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USDA Open Ideas: ARS
The USDA Agricultural Research Service is soliciting customer and stakeholder input on planning and setting research priorities for its veterinary, medical and urban entomology research program. Below you will find four short questions that we are asking you to answer, or you can post your own ideas. This information will help guide us in developing our research plans for the next five years.
These programs form the foundation of all nutritional epidemiology in the U.S. and provide snapshots of the nutritional health of the nation and its food supply. We will expand and improve the National Nutrient Databank which provides food composition data. We will determine food consumption and dietary patterns of Americans ...
Federal nutrition policy and food assistance programs increasingly use the Dietary Guidelines for American and Dietary Reference Intakes as their basis and these need to be updated based on new knowledge. We will identify the role of food, nutrients, other food components, and physical activity in promoting health and preventing ...
Diets are composed of plant and animal foods that are produced by our agricultural system; accordingly, the support of human health must be an explicit goal of domestic agricultural production. To this end it is imperative that agricultural and food scientists and human nutritionists work together to ensure they have ...
Three of the 6 Human Nutrition Research Centers have Congressionally-mandated missions to study nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating women, the fetus, infants, children, and the aging population. We need to explain mechanisms by which nutrition promotes healthy development and function from conception to old age. We will define the ...
We need to understand the causes and consequences of obesity and related diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and chronic inflammation. We will develop and evaluate strategies to prevent obesity and related diseases. We will generate new information on both behavior and biology related to obesity prevention.
The USDA human nutrition research program focuses on nutrition monitoring and also provides scientific evidence for the development of dietary guidance policy, in the area of nutrition and health throughout the human life. Suggested recommendations: 1. Human nutrition research conducted at six human nutrition research centers do provide scientific information ...
There is a signficant communications gap between scientists working in the biomedical sciences and those working in agriculture, particularly production agriculture. It is critical to not only stimulate a dialogue between the many disciplines represented, but to actually advace a transdisciplinary research agenda with a particular emphasis on the biomedical ...
In order to utilize the food consumption data results in terms of nutrient intakes for nutrition population studies, governments must maintain a reliable, unbiased, nationally representative database of the nutrient profiles of commonly consumed foods. These national reference nutrient databases should strive not to try be all things to all ...
Start education programs in early childhood (K-12) about the need for balanced diets. In the past we had health classes in gradeschool that taught us about a healthy, balanced diet and excercise for all, not just those that play sports. Expose our youth to healty food for healthy living. Start ...
Both international and domestic funding agencies are largely focused on the need to maximize calorie production using cereal crops to feed an ever expanding world . While this focus is understandable, it must be balanced with the need for diversity in the human diet. A greater empasis on legume (pulse) ...
Gut microbiota is a new organ modulating bioavailability of many xenobiotics and bioactives found in diet. Exploring, flagging and clustering what is happening in the gut, main enzymatic systems, and main targets will benefit a) demonstration of health benefits of food ingredients by selecting "responders"; b) Agriculture to design production ...
National Nutrition Monitoring and NHANES are invaluable in providing both the public and the private sectors with current and continuous measures of both food and nutrient intakes for the U.S. population as well as vital health tracking data such as obesity rates. This continuous monitoring is increasingly more important as ...
Currently, the USDA National Nutrient Database contains nutrient data on the following citrus crops: • Limes • Grapefruit (pink, red and white from California, Arizona and Florida) • Lemons • Oranges (Valencias and navels from California and Florida) • Tangerines • Pummelo • Clementines Because there are significant differences in ...
Sarcopenia, or the loss of muscle mass with aging, is a significant public health concern, with some estimating as much as a 1% loss of lean mass per year after the age of 30 years (1,2). Loss of muscle mass and associated declines in strength and mobility may not only ...
The International Formula Council (IFC) believes that nutritional programming is an important and emerging area of nutrition science. Further research is needed to better define how prenatal nutrition and early infant feeding (including all methods of feeding, i.e. breastfeeding , supplemental feeding, infant formula feeding, and the feeding of complimentary ...
Farm to school programs involve at least one, and often all three of the following activities: (1) Improving access to healthy food in school cafeterias, (2) Engaging students and families in school gardens, and (3) Teaching food and nutrition education in the classroom. As the USDA Farm to School program ...
As the population grows and resources are stretched to produce the needed amounts of high quality nutritious foods, there is the need to identify ways to improve our utilization and consumption of these resources. Research is needed to better understand and assist in the implementation of a broad range of ...
Consumers respond better to dietary guidance that talks about specific foods versus specific nutrients. Expanding research programs that focus on health outcomes associated with specific foods and dietary patterns will provide data that will help develop more specific dietary guidance for consumers.
The 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report included a recommendation to, “Shift food intake patterns to a more plant-based diet that emphasizes vegetables, cooked dry beans and peas, fruits, whole grains, nuts, and seed.” This type of dietary pattern includes many low glycemic load foods. There is limited research showing ...
