At the 2023 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, President Joe Biden presented an ambitious new national strategy for combating hunger, improving healthy eating, and reducing diet-related disease in the United States by 2030.
That strategy included many recommendations put forth by the Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, an independent, nonpartisan group of subject matter experts and multisector leaders co-chaired by Dariush Mozaffarian, Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
Tufts played an important role in helping to bring about the conference, along with other national stakeholders—a convening that came more than 50 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.
To achieve its goals of ending hunger, improving nutrition and physical activity, and reducing diet-related diseases by 2030, the Biden administration seeks to make the Child Tax Credit permanent, provide free meals for all students during and outside of the school year, expand access and healthy eating in the federal nutrition programs, create health-care programs that support food as medicine interventions, advance nutrition science, create new package labeling and targets for reducing sodium and added sugar, and more.
Mozaffarian is leading an ongoing advocacy initiative at the Friedman School, supported by philanthropic gifts, to ensure that the most promising actions in the national strategy happen.
“The national strategy sets out a strong, detailed, whole-of-government approach to fixing food,” says Mozaffarian. “It’s up to all of us to ensure these are not just words on a page but become real actions.”