Taking Inventory And Trying Ahead: Meals Entry and Vitamin

The year 2021 is drawing to a close and we take stock of another significant year that marked massive upheavals in the food system and in society as a whole. To lead us into 2022, we asked some of the leading thinkers and makers at the forefront of nutrition, justice and climate to share their thoughts on the most pressing issues they will be working towards in the new year, and what drives them to keep going.

Today we’re hearing from Dariush Mozaffarian, Marion Nestlé, and A-dae Romero-Briones on nutrition research and policy and efforts to improve access to food and nutrients.

Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University

In your testimony to the Senate Agriculture Committee, you described a “true national food crisis”. In your opinion, what are the main factors that contributed to this crisis?

Our food system has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, in many ways, from the way we grow our food, how we process it, how we sell, market and eat it. And these changes together are contributing to a tidal wave of obesity and diet-related diseases. Therefore, it is crucial that we respond to the drivers of this crisis that we already know and then expand our science to find those we do not yet understand.

What big gaps do you see from a research perspective?

I would say we know maybe 40 percent of what we need to know about the heart and 25 percent of what we know about diabetes. Every nation in the world is growing [rates of] Obesity, and we don’t really understand what causes it. [We don’t understand] why we are actually getting obese. There is also great disagreement about the best diet to reverse this – a low-fat diet, a low-carb diet, the paleo diet. Some people say we need to eat natural foods. Some people believe that these are just pesticides and additives and that we need to eat “clean” food. There is no consensus.

After all, we don’t understand the thousands of things that are in our food. There is some evidence that cocoa and green tea might be good for us, but why? How do diet and the microbiome affect autism? What about fertility or brain health? We don’t even understand these terms. It doesn’t mean we are paralyzed and shouldn’t take action; but we don’t understand a lot.

What do you think of the current government and Congress’s efforts to date on food and nutrition policy? What works and what does it take?

The government and Congress should be congratulated for addressing acute food insecurity. There have been great, successful efforts to address food insecurity through the expansion of SNAP, school exemptions, pandemic EBT, and many other programs. On the other hand, very little has been done to address food insecurity. If we bring calories to people without working on the nutritional quality of the food, we will only have solved half the problem.

You have called for a national nutrition strategy and a White House conference on nutrition, both as part of a larger federal government effort. Why do you think these efforts will be successful?

The Government Accountability Office report released in September highlighted the challenge and the solution. She identified 200 different state efforts across 21 agencies dealing with nutrition. They are not harmonized and there is no strategy to bring them together so they have not been effective. They made it very clear that diet-related diseases are deadly, costly, and preventable, and that we need a real federal plan. If we don’t have a plan, we won’t fix it.

The last time the federal government sat down to study our food and nutrition landscape was in 1969 at the White House conference [on Food, Nutrition, and Health]. This led to some big changes in our food policy and programming. So 53 years later we have to do that again.

Are there any policy initiatives between now and 2022 that you think could make a real difference?

There is interest in a White House conference on hunger and health; Both the House and Senate have tabled bipartisan bills suggesting this. Minister Vilsack said he supported it. When that happens, it must be accompanied by a commitment from the White House and Congress to actually implement the recommended policy. And I think that could be very positive.