Poor-quality diets spanning throughout the U.S. population have led to our people having the shortest lifespans among residents of wealthy nations, millions of children sick with chronic disease, overwhelming health costs, and undermined military readiness.

Diet quality is a measurement of how well diets align with the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Given the urgency of these issues, Nourish Science and our research partners at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and University of California San Francisco School of Medicine developed a measure of diet quality using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the nation’s diet and health survey, and the Health Eating Index, a government-designed report card measuring individuals’ adherence to the dietary guidelines.

What we found should shock all Americans – more than 86% of people in the U.S. have poor diet quality and almost half have very low diet quality.

These findings should add additional urgency to efforts to Make America Healthy Again and motivate Congress to require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve SNAP diet quality using evidence-based metrics and goals, and to report on its strategies and success annually.

Our research is providing a new measurement tool policy makers can use to monitor the effectiveness of Federally funded diet quality programming and policies over time and track the progress our nation is making towards improved diet quality. With the right science-based policies and support of U.S. health leadership, we can make progress towards becoming a healthier nation.