The current landscape
More than 10 federal departments and agencies currently invest in critical nutrition research. Their relative investments in nutrition research have remained flat or declined over several decades—even as diet-related conditions and their societal burdens have climbed. The NIH is the largest funder, with nutrition research investments estimated at $1.9 billion annually (∼5% of total NIH funding) for fiscal year 2019. Approximately 25% of this funding (1.3% of total NIH funding) focuses on diet for the prevention or treatment of disease in humans. This NIH nutrition research is conducted and supported across nearly all of the 27 current NIH institutes and centers. Coordination of these efforts has been challenged by successively smaller NIH coordinating offices with decreasing stature, staff, and resources. The USDA is the second-largest funder of US nutrition research, with an estimated annual budget of ∼$0.17 billion for fiscal year 2019 across several institutes and services. The USDA works to provide Americans with safe, nutritious, and wholesome food and works to ensure the foods and beverages our nation produces optimally benefits human and animal health and to address food insecurity through the administration of 15 federal nutrition assistance programs. Several structures work to improve research coordination within the USDA, although a recent USDA workshop and Government Accountability Office (GAO) report identified gaps and opportunities in nutrition research coordination. Multiple other federal departments and agencies invest in nutrition research, including the CDC, FDA, Department of Defense (DoD), US Agency for International Development (USAID), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and others.
Consistent with this fragmented infrastructure, multiple major reports over 50 y have called for greater coordination of federal nutrition research. Current coordination efforts include the Interagency Committee on Human Nutrition Research (ICHNR), which currently meets about twice a year to work on the following activities, among others: food and nutrition monitoring and surveillance, the joint USDA–Department of Health and Human Services (-HHS) activity to produce the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) and certain regulatory, communication, and educational activities. However, no concrete authority has been created to successfully harmonize and leverage the federal investments in nutrition research.
Overall, this white paper and several prior reports found these efforts to be important but insufficient to address current and rising diet-related disease burdens, food insecurity, health disparities, health care costs, challenges to military readiness, and intersections with food and agricultural production, supply chains, and sustainability.