Americans are living shorter, sicker lives due to poor quality diets.¹ We are dying early due to diet-caused disease,² our children are sick with fatty liver disease³ and Type-2 diabetes, and our food companies are substituting harmful ultra-processed foods as healthy school meals.⁴ Although our nutrition crisis began pre-Covid, it has made Covid twice as severe because our food made us so vulnerable.⁵ Other countries have been galvanized to confront diet issues. The U.S. has had no such wakeup call.⁶ Diet-related illnesses are the leading cause of poor health in the U.S.,⁷ exacerbating health disparities and straining health care spending, worker productivity, and military readiness.⁸ The economic cost of nutrition-related chronic diseases among 18 to 64-year-olds was $16 trillion from 2011-2020.⁹ It’s an alarming trend that keeps getting worse, without an effective response. Beyond effects on health, our food system is draining our natural resources and accelerating climate change.¹⁰

Diet-driven illness and death are the third of three major food and nutrition crises our country has faced in the past 100 years. At the turn of the 20^th century, chemical and microbiological contaminants in food were among the 10 leading causes of death. Then in the 1960s, we recognized calorie-protein-micronutrient malnutrition was driving poor health outcomes in significant areas of our nation. We met these first two crises with bold, effective solutions; we dramatically reduced food contamination through aggressive food safety legislation,¹¹ and we launched robust federal food programs that significantly improved food security.¹² It’s time to tackle our third food crisis head on.

Our efforts to understand and decrease food-driven chronic health conditions are grossly inadequate.¹³ The scope and pace of nutrition science are insufficient to address the country’s pressing nutrition-related challenges. The federal government’s investment in nutrition research has remained flat or declined over several decades, even as diet-related conditions and their societal burdens have climbed.¹⁴ Paradoxically, nutrition research funding to prevent diet-related diseases is dwarfed by research funding to treat them.

While federal programs effectively address hunger, they are not meeting the nutritional needs of most Americans. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) spends more than $150 billion per year supporting food insecure Americans through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP has been shown to reduce food insecurity and improve child education and economic outcomes, but SNAP does not promote healthier eating patterns among participants or support participants in procuring healthy, time-saving, meals.¹⁵

The U.S. has successfully faced similar public health challenges in the past.¹⁶ In 1994, FDA launched an investigation into the design of cigarettes to maintain an addiction. Youth smoking rates were 25 percent. FDA sought to regulate cigarettes, and in 2009 Congress granted it the authority to do so. Today the youth smoking rate is less than two percent.¹⁷ It’s time for a similar effort to combat childhood obesity.