Every day, millions of Americans go hungry because they cannot afford or access enough food. In 2023, approximately 1 in 7 U.S. households grappled with food insecurity, according to the USDA. They define food insecurity as individuals having limited or uncertain access to nutritious and safe foods. This fact, along with the changing landscape of federal investment in health and nutrition initiatives, creates an urgent need to improve strategies and policy approaches for reducing food insecurity. Better access to and use of nutrition-related data can generate more insightful health trends, inform tailored interventions, and evaluate program effectiveness.
Currently, the efforts to collect and analyze nutrition data across this topic area lack consistency and interconnectivity, challenging researchers’ ability to efficiently study the health trends to inform nutrition policy. This poses immense barriers for researchers, policymakers, nonprofit decision-makers, and other stakeholders working to tackle food and nutrition insecurity.
To strengthen the data infrastructure for health, nutrition, and hunger policy, which includes better collaboration and accessibility, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) awarded a grant to the Data Foundation to work on these issues, in collaboration with subject matter experts in the policy area. This initiative supports evidence-informed decision-making across the government, business, and research communities addressing food insecurity.
As a first step, the Data Foundation’s Center for Evidence Capacity held a series of focus groups – from April to June 2025 – with 16 experts from universities, nonprofits, and government agencies. These sessions gathered insights on nutrition and health research priorities, challenges and barriers, and potential solutions, which will inform how the Data Foundation creates evidence-building frameworks and products.
Nutrition Research Priorities
Focus group participants described major existing research priorities:
- Food and Nutrition Security Measurement: Researchers continue to study food accessibility, and have recently expanded their focus to include “nutrition security” — ensuring people have consistent access to healthy, nourishing food that supports their specific health needs. The field is still working to agree on common definitions for food insecurity and nutrition insecurity, which creates challenges for consistent measurement and comparison.
- Studying Factors Impacting Food Systems: Research increasingly suggests how multiple factors, such as cultural norms and environmental conditions, work together to influence what people can eat and to shape long-term health outcomes. Studying the many intersecting variables will require processing large amounts of data from different sources.
- Supporting Nutrition Programs and Applications: Many of the focus group participants advocated for maintaining federally-administered nutrition programs like SNAP and WIC. These programs provide funds and resources to help maintain data quality and connectivity across systems, making it easier to track trends and measure program effectiveness across the country. The Data Foundation, in fact, has supported improving SNAP systems nationally with strong privacy safeguards, as did the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
Identified Challenges and Barriers
Focus group participants identified numerous barriers to better using existing and new data:
- Data Infrastructure and Access Barriers: Many existing health datasets, such as those of local hospitals and health providers, are not interoperable — i.e., they often cannot connect to each other and share unique information — creating data silos that make it difficult for researchers to identify overarching trends. When datasets are combined or aggregated, researchers may find community-specific information grouped together, creating blind spots for understanding specific population needs and challenges. These two barriers underline the need for a comprehensive, nationwide data and evidence resource hub that would facilitate robust information sharing within a regulated framework, ensuring consistent and clean data.
- Capacity and Resource Constraints: Many organizations across this policy area, down to the program delivery provider or rural health care system level, have limited staff, technical resources, and capacity for effective data collection or program evaluation. This exacerbates existing capacity issues, and leads to many data quality-related issues. There is a clear need for user-friendly tools and data literacy training within the health field to help individuals across organizations meet regulatory, contractual, grant, and funding-related requirements without overwhelming core operational capacity.
- Current Political Environment and Context: Existing federal datasets used for nutrition and health research may face changes or capacity limitations due to funding and resource reallocations planned by Congress and the Executive Branch. These unexpected changes may be leaving researchers to seek non-federal data sources that are in the short-term more expensive, less reliable, less validated, and harder to access. Emerging potential changes – and even concerns about these changes – highlight the need to improve the efficiency and organization of data infrastructure for food, nutrition, and health research.
Focus Group Participants’ Recommendations for Future Research
Focus group participants provided recommendations for how to create better data infrastructure for research:
- Centering Community: Tools and methods used for data collection should be tailored to specific population needs and preferences. For example, engaging community members in research can involve online tools, in-person discussions, or expert-led meetings, depending on the type of community. Community-engaged approaches have been shown to enhance participation and improve survey representativeness, which can sometimes increase research quality.
- Representation and Context Matters: Demographic representation—discussed as the inclusion and reflection of different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, etc—within research participation needs to be prioritized. Including all voices in the full cycle of evidence building is crucial for generating findings that are both accurate and useful for identifying disparities between populations of interest. This is an important component for interpreting data accurately, and avoiding the perpetuation of existing biases or inequities.
- Prioritizing Privacy and Data Protection: Data privacy and safeguarding personal information must be prioritized in research, including when working with vulnerable populations. Considerations for improved protection include researchers developing robust security protocols, ethical frameworks protecting individual information, and systems allowing access to detailed but de-identified data.
Catalyzing Future Work
Building on the information provided in the focus groups, the Data Foundation developed a series of questions to catalyze future health and nutrition research. The following questions are intended to guide what researchers, policymakers, and community members should consider as the nutrition research landscape evolves.
Question #1 – Whose Knowledge Counts?
What happens if community-centered findings contradict existing research and federal policy?
- If localized nutrition data warrant deviations from broader policy, there may be conflicts regarding which guidelines are appropriate to apply to various populations.
- Federal policy may need to reflect unique trends and incorporate multiple solutions that can be tailored as necessary.
Question #2 – Securing Basic Necessities vs. Innovating New Approaches
How should the nutrition field allocate scarce resources between addressing basic infrastructure gaps and developing innovative data solutions?
- Health researchers recognize that current data infrastructure and capacity do not meet basic needs for the field, but also face demands for innovative systems and solutions.
- As federal research funding dwindles, increasingly limited resources must be allocated between addressing fundamental needs and fostering innovation in data practices.
Question #3 – Rebuilding Government Trust
Can localizing data collection efforts empower improved trust in government programs?
- Federal programs often use “blanket solution” approaches that can feel irrelevant to diverse communities, fostering public mistrust and resistance.
- Community-centered data systems would help government programs become more locally responsive and trustworthy by demonstrating direct relevance to people’s lived experiences.
Conclusion
The insights from the experts participating in our focus group sessions illuminate the need for more robust, interconnected data infrastructure in U.S. nutrition research. Addressing challenges in data interoperability and resource constraints, along with incorporating representative, tailored, and secure data practices, is necessary for effectively combatting food and nutrition insecurity.
The Data Foundation is committed to leveraging findings from these focus groups to inform the creation of a pilot open data repository and a cross-sector learning agenda. These initiatives will serve as platforms for fostering collaboration and enhancing data accessibility, paving the way for more impactful nutrition policies and programs.
The Data Foundation looks forward to continuing this work and partnering with those in the field, as part of an ongoing effort to improve data infrastructure across the U.S.
