Location: Responsive Agricultural Food Systems Research
Project Number: 3093-51000-002-001-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 15, 2024
End Date: Sep 14, 2026
Objective:
Scientists with the Institute for Advancing Health through Agriculture (IHA) will collaborate with co-located USDA, ARS Responsive Agricultural Food Systems Research Unit (RAFSRU) scientists, and with scientists at other ARS and university locations to conduct a broad range of research activities that will address how agriculture, food and human nutrition can promote human health and lower rates of diet-related chronic disease. Agriculture directly influences human health by supplying the foundation of a food system that then provides the basis for human diets, which directly affect nutrition, health, and risk of chronic disease. Responsive agriculture and precision nutrition, two of the three foci of this research agreement, seek to better refine and meet the dietary needs for the U.S. population and to more carefully tailor the agricultural process to meet those needs. The other foci of this research, healthy living, will quantify the effectiveness of community-centered programs with a similar goal. Diet quality has been shown to affect the health of Americans through the maintenance of essential functions and by reducing the risk of chronic disease, which include obesity, certain cancers, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. The cost of chronic disease in the United States is estimated to be greater than $1 trillion annually. Reducing the risk of these diet-related chronic diseases and, thus, reducing associated health care costs requires a transdisciplinary partnership of scientists working in agriculture, food, and human health. This research effort will employ multi-disciplinary approaches that will integrate agricultural production management, breeding, environmental and economic sustainability, consumer attitudes, and public health/nutrition. Central to this approach is understanding how agriculture affects the nature and abundance of the food supply and, thus, human health, and developing methods to link diverse primary and secondary data sources and decipher the dynamics of complex biological, geographic, seasonal, and socioeconomic interactions within agricultural systems.
Specifically, research will be conducted to address the following three foci:
Precision Nutrition: Precision nutrition can assist with refining the dietary needs more carefully for the U.S. population by better understanding individual and population subgroup differences in how diet relates to health.
Healthy Living: Community-centered programs can prevent or minimize diet-related and physical inactivity-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes.
Responsive Agriculture: There is a need to transform the U.S. food system from one that primarily addresses hunger to one that focuses on nutrition and health outcomes.
A need exists for adapting agriculture and food supply systems to reduce the major gaps that exists in nutrition research at the critical intersection of responsive agriculture, quality food production, and human nutrition and health; with the goal of lowering rates of diet-related chronic disease and reducing health care costs of Americans.
Approach:
We will conduct multi-disciplinary research to understand the interactions within the food system and impacts on human health.
Precision Nutrition: The Individualized Dietary Exposure Assessment (IDEA) system, informed by an individual’s personal signature, will tailor customized Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)-based prompts for identification of dietary data collection times. This will emphasize considerations related to food choices and behavioral and contextual details requisite to estimate “usual” exposures, capitalizing on user-informed routines and user-learned behaviors. A personal signature will be developed based upon data gathered about habitual eating times, typical beverage consumption, dietary supplement use, general sleep/wake schedule, and meal and snack patterns. The system can develop the optimal combinations of data collection times; and will be used to maximize the completeness and accuracy of coding of foods and amounts typically consumed by a participant. We will leverage portion size image databases to further improve our deep learning-based food energy estimation method.
Healthy Living: This program will conduct community-engaged research through collaborative partnerships and comprehensive approaches to develop and implement community-centered interventions for chronic disease prevention and management, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods, mHealth and digital technology testing, and policy, systems, and environmental change, including those related to food, built, and social environments as well as citizen science and civic engagement. Formative research will be used to inform the design of culturally and contextually relevant interventions as well as to conduct rigorous process and implementation evaluation. Digital technologies and virtual reality will be utilized, with elements including personalized guidance, real-time feedback, and remote healthcare access. Change interventions may be implemented using citizen science/civic engagement initiatives to catalyze changes that make healthy living behaviors and practices more accessible and attainable. Healthy living research will include cost and cost effectiveness analysis of its interventions programs and utilizes the IHA Mobile Health Assessment Centers with diverse participants across the life course to engage underserved, at-risk residents in relevant studies.
Responsive Agriculture: We will identify consumer acceptance and willingness-to-pay for food products with enhanced nutritional value and sustainability characteristics to inform breeding and genetic programs and producers. Emphasis will be placed on developing production systems that produce healthy products and enhance environmental sustainability that promote health. Providing a steady supply of healthy, nutritious, and safe food in a sustainable way and enhancing the purpose of food to promote healthy diets requires economically prosperous agriculture systems. The responsive agriculture hub will consider the impact of emerging agricultural production innovations and technological advances for improving the economic feasibility and prosperity of Agriculture-Food Value Chains.
