In the News

Now, a team of doctors and public health experts say that it’s time for adult Americans to receive food prescriptions as well, but on a national scale. A study released Wednesday in PLOS Medicine — “Cost-effectiveness of financial incentives for improving diet and health through Medicare and Medicaid” — provides compelling evidence for the distribution of food prescriptions and subsidies via Medicare and Medicaid, the largest U.S.

Every day, doctors write prescriptions for medications that will treat various ailments in their patients. Those prescriptions, though, come once the patient is already sick.

Modifying the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to encourage better food choices could improve recipients’ health and cut billions of dollars in health care costs, according to researchers at Tufts and Harvard. The antihunger effort, once commonly known as the food stamp program, provides $70 billion each year for low-wage working families, low-income seniors, and disabled people to buy food, Tufts said in a statement.

Less than 0.1 percent of meals eaten in American restaurants are good for you, a study has warned. Researchers analysed the food choices of more than 35,000 people who ate out regularly between 2003 and 2016. Half of the meals eaten at restaurants with table service were of poor nutritional value, and almost none reached 'ideal quality'. The researchers said this was a concern because restaurant meals accounted for a fifth of Americans' total calorie intake, and fast-food accounted for 12 percent.   

Americans got about one in five calories from dining out, either in restaurants or fast-food joints, in the period between 2003 and 2016. And while those meals may have been convenient, fun, and even tasty, they typically weren’t very healthy, according to new research from Tufts University. At fast-food restaurants, 70 percent of the meals Americans consumed were of poor dietary quality in 2015-16, down from 75 percent in 2003-2004.

America's love of dining out may come with real health consequences. Restaurants of all kinds provide one out of five calories adults in the U.S. eat, but patrons are consuming food of “persistent low quality” when it comes to nutrition, researchers reported Wednesday. Half of the meals Americans ate in full-service eateries and 70% of their fast-food orders in 2015 and 2016 were of poor diet quality, according to the study published in The Journal of Nutrition.

New research, published in The Milbank Quarterly, highlights the potential health and economic impact of the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) proposed voluntary salt policy on workers in the US food industry. This new study examined the impact of the policy on the food industry itself to determine the cost-effectiveness of meeting these draft sodium targets. The team modelled the health and economic impact of meeting the two-year and 10-year FDA targets, from the perspective of people working in the food system itself, over 20 years, from 2017 to 2036.

A new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, published by Elsevier, found that the amount of processed meat consumed by Americans has remained unchanged in the past 18 years, nor has their intake of fish/shellfish increased.

A new modeling study estimates the number, proportion, and type of specific cancers associated with the under or overconsumption of foods and sugar-sweetened beverages among American adults. The analysis is one of the few to focus on the modifiable risk factors for cancer connected to food intake in the United States.

The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) mandatory added sugar labeling policy for packaged foods and beverages, set to take effect between 2020 and 2021, could be a cost-effective way to generate important health gains and cost-savings for both the healthcare system and society in the U.S., according to a new modeling study led by researchers from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and the University of Liverpool. The analysis is the first to estimate the potential health and economic impacts of the new label.