After decades of fighting hunger with food stamps, WIC, and school lunch, the USDA will raise its aim to nutrition security, meaning consistent access to healthful foods for all Americans, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Thursday. The new approach will rely on food education and outreach to neglected groups as well as stronger nutrition standards in federal food programs.
Three-fourths of USDA spending goes to public nutrition programs, such as SNAP. “Our job in the nutrition space was to ensure that people who were struggling financially had access to food,” said Vilsack in a speech at Teachers College in New York City.
“I’m here today to suggest we have an equally important responsibility. It is also incumbent on the Department of Agriculture to embrace the challenge and the responsibility of creating an America that is also nutritionally secure … [with] consistent access to food that’s, obviously, healthy as well as safe and affordable. It’s a big, tall task. But it’s one that we need to undertake.”
Vilsack listed four guideposts USDA officials would use to implement the new strategy, though he did not advocate creating new programs or increasing spending on public nutrition. He pointed to last year’s recalculation of the cost of a healthy diet, which will boost SNAP spending by $20 billion a year, as an example of helping low-income Americans acquire the food they need for a nutritious diet. That update will boost average SNAP benefits by $36 per month, per person.
The four “pillars” of nutrition security will be providing nutrition support to people of all ages; connecting Americans to healthy, safe, and affordable food sources; collaborative work to develop and explain nutrition science in understandable terms; and prioritizing equity of treatment.
“These pillars will now define the decision-making process that we go through, whether it’s formulating the Dietary Guidelines or whether it’s figuring out ways we can improve SNAP or expand WIC, or figure out ways in which we can improve school lunch programs, or any other aspect of research that we do,” said Vilsack. “So this is an exciting day and an important day.”
To support his argument for nutrition security, Vilsack pointed to the high cost of such diet-related illnesses as diabetes and heart disease. An estimated 600,000 Americans die each year of diet-related diseases, and hundreds of billions of dollars are spent treating them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 4 in 10 Americans are obese, which carries a risk of chronic disease. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher; a healthy weight range is a BMI of 18.5 to 25.
Two-thirds of people hospitalized for Covid-19 in the United States had diet-related diseases, said Vilsack.
A report, “USDA actions on nutrition security,” is available here.
A graphic version of the report is available here.