At the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in over 50 years, President Joe Biden presented a new national strategy for combating hunger, improving healthy eating, and reducing diet-related disease by 2030 in the U.S.
The president said public and private partners in health care must work to: improve Americans’ access to healthy food; better integrate nutrition with health care; make nutritional information as transparent as possible; and invest more in nutrition and food security research.
And that would only be the start.
“There's so much more in our strategy,” Biden said during opening remarks at the conference, held on September 28. “There's so much more in our imagination, but one thing is clear. Meeting our bold goals requires a whole-of-government approach and a whole-of-society effort.”
The new national strategy included many recommendations put forth in August by the Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, an independent, nonpartisan group of subject matter experts and multi-sector leaders. Task force co-chair Dariush Mozaffarian, currently the dean for policy and Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, said at the release of their report that “the actions and strategies we have outlined are sensible and actionable, and would create transformational change for Americans.”
Along with other national stakeholders, Tufts played an important role in helping to bring about the conference, which comes 53 years after the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health was chaired and organized by former Tufts president Jean Mayer. Mayer founded the university’s school of nutrition, and the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts bears the name of the former university president.