevent or treat disease, not just foods that provide calories.

Almost half of U.S. adults, or 46%, have a poor-quality diet, with too little fish, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and beans, and too much salt, sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats.

Government policy has been hijacked by “Big Food”—the farm input suppliers, ingredient processors, and peddlers of cheap, highly processed foods.

America’s poor diet isn’t just bad for us. It’s now considered a threat to national security.

The Friedman School and other institutes have outlined specific options to strengthen and accelerate federal nutrition research to transform lives, reduce health disparities, and reduce health-care spending.

Greater federal coordination and investment in nutrition research could accelerate discoveries across critical areas and positively impact the economy, public health, and population resilience to COVID-19 and new threats.

The U.S. is overdue to establish an institute devoted to research on the top cause of poor health.

Improving American nutrition would make the biggest impact on our health care.

In this new year, millions of Americans will make resolutions about healthier eating. In 2019, could U.S. government leaders further resolve to improve healthier eating as well, joining public health experts in seeing that food is medicine?

The farm bill is finally headed to conference. To three former Secretaries of Agriculture, this would normally be cause for celebration. Instead of appreciating the farm bill’s progress, however, we have found ourselves becoming distressed. Debate over this monumental piece of food and agriculture legislation has neglected a crucial subject: nutrition.

The national debate on health care is moving into a new, hopefully bipartisan phase. The fundamental underlying challenge is cost – the massive and ever-rising price of care which drives nearly all disputes, from access to benefit levels to Medicaid expansion.