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| 3 Sep 2026 | |
| Reports |
Nutrition research and data infrastructure in the United States is extensive and dispersed. The nutrition research community, as described throughout this document, is composed of hundreds of the federal, state, academic, philanthropic, and private actors that generate ample research and data on food security, nutrition security, and diet-related disease, largely within their own mandates and on their own timelines. Federal efforts to coordinate this work date back more than 50 years, but they have not been consistent across administrations, with resources rising and falling with shifts in priorities over time. Coordination outside government has been real but narrower, organized around single problems and dependent on the funders who convened it. No active structures connect evidence-building across the field as a whole.
This Learning Agenda on Nutrition, Hunger & Health is a product of the nutrition research community working to advance cross-sector evidence-building. The Data Foundation's Center for Evidence Capacity, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, convened experts from across the country and across disciplines to identify the questions the field most needs answered and the infrastructure required to answer them. Sixteen experts across six virtual focus groups and 33 experts at an in-person workshop shaped the agenda's priorities and scope, identified gaps in the evidence base, and weighed the impacts of answering the agenda’s questions.
Chapter 1 of this agenda provides an overview of the nutrition research community, this agenda’s methods, and the challenges that have faced the community. Chapter 2 presents the resulting research questions, organized into four interrelated topic areas: data and evidence infrastructure, nutrition assistance programs, social determinants of health, and food and nutrition in medicine. Chapter 3 provides guidelines for effective and ethical data practices that, if widely and appropriately adopted, would facilitate evidence-building to answer the questions in this agenda. The guidelines — which cover data collection, management, privacy, and open science — were tailored to the research community’s needs, and were developed against established frameworks.
The Learning Agenda on Nutrition, Hunger & Health does not establish a new coordinating body or top-down strategy. It sets out the research community’s priority questions and the infrastructure gaps that keep them unanswered as the community itself describes them. It invites governments, researchers, program administrators, funders, and community organizations to take up that work together.
