Being Healthy in the New Year: Nutrition Is Personal
“New Year, New Me, New You, New Us?” If you’ve made a resolution to “eat healthier” this year, you’re not alone. In fact, I’m right there with you. But how doable is this?
The good news is that nutrition is very personal, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and yes, we can do it! There are many paths to wellness that prioritize whole person health; prioritizing nutrition is about more than what’s on your plate or in the fridge.
This is an unprecedented time: food and nutrition are all over the news. There is a call to action to make our country healthier, and many promising innovations in nutrition research are moving us closer to achieving that goal. These include topics I have written about recently such as food is medicine, precision nutrition, teaching kitchens, and more. Our office, the NIH Office of Nutrition Research (ONR), is laser-focused on one goal: generating and applying scientific evidence to inform how we can support the nutritional needs and choices of people of all ages and stages. Science will guide us on this path and help us make positive changes so that we can have sustainable nutrition for everyone.
Food and nutrition (which connects food to health) is a surprisingly complex topic with many moving parts. It involves farms and factories, restaurants and the food industry, schools and neighborhoods, individual kitchens and community gardens, scientists and engineers … as well as various government agencies that keep our food plentiful and safe. Ongoing research and collaboration across the government keeps a pulse on national nutrition trends, which continuously guide our work.
For example, the long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics), operates out of mobile examination centers (fancy state-of-the-art vans) that travel continuously around the country. NHANES collects health and dietary information through interviews, physical exams, and lab tests to measure nutritional status and capture changes in American diets and dietary patterns over time. It’s like a nationwide health check-up on wheels, collecting data to help us understand how Americans eat and how dietary choices affect health across the life course.
NHANES and other data inform the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), a science-driven public resource that gives advice about how to make good food choices. It’s updated every five years to reflect new knowledge that comes from nutrition research across the United States. That same research also tells us what foods to avoid. For example, artificial trans-fats were recently banned from the U.S. food market because research showed unequivocally that they cause disease.
Science drives nutrition policy decisions in other ways too. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently updated its criteria for the “healthy” claim on food packages. To meet the new scientifically based healthy claim, food products must now have a certain amount of one or more food groups identified by the DGA as vegetables, fruits, dairy, protein foods, and whole grains. And they need to meet specific limits for added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium. Many data sources drive these nutrition policy decisions, including new findings from NIH-supported research and the FDA’s efforts to ensure that food is a vehicle for wellness.
Lately, there has been a particular spotlight on ultra-processed foods (including packaged snacks, processed meats, and sweetened drinks), which emerged several decades ago when – reflecting economic changes and population shifts – nutrition changed from traditional diets focused on home-cooked meals containing natural, whole foods to modern “Western” diets. Ultra-processed foods emerged partly for convenience and partly as a solution to efficiently feed a growing population – both noble goals. These foods are often perceived as inexpensive, tasty (sometimes irresistible), and have an extended shelf-life for easier transport and storage. But ultra-processed foods have now been associated with disease risk, weight gain, and even death.
Why? Well, we really don’t know … yet. Is it the added fat, sugar, and sodium many (but not all) ultra-processed foods have? Is it the other added chemicals and compounds designed to make them easy to transport and store? Is it because they taste so good that we eat more than we should? Is it the processing itself? Or is it because eating more of these foods replaces the essential nutrients we would otherwise be getting from the whole foods that used to be the core of our diets?
Research can answer these questions to inform next steps and solutions. That’s really important because ultra-processed foods make up approximately 70% of the U.S. food supply. We can’t just get rid of them, nor do we necessarily need to. Also, we really don’t fully understand how the food environment we live in affects attitudes, beliefs, and choices about the foods we eat.
Science taught us how to make ultra-processed foods, and science can help us come up with ways to re-formulate them to be healthier. We need lots of expertise to figure this out, including food scientists, chemists, engineers, nutritionists, and many other partners: a topic to be explored soon at a March 2025 ONR-hosted seminar. Smart and creative minds will also help us tackle other problems too, such as how to re-engineer food systems so that healthy food is available everywhere and for everyone in a way that also protects our environment and planet. We need to better understand what people know about food and nutrition too, as well as what they want to eat. Yes, it’s personal! People have the power to make a difference. And when people make it known that they want healthier food options, industry often responds with expanded choices.
Yes, I am an optimist, and I truly see an amazing opportunity to figure all this out. Now is the time, and in 2025 our office will be leading the charge by focusing on improving rigor and reproducibility in nutrition research, enhancing precision in nutrition science and assessment, and promoting sustainable nutrition in a changing environment. We will also be launching new working groups, leading new workshops, and starting new programs, operating strategically to use resources wisely and efficiently.
Even though nutrition is personal, it takes a community to support our individual choices and advance everyone’s goal of improving the nation’s health through sustainable nutrition for everyone. We can make a change, and science will lead the way.
As always, I welcome comments, feedback, and suggested new directions for nutrition science research. If you’re on LinkedIn, feel free to share your favorite healthy snack or recipe with me – I’m always looking to expand my cookbook! Until next time, please visit the ONR website to get office-related information, and consider signing up to the ONR Updates list to receive monthly emails (including the Drew’s Views blog and the ONR Director’s Updates newsletter).
Nutrition Is Who We Are!
Drew Bremer
January 21, 2025