About Dietary Research: Guidance- & Policy-Related Research

Much of our dietary research has direct application to food guidance and policy. For example:

• Our analyses of fruit and vegetable intakes substantiated more stringent national health objectives within Healthy People 2010 than had been used previously. A major ongoing initiative is aimed at improving estimates of the percentage of persons meeting those objectives.
• Soon after the release of the fifth edition of the Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, we prepared a detailed analysis of each guideline, published as a supplement to the Journal of Nutrition (see Dietary Guidelines: Surveillance Issues and Research Needs). Each paper reviewed available assessment methods to evaluate the progress on meeting the guideline and examined the existing data to provide a benchmark and identify gaps and limitations.
• We also collaborated with the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service and Cornell University to support a conference on "US Dietary Guidelines: Research and Policy Needs in the Nutrition, Health and Agriculture Sectors." We coauthored the keynote paper for the conference, which estimated the agricultural gaps that would need to be filled for the population to meet the guidelines, currently and in the future, based on census projections of demographic shifts (view summary).